The Last Prince of Bengal E-Book

Lyn Innes

• Herausgeber: The Westbourne Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Nawab Nazim was born into one of India's most powerful royal families. Three times the size of Great Britain, his kingdom ranged from the soaring Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. However, the Nawab was seen as a threat by the British authorities, who forced him to abdicate in 1880 and permanently abolished his titles. The Nawab's change in fortune marked the end of an era in India and left his secret English family abandoned. The Last Prince of Bengal tells the true story of the Nawab Nazim and his family as they sought by turns to befriend, settle in and eventually escape Britain. From glamourous receptions with Queen Victoria to a scandalous Muslim marriage with an English chambermaid; and from Bengal tiger hunts to sheep farming in the harsh Australian outback, Lyn Innes recounts her ancestors' extraordinary journey from royalty to relative anonymity. This compelling account visits the extremes of British rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exposing complex prejudices regarding race, class and gender. It is the intimate story of one family and their place in defining moments of recent Indian, British and Australian history. 'I was captivated and surprised by this bitter-sweet history as it twists and turns down three generations, through many astonishing changes of fame and fortune, from a glittering Bengal palace to an Australian sheep farm. Lovingly researched and meticulously told, The Last Prince of Bengal is notable for its candid revelations of British colonial attitudes and hypocrisies across two centuries. A rich, delightful and unexpectedly thought-provoking saga.' --Richard Holmes Lyn Innes explores her ancestors' history in moving detail, capturing the tragic story of the dethroned princes of Bengal who had to make their lives in foreign lands, marked forever by the harsh legacy of Empire.'-- Shrabani Basu, author of Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant

Leseprobe

THE LAST PRINCE OF BENGAL

ALSO BY LYN INNES

The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English

A History of Black and Asian Writers in Britain, 1700–2000

Ned Kelly:

Icon of Modern Culture Series

Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935

Chinua Achebe

The Devil’s Own Mirror:

Irish and Africans in Modern Literature

THE LAST PRINCEOF BENGAL

A Family’s Journey from an Indian Palaceto the Australian Outback

Lyn Innes

THE WESTBOURNE PRESS

An Imprint of Saqi Books

26 Westbourne Grove, London W2 5RH

www.westbournepress.co.uk

www.saqibooks.com

First published 2021 by The Westbourne Press

Copyright © Lyn Innes 2021

Lyn Innes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

Maps by Lovell Johns.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All rights reserved.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 908906 46 5

eISBN 978 1 908906 47 2

Printed and bound by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1: A Prince in Name, 1838–1848

Chapter 2: Money, Power and Politics, 1849–1859

Chapter 3: Passage from India, 1859–1869

Chapter 4: A Cinderella Story, 1852–1870

Chapter 5: Battling Parliament and the Press, 1869–1873

Chapter 6: The Nawab’s English Family, 1871–1881

Chapter 7: Leaving England, 1880–1884

Part II

Chapter 8: Sarah’s Fight, 1885–1925

Chapter 9: Royal Bohemians, 1907–1914

Chapter 10: Weathering the War, 1914–1919

Chapter 11: Writing for a Living, 1920–1925

Chapter 12: Farming Down Under, 1925–1927

Chapter 13: Divided Families, 1927–1941

Epilogue

Family Trees

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Credits

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

Who Did They Think We Were?

‘But what is a black person then? And first of all, what colour is he?’ Jean Genet, Les Nègres

A hot summer day in February 1945, a few weeks after my fifth birthday. We had just moved from the slab hut near the road to our new fibreboard house on the hill, and I was watching my mother unpack. At the bottom of a trunk, wrapped in tissue paper, were several old photographs mounted on card. Looking straight out towards the camera in one were my father’s Scottish parents: my grandmother in a high-necked long-sleeved dress, my grandfather in a tightly buttoned suit. There was another photograph of a man in profile – an elegant man with a fine, waxed moustache, prominent nose and broad forehead. In the sepia print he is only slightly darker than my Scottish grandparents.

This, my mother told me, was her father. He was Indian – no, not an American Indian but from India – and he was the man who had painted one of the two oil landscapes that hung in our freshly decorated living room. His painting is unobtrusive: a small, black-framed pastoral scene depicting a field with dark green trees, six inches by nine inches. The colours are sombre. There is no sunlight. Growing up I had assumed that the field was English since it did not look Australian. Examining the picture more closely now as it sits above the desk in my study in Kent, I see that the frame is not black but brown, that the trees in the foreground are a pine and an oak or chestnut, that there are brown cows in the field, and there is a suggestion of a ruined tower in the distance. The scene could be English or French.

This painting is the only thing my mother inherited from her father – or at least the only thing she had kept. He had died four years previously, just before my first birthday. To me then and now this quiet and unmistakably European rural scene evokes a distinctive and intriguing aspect of my grandfather’s character: somehow, his Indian identity had to include being a painter of European landscapes. My mother later told me that her parents had lived in the suburb of Saint-Cloud, Paris, for several years; that her father had studied art there; and that his work had been exhibited in Paris. Once, she recalled, her parents had visited the Paris zoo, and on recognising an elephant as one that he had known as a boy in India, her father had called it by name and commanded it to kneel, which it did. She told one other story about my grandfather. When he was young, he and his older brother had caused outrage amongst the Hindu community in their neighbourhood by tying firecrackers to the tail of a cow and setting light to them. Their Muslim father had had to pay a large sum of money in compensation. It was a story my mother repeated several times in later life without, as far as I could tell, any concern for the cow.

Our own cows grazed quietly in the paddocks below the house on our isolated mountain farm, named by my father ‘Rhu-na-Mohr’, Gaelic for ‘on the bend of the hill’. The nearest neighbours were three miles away, the nearest small town, Rylstone, twenty-one miles. From the windows of our new home we looked out over a wilderness of distant mountain ranges. We were taught at home with the aid of correspondence-school lessons and knew no other children. Since there were six of us, three girls and three boys, we did not miss the company of others. Nor did we experience the need to identify ourselves in social or cultural terms, although we were aware that our father was Scottish, and our mother English, and that this made both of them a little different from our neighbours on Nulla Mountain, at least with regard to the way they spoke. My mother’s father and his Indian past existed as a vague footnote in the family story.

Soon after I turned seven my parents bundled us all into our 1928 Dodge car, and we drove the fifty miles of dusty roads for the first of several semi-annual visits to Glen Alice, where my grandmother lived on the property she and her husband had bought in 1926, soon after they had arrived in Australia. It was Easter and we began the visit searching for the small gifts that our grandmother had wrapped in yellow tissue paper and concealed behind the yellow and golden autumn leaves of the grapevines, rose bushes and shrubs which filled her English garden.

Indoors we were overawed by the elegance of the wide, verandahed house, and the sitting room with its polished parquet floors, leaded French windows, shining copper tables and crystal glassware. For these special family visits my grandmother dressed formally in a long, green taffeta dress with a white lace collar, and an amber necklace. In the sitting room I remember leafing delightedly through old copies of Punch magazine, looking for cartoons, and glancing through stacks of old newspapers, mostly the Sunday Times, which contained pictures of huskies and Eskimos. These pictures were illustrations for feature articles written by my grandmother and based on the experiences of an Arctic explorer. On top of a chest rested my grandfather’s Qur’an, which we were told to treat with care – indeed, we were told that if one of us dropped the Qur’an, we would have to pay our weight in gold in compensation. We were not told to whom this payment should be made.

On a later visit my grandmother showed us her late husband’s – our grandfather’s – court dress and sword. I remember only that the tunic was made of bright green muslin, and that the long, slightly curved sword had a large green stone decorating its hilt. With it, there was a yellowed newspaper cutting from The Times dated 5 June 1914, that showed a photograph of my grandfather wearing an embroidered coat, the sword, and a cap with a feathered plume. There was a caption under the photograph: ‘The Nawabzada Misrat Ali Mirza [sic] of Murshidabad, who attended court on June 5th. The Prince is the son of his Highness, the late Nawab Nazim of Behar, Bengal, and Orissa, and is the uncle of the present Nawab of Murshidabad.’

Although her husband’s Qu’ran had a prominent place in my grandmother’s house amid the leather bound volumes of Thackeray and Dickens and the more colourful covers of the books she herself had written, and although his dress clothes and family seal were there, not once did my grandmother ever speak to her grandchildren about him or about India. We were made aware of his status, but had no sense of him as a person. That very silence aroused my curiosity. Who was my grandfather and what kind of world had he and his ancestors inhabited?

The Nawabzada Nusrat Ali Mirza of Murshidabad

As well as her newspaper and magazine pieces, my grandmother wrote fiction, mainly storybooks for children and teenagers, published under both her pen name, Elizabeth Marc, and her married title, Princess Nusrat Ali Mirza. These two identities existed alongside ‘Mrs Mostyn’, which is how she was customarily addressed in Australia. Sometimes, she used a large seal ring featuring a star and crescent and her husband’s family motto, ‘Nil desperandum’, to close her correspondence. Otherwise, everything about my grandmother, from her accent, garden, library and attitudes towards her neighbours to the repertoire of songs she encouraged us to sing together (‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel’) as I played her out-of-tune piano, impressed me as distinctively English.

To us, our grandmother seemed a somewhat imposing person, an upper-class Englishwoman whose attitudes towards our fellow Australians we could not share. As we gradually acquired the accents of our fellow students at school, she vehemently reprimanded us for ‘sounding like Irish navvies’. She had deplored the fact that our father came from a ‘trade background’, worse still, a family of butchers.

However, our grandmother did share with us her love of books, and she was an enthralling reader; her rendition of The Wind in the Willows still echoes in my memory. Despite her un-Australian views, she appeared to us serene and settled in the comparative solitude of Tyar, seated on the wide veranda of the house she had designed, her beloved English collie Sandy beside her as she gazed out to the distant blue mountains.

The year I turned ten, my father’s illness forced us to move from the farm he could no longer manage to a very small cottage on our grandmother’s property, about one mile from her house. With this move came the dubious benefit of access to a school bus that could take us to a convent school in Kandos, a dusty cement-and-coal town twenty-five miles away. While my older brother was sent away to boarding school and my older sister stayed with our grandmother to study for her Intermediate exams (equivalent to Scottish Standard Grades or Intermediates) my three younger siblings and I left home at seven each morning to hurry down the two miles of dirt track to the bus stop.

I dreaded the bus journey. It lasted a stomach-churning hour and a half along winding roads, during which time we had to face the taunts of the other children. Most of all I dreaded Patricia, a plump, fair girl about my own age, whose parents lived on a nearby farm. When she and her brother boarded the bus she would push past the other children and stand over me, her cheeks red, her eyes glinting. ‘How’s the black princess?’, she would sneer.

My initial bafflement as to what she meant amused everyone. The only ‘black’ people I had seen were the aboriginal boxers at the annual county show in Rylstone. Looking dishevelled, disdainful and formidable, they stood on a platform outside the tent that sheltered the boxing ring, daring the white lads to take them on. My father had shown me caves which had been decorated many years before by local aboriginal people, and I had once heard an elderly neighbour tell my mother how she had watched the men hunting down ‘the last aborigine in the area’, and seen him ‘bounding over the fields like a kangaroo’.

Like my grandmother and my Scottish father, my siblings and I were all fair-skinned and blue-eyed. I tried sitting further back, but it became common practice for other girls on the bus to refuse me a seat next to them (to sit next to one of the boys would have been unthinkable, of course). I fought back, determined to retain my place on the bus, physically rather than verbally, because I did not know how to respond to the jeering. On some level, I realised that it was the particular combination of ‘black’ and ‘princess’ that Patricia and her friends objected to. I rejected both terms.

Eventually, I understood that the reference was to my grandfather, and that ‘black’ didn’t mean ‘black’ but was intended as a generic term of disparagement that applied to anyone who wasn’t white. It was on that school bus that I first realised that I was not only Australian, but also, in some sense, ‘Indian’. Later, this realisation grew into determination to understand my Indian heritage, and to understand it in terms that took into account, but were not limited by, the attitudes of my Australian schoolfellows.

My brothers, sisters and I kept quiet about the fights on the school bus – the hair-pulling, the punches that I received and returned, all studiously ignored by the young male bus driver. Nor did we talk, even among ourselves, about our younger sister’s travel sickness, or the embarrassment we faced during lessons for our lack of knowledge about Catholicism, or when we were caned for not knowing mathematical rules that the other children had learned years before. Our mother was struggling to run her small poultry farm, and both parents were growing increasingly anxious about money and our father’s illness. The curiosity about my heritage did not feel so urgent in light of my more immediate need to acquire social codes expected of us by teachers and classmates. And then, following my father’s death just over a year after we had moved to Glen Alice, my mother took up a position as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, in the tiny town of Naradhan 300-or-so miles west, where our ancestry was unknown. That same year I began secondary school as a boarder at St Scholastica’s College in Sydney.

While my mother and younger siblings were living in Naradhan, I spent some weeks during my school summer holidays staying with my grandmother. I found those visits daunting, not only because of her insistence that we speak French, but also because she expected me to help with her large garden, pruning the roses and cutting back the periwinkle that straggled forlornly up the bank below her veranda. Those hours in the garden were hot and tiring; the rose thorns scratched, the hornets threatened, and the green and red ants ran over the dry, pebbly ground. Now every time I tend the periwinkle and the abundant roses in my garden in Kent I think of her and her determination to cultivate a truly English garden in the meagre soil of Tyar. It was in her house that I read every novel Thackeray and Galsworthy wrote, and began to glimpse the fictional world that sustained her and that she partly inhabited.

Boarding school was also daunting, with its rigid schedules and confined spaces. We were allowed to venture outside the school gates only one Sunday a month. Here religious affiliation superseded class and ethnic identities. Hierarchies were established that exalted religion first, ethnicity second. My classmates were O’Briens, Ryans, Murphies, McVeighs, Coogans, O’Connors and Lynches; occasionally a Kowalinski or Costello appeared on the name rolls, which were deemed acceptable ‘New Australian’ Catholic names, but lacking the status of good ‘old Australian’ Irish surnames. When, aged fifteen and home for the holidays, I attended my first public dance, I was rebuked for accepting an invitation to dance with an Italian immigrant: ‘No decent girl would be seen dancing with a New Australian,’ my older sister’s friend told me.

Each morning our lessons imparted Irish nationalist history, including the persecution of heroic Catholics who stood up for ‘the faith of their fathers’ against English Protestants and Scottish Presbyterians. We were sternly discouraged from associating with Protestants and accepted that a ‘mixed marriage’ was a scandal. We pitied the children in Japan, Africa, China and India, devoutly offering our sixpences and our prayers for the salvation of their souls. I shared the widely accepted view that the few Papuan and Chinese Malaysian boarders at the school were special cases, who had been taken in as part of the convent’s missionary zeal. In such a world, the possession of an Indian Muslim grandparent seemed both irrelevant and inadmissible.

The fact that neither of my parents had any trace of Irish Catholic heritage (both had converted to Catholicism shortly before I was born), and that my fees were subsidised by various scholarships and charities, made it all the more necessary to disassociate myself from other outsiders. Together with my classmates I joined the parades on St Patrick’s Day, became a devout ‘Child of Mary’, and took ‘the ‘heroic pledge’ to abstain from alcohol for life. Once, a fellow boarder who came from a rural town near Kandos, referred to a rumour that my grandmother was ‘some kind of Swedish princess’. I did not disabuse her.

When I mentioned the report of our grandmother’s Swedish identity, my mother suggested that I should not deny it if asked again. She had told me, without any apparent displeasure, that at school and university her friends had light-heartedly called her Mozzy (a play on Mostyn), Fuzzy or Golly. Her hair was now white and cut short and close to her skull, but I retained an image of her from some eight years earlier when her hair had been thick, black and frizzy. I had always thought that she looked and felt beautiful. Now I began to wonder what invisible scars those school nicknames had left, and remembered how disapproving she had been when as a very small child I had been given a gollywog by a family friend. A few years later, when studying at Sydney University, I mentioned to my mother in a letter that I had become friends with a male student from India. Her very prompt reply warned me that she was aware that ‘Indian men can be very charming’ but that I should beware of forming a deeper relationship.

During my teenage years, my grandfather’s sister began writing to us from India. Great Aunt Vaheedoonissa had grown up in Murshidabad, her ancestral home in West Bengal. According to family lore (later proved incorrect), she had been betrothed at the age of five, but her husband-to-be had died before the wedding could take place, and she had remained in purdah all her life. I pitied her in her confinement and felt my good luck in being a liberated Australian female, seeing no contradiction in my growing ambition to become a nun in the very enclosed convent that housed my school.

The letters from my great aunt were written by her in Urdu and translated into English by a scribe. They conveyed family and political news, including events involving President of Pakistan Iskander Mirza, her cousin and ours. From these letters I learned that there were other perspectives on the Suez crisis than those advocated by the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and the Australian Prime Minister at the time, Robert Menzies, who was an ardent supporter of Anthony Eden and the British establishment. She bitterly denounced those who were responsible for the coup that ousted Mirza in 1958, and indignantly refuted claims that he was corrupt. Her letters brought both an awareness of and a connection to another world. Once along with a letter she sent a parcel containing silk scarves, ivory ornaments, and a little bottle of sandalwood-scented perfume. I claimed that bottle as my own, taking it with me when I moved to my student room at Sydney University. It has travelled with me through a series of American states and still exudes its special perfume here in Kent.

Those long-distance communications from my Great Aunt Vaheedoonissa began to make more tangible that other world to which my grandfather had once belonged. Everything was intriguingly different: the language, political histories, hierarchies, gender roles, clothing, smells and aesthetics. I became interested in my grandfather’s Indian family and wanted to know about his parents. My mother explained that the British government’s disapproval of my great-grandfather’s marriage to an English governess had led to his abdication. My brothers, sisters and I were not discouraged from making analogies with the story of Edward VIII’s abdication, a story kept alive by occasional articles about him and Wallis Simpson in Australian newspapers and magazines.

I was fascinated. What could it have been like for this young Englishwoman to travel to India, to work as a governess in an Indian palace, to be the wife of an Indian Nawab? The King and I was playing in local cinemas, but it was Thackeray’s Becky Sharp rather than Deborah Kerr or Jane Eyre who informed my notion of a governess. Yul Brynner, however, seemed a desirable model for an oriental ruler, and to the strains of ‘Getting to Know You’ I embarked on the first of many attempts to imagine and write the story of my great-grandparents.

When I read many years later in a family history written by the son of President Mirza that my great-grandmother was not a governess but a hotel chambermaid, my interest increased. Humayun Mirza wrote: ‘The Nawab Nazim embarked for England in February 1869 for what was planned as a short visit. As it turned out, he was to remain there for twelve years. By the time he returned to India, his weakness for servant girls and the pleasures of life in London gave the British the opportunity that they were waiting for to acquire Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.’

Thus I learned that my own existence ensued from the Nawab’s ‘weakness for servant girls’ and, in particular, of a seventeen-yearold chambermaid, Sarah Vennell, who happened to be working in the Alexandra Hotel in 1870. How did they meet, and was it this relationship that detained the Nawab in London for all those years? What was it like for Sarah to have been married to a Muslim nobleman? What was the British reaction that Humayun Mirza mentioned? These questions remained with me, but many years passed before I made my first visit to my great-grandfather’s birthplace in Murshidabad and began to explore the story of the last Nawab of Bengal and the young English girl he had married.

Part I of this book, the exploration of the stories of the Nawab and Sarah, involved not only visits to Bengal but immersion in the history and politics of British and Indian relationships throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those relationships were well documented – from the British side – in the many volumes of letters, reports and official accounts gathered in the files of the India Office, now held in the British Library. However, when I turned to the story of their youngest son, my grandfather, my mother’s memories and family photograph albums became the starting point of his story, informed also by memoirs, written and oral, passed on by my cousins. Consequently Part II of the narrative was shaped by personal experiences and encounters in a way that Part I could not be. Nevertheless, I was struck by ways in which both generations were involved in a resistance to and a dialogue with the political priorities, and the particular racial, and class attitudes that dominated Britain, India and Australia during their lifetimes: priorities and attitudes which continue to affect present generations in all three countries.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

A Prince in Name

1838–1848

‘My ancestors and the British Government made Treaties and the Government kept all the country, all the money, and left me nothing but the old and useless paper.’ Humayun Jah

L ocated 150 miles north of Kolkata, Murshidabad was once the capital of East India, and a focus for trade with the rest of India and other parts of the world. Granted a charter by Elizabeth I in 1600 for sole trading rights in India, the East India Company had become by the eighteenth century the world’s most powerful and profitable commercial company, dealing in spices, silk, cotton, gold, silver and opium. By 1750 it had its own substantial army. When Robert Clive, Governor of the East India Company in the Bengal area, visited the city for the first time after the Battle of Plassey and appropriation of Bengal in 1757, he wrote in sheer surprise that ‘the city of Murshidabad is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London with this difference: That there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater wealth than the whole of the Lombard Street [the financial hub of London] joined together.’

Sadly, Murshidabad did not stay the power it was, and the city’s preeminent status quickly declined under East India Company rule. The company was answerable first, foremost and solely to its shareholders. As with most corporations operating in this way and on this scale, it had no interest in the fair governance of East India or its wellbeing. Not long after the East India Company established itself in the region, as historian William Dalrymple comments in his book The Anarchy, its rule ‘quickly turned into the straight-forward pillage of Bengal and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth’.

Today, Murshidabad is a small and dusty town with a population that has rapidly diminished from 250,000 in 1757 to just over 42,000. Remnants of its grand history remain in the entrance gates, mosques, decaying Mughal palaces, Jain, Sikh and Hindu temples, colonial residential buildings and the separate graveyards for the Nawabs of Murshidabad and their families, and the Dutch, French and British colonialists. The Hazarduari Palace, ‘the Palace of a Thousand Doors’, dominates the city, now as a state museum visited by crowds of tourists and schoolchildren.

The palace was designed by Scottish military engineer Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan MacLeod for the Nawab Nazim Humayun Jah in 1830. It was built in the European style and intended to impress as a grand venue for hosting durbars (court meetings) and other ceremonial events – rather than for domestic living. Inside and out, the palace declared the Murshidabad family’s status as Indian royalty while implying equality with European royalty and aspirations. There are several galleries where paintings of various British officials hang – including a life-size portrait of King William IV – alongside the ancestral portraits of the Nawabs of Bengal, back to Mir Jafar, whom Robert Clive had installed as Nawab Nazim following the Battle of Plassey and the defeat of the then-ruling Nawab, Siraj ud-Dualah, Mir Jafar’s nephew.

Among the paintings in the Hazarduari Palace is the earliest surviving image of my great-grandfather, the last Nawab of Bengal, who was also known as Mansour Ali Khan. It was painted to mark the completion of the Hazarduari Palace in Murshidabad in December 1837, when Mansour Ali Khan would have been seven years old. In this picture he wears embroidered red and white silk robes and a large gold necklace, identical to the one worn by his father, Humayun Jah, who stands beside him. My grandfather is watching his father intently.

Painted by William Henry Florio Hutchisson and titled Handing over the Hazarduari Palace, this painting hangs today in the entrance hall of the palace. It shows a crowded scene of featureless and indistinct Indians in white robes and turbans standing behind six seated Britons, four of whom are wearing military uniforms. Presumably their presence is intended to honour the occasion and the owner of the palace, but the British men appear to be engaged in rather desultory conversation with one another and are paying little attention to the ceremonial signing in the background. On the right side of the portrait, Lt-Col Duncan McLeod, the British officer who designed and supervised the construction of the palace, is seated at a small table holding a large scroll which is being signed, or perhaps sealed, by the splendidly robed Nawab Humayun Jah.

Hazarduari Palace (The Palace of a Thousand Doors), Murshidabad

Less than ten months after the palace was completed, Humayun Jah was dead, aged just twenty-eight. The British doctor blamed his death on over-indulgence in alcohol and luxurious living, although the usual palace rumours of poisoning circulated. And so, on his eighth birthday, 29 October 1838, Mansour Ali Khan was officially pronounced the new Nawab Nazim of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa: an area of East India almost three times the size of the British Isles. His ascension to the throne took place four months after Queen Victoria’s coronation.

Almost immediately after Mansour Ali Khan’s installation, he received a letter from the British Administration in Calcutta (the name by which today’s Kolkata was known for practically all the period covered by this book). It congratulated him on his accession to the ‘throne of his ancestors’ and affirmed that ‘the dignity and honour of the illustrious house you now represent will ever be an object of care and solicitude to this Government’. Some dozen volumes of laboriously handwritten files in the India Office Records demonstrate that, both before and during the young Nawab’s childhood, and throughout his entire life, the British government’s ‘care and solicitude’ was indeed unremitting.

Despite remaining the titular head of government for the region, the Nawab had very little power. After the Battle of Plassey, the Nawabs of Bengal had become in reality puppet princes. Robert Clive had installed Mir Jafar as Nawab, with a promised annual stipend of 530 million rupees (today equivalent to approximately 5 billion pounds), drawn from taxes and revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The East India Company at the same time exacted large payments for damages to people and property in Calcutta, salaries for the British troops, and ‘gifts’ to Clive himself. The real power was now held by the East India Company, which was in turn partly controlled by a British Parliamentary Council, with a Governor-General based in Bengal, appointed by the British Parliament and backed by a substantial army of British and Indian troops supervised by British officers.

Although Warren Hastings had moved the capital of East India to Calcutta in 1772, a British Agent to the Governor-General remained posted in Murshidabad. His role was specifically to oversee the management of the Nawab’s estates and family. The Agent’s salary and expenses, and those of his servants and clerks, were paid out of the Nawab’s funds, as were all the allowances paid to the Nawab’s numerous relatives and servants. Under the East India Company’s management, the pension paid by the British administration from its Indian revenues to the Nawab decreased with each generation, often because the heir was not yet an adult, and the Agent deemed it unnecessary to allow him the full pension during his minority. Somehow the full amount was rarely reinstated when each new young Nawab’s majority was reached. By the time Mansour Ali Khan, the ninth Nawab after Mir Jafar, ascended to the throne in 1838, the pension had been reduced from 530 million to 750 thousand rupees – equivalent today to approximately four and a half million pounds.

Mansour Ali Khan’s father, Humayun Jah, had complained that his predecessors had made Treaties and the Government kept all the country, all the money, and left him nothing but the old and useless paper [treaties]. When the British Agent claimed that the Nizamut (the house of Murshidabad) was now degraded, Humayun Jah responded that this was because the English Government had broken its faith.

Humayun Jah had been a tall, proud, ambitious man, determined to ensure that his status was respected. Indeed, towards the end of his reign, he enquired several times about the possibility of being titled King (rather than Nawab), since the wealthy King of Oudh in a neigbouring province had been so honoured. The British Agent and Governor-General neither welcomed nor encouraged this suggestion. However, in 1836 the Nawab was pleased to receive from William IV, together with a life-size portrait of the king, a letter conferring on him the Grand Cross of the Hanoverian Royal Order. This was an honour created by George IV in his role as King of Hanover. Other recipients of the order included the Duke of Wellington, the explorer Sir John Franklin, and the King’s own sons. The Nawab saw the order as confirmation from King William of his own high status and unique position in India and in the eyes of the world. The order might not be a hereditary title that induced the worldwide respect that ‘King’ would have secured, but Humayun Jah considered his position, and that of his family, assured.

When Humayun Jah’s death was announced, the Governor-General’s Agent in Murshidabad, Colonel James Caulfield, in consultation with the Governor-General and other British officials in Calcutta, immediately took steps to oversee the new young Nawab’s education and control his finances. Caulfield emphasised the need to ‘retrieve the affairs of the Nizamut from the state of disorganisation into which they had been suffered to fall by the late Nazim’. He also pointed out that, since in 1833 the Agent had become ‘the channel through which all members of the [Murshidabad] family and their dependents receive their stipends’, there was no need to appoint a Regent. Thus the British government gained even closer control of the young Nawab’s affairs.

Ever since the Mughal conquests of North India in the sixteenth century, Persian had become the lingua franca for trade and government throughout the continent. It was also the court language in the Delhi imperial court as well as provincial palaces such as Bengal. Now, the East India Company officials and the British government sought to replace Persian with English as the official language. As the secretary to the Board of Control of India, Thomas Babington Macaulay, put it in his 1835 Minute on Education to the Governor-General’s Council, through encouraging upper-class Indians to obtain a command of English the British could ‘create a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.

For the ‘Oriental branch’ of the boy’s education, Colonel Caulfield appointed Meerza Ali Azeem to tutor Arabic and Persian. In accordance with the new emphasis on a European education, Caulfied recruited Felix Seddon, a professor of Oriental Languages at King’s College, London, for ‘the more important duty of instructing [the Nawab] in English literature and European Science’. It was a well-paid job for Seddon, whose salary was 1,000 rupees a month, equivalent today to approximately £10,000. In comparison, Meerza Ali Azeem was paid 250 rupees each month to tutor the Nawab in Arabic and Persian – just one quarter the payment that Seddon received. Despite this it would seem that the tutors had a harmonious relationship with one another, and in one letter Seddon expresses considerable admiration for the learning and integrity of the Persian tutor, who he claimed was ‘as good a man as I ever met and a sterling first-rate scholar’.

In the view of Robert Pemberton, who succeeded Caulfield as Government Agent in 1839, it was Seddon’s role to offset the influence of Mansour Ali Khan’s Indian tutors and steer him away from the women and eunuchs in the zenana, that part of the building reserved for them. Lord Auckland, then Governor-General of India, requested that Pemberton keep a diary ‘showing how His Highness the Nazim … passes his time’, recording his progress in his studies, and noting ‘any particular traits of his general disposition and character’ which might strike him as worthy of notice. Pemberton took it upon himself to examine the young Nawab every Monday morning in both English and Persian. ‘Too much aware of his status’, ‘proud, unsteady and volatile’ was Pemberton’s report of the nine-year-old Nawab’s character in 1839.

Those long and laboriously written reports from Seddon and Pemberton about Mansour Ali Khan’s progress reveal varying degrees of conflict between the Agent, the tutors, and – above all – the young Nawab, who at first strongly resisted the insistence on learning English. ‘Since his father did not learn English, his grandfather did not speak it, none of his ancestors spoke it, why should he?’ Seddon reported him demanding. These Englishmen, these angrezi, had usurped his father’s place, insisting on their right to direct and supervise him, but speaking a language he did not understand. Perhaps it is the voice of his Persian tutor, or his grandmother, we hear ventriloquised in his defiant questioning of the requirement to learn English.

Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in many of the reports and letters written by the British officials is an intimation of the different factions and interests striving to influence the young Nawab and keep him on side: his Persian tutors, the molvis (doctors of Islamic law) and other Muslim members of court concerned that he keep the faith of his fathers; his grandmother who seems to have been less willing than his mother to accommodate the British; his cousins and uncles; the eunuchs in the court, one of whom, an African, had been a respected member of the household and an advisor to the family for over sixty years. Pemberton reflected a typical British official distrust of those areas still managed by the women of the family when he complained that an ‘adverse influence is still secretly exercised by those who have hitherto possessed a most pernicious influence over the minds and actions of his predecessors in office’. In the end it was the British who assumed the right to exercise major control over the child, and they had the power to do so.

The feelings and views of the young Nawab, his mother and relatives are rarely mentioned. Their language was Persian or Urdu, not English, and only the most formal documents in those languages have been preserved. It is the British records that have survived and which contain and interpret the Nawab’s story in the light of British attitudes and assumptions, so that it is only by reading between the lines that we can try to glimpse his reactions to them.

Seddon was, as well as the first, perhaps the most sympathetic of Mansour Ali Khan’s English tutors. As an orientalist who understood several Asian languages and had read a wide range of Persian and Arabic literature he was better able to communicate with the boy. He was sensitive to the Nawab’s unique position and various pressures, conceding that ‘one so young and so sensible that he is “monarch of all he surveys” cannot be treated quite like other children who feel more their obligation to do as they are bid’. His philosophy as a teacher was to follow the method of education advocated by the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a system that adjusted to and developed the child’s innate qualities rather than imposing a preformulated curriculum. Several of his reports comment on the boy’s interest in art, noting that, although he was often restless and recalcitrant during other lessons, he was willing to spend hours talking about pictures. Seddon wrote, ‘He will look for hours at pictorial embellishments, and examine with a keenness of perception truly wonderful every part and atom of a picture with never ceasing enquiry and the utmost interest.’

Although the young Nawab at first made slow and reluctant progress in his ability to speak and write English, he quickly became proficient at writing Persian, and clearly enjoyed doing so. An early tutorial report comments that he would frequently stay on after his afternoon writing lesson ‘and take up the reed and write his Persian copies, his little fingers sometimes forming strokes that would do little discredit to the most practised penman’.

There is a telling incident relayed in one report illustrating the frustration of both teacher and pupil, the boy’s resentment and childish anger, as well as his need for affection and attachment. During the hot season, Seddon had forbidden the young Nawab to leave the palace in order to go out in the sun or to the zenana (which would be cooler and better ventilated), and he had locked the door. The young Nawab, on discovering this, had ‘walked to the other end of the room, swelling with impotent rage’. However, within a few minutes, he apologised, saying ‘I have behaved very ill, but you are my good tutor and you will I hope forgive me.’ This sequence of events – the imposition of restrictions, the show of rebellion and frustration, followed by the capitulation to a paternal British representative – would be repeated throughout Mansour Ali Khan’s life. It wasn’t an isolated incident and throughout his education the Nawab clearly felt the burden of his position, even as a child. During another lesson the Nawab’s Persian tutor sought to impress upon the young boy the importance of acquiring greater knowledge now because of the responsibilities he would take on at a later age. ‘If this is the case, I will resign – I will give up the Nizamut,’ was his reaction. It is the response of a small child of whom too much is demanded.

Robert Pemberton’s death in June 1840 brought a change of regime. The new Agent, Major-General Felix Vincent Raper, had previously spent more than forty years in the Bengal Army; he considered Seddon too lax in his discipline. Seddon was transferred to become Principal of the Nizamut College, established in Murshidabad to offer schooling to the lesser members and dependents of the royal family. He was replaced by a new and stricter superintendent of studies, Captain G. D. Showers, who engaged James Cooper as the English tutor. Under the supervision of Showers, the now ten-year-old Nawab was required to study English, history, science, mathematics and geography from seven in the morning till one in the afternoon, and then, after a brief meal break, resume lessons in Persian till half-past five. In addition he was expected to go horse riding and take other physical exercise from daybreak till seven in the morning and from half-past five till half-past six in the evening, supervised by an English tutor. Following all these activities, Captain Showers reported, the pupil was ‘too much exhausted to sit up at night and retires to his mother’s deori [apartments]’.

Showers remarked somewhat defensively that he felt it necessary to allow a large portion of the afternoon to the Nawab’s four Muslim instructors, saying he had done so because he considered it ‘of importance that a Nobleman of his rank should possess a full share of Oriental acquirements … and also on account of the jealousy and suspicion which would be created by any appearance of partiality for a course of English instruction’. He noted with approval that the principal instructor, ‘Meer Alee Azem’, ‘is a learned man, and tho’ a recluse and a Sheea, he possesses sufficient liberality of principal to aid and assist me in all my views’. Nevertheless, Showers feared that any discussion of religion between himself and the young Nawab might be tricky, and so avoided including it as a formal part of his instruction. He hoped that science lessons would gradually lead the boy away from ‘superstitious beliefs in Omens, Auguries, and Supernatural spirits’. Eventually he hoped to ‘install in his mind those more exalted Notions of Omnipotence, and of an over ruling Providence’. That an ‘exalted Notion of Omnipotence and an over ruling Providence’ is fundamental to Islam seems to have escaped Captain Showers’s notice.