JULIA KEAY was the author of severalacclaimed biographies including The SpyWho Never Was, With Passport and Parasoland Alexander the Corrector. She also wrotenumerous BBC radio documentaries,including two plays, and, with her husbandJohn Keay, co-edited two editions of theEncyclopaedia of Scotland and the thirdedition of The London Encyclopaedia. Thetext of Farzana was completed just beforeher death in 2011.

‘This book, about an amazing woman, nowstands as a fitting memorial to another.

Julia will be greatly missed, and this book showswhat an enjoyable writer we have lost.’

WI L L I A M DA L R Y M P L E

mongst the riches of nineteenth-century India, as the British fought their wayacross Mughal territory, an orphaned street-girl ends up at court with the ear of theEmperor. That girl was Farzana, and shewould become a courtesan, a leader ofarmies, a treasured defender of the lastMughal emperor and the head of one of the most legendary courts in history.

In this beautifully written book, the author’slast, Julia Keay weaves a story which spansthe Indian continent and the end of a goldenera in Indian history, the story of a nobodywho became a teenage seductress and diedone of the richest and most prominentwomen of her age. Farzana rode into battleatop a stallion, though only 4 ½ feet tall, andled an army which defended a sickly MughalEmpire. She dabbled in witchcraft whilegaining favour with the Pope, and died afavourite of the British Raj. Farzana is anevocative and moving depiction of one of themost remarkable, and least-known, historicallives of the nineteenth century.

Jacket design: B R I L L

Jacket image: Begum Samru’s household, c.1820, Delhi, India. Public domain.

Farzana

Far

za

na

‘A delight to read’ Charles Allen, Literary ReviewA

Julia KeayForeword by

William Dalrymple

Jul

ia

Ke

ay

The Woman Who Saved an Empire

www.ibtauris.com

9 781784 530556

ISBN 978-1-78453-055-6

JULIA KEAY was the author of several acclaimed biographies including The Spy Who Never Was, With Passport and Parasol and Alexander the Corrector. She also wrote numerous BBC radio documentaries, including two plays, and, with her husband John Keay, co-edited two editions of the Encyclopaedia of Scotland and the third edition of The London Encyclopaedia. The text of Farzana was completed just before her death in 2011.

‘This book, about an amazing woman, now stands as a fitting

memorial to another. Julia will be greatly missed, and this book shows what an enjoyable writer we have lost.’

William Dalrymple

‘A delight to read.’ Charles Allen, Literary Review

FARZANA The Woman who Saved an Empire

JULIA KEAY

New hardback edition published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 First published in India in 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers India Copyright © 2014 the Estate of Julia Keay Copyright Foreword © 2013 William Dalrymple The right of Julia Keay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the Estate of Julia Keay in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 78453 055 6 eISBN: 978 0 85773 569 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in 11/15 Goudy OlSt BT by R. Ajith Kumar Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

Foreword vii

Prologue 1

PART ONE: MARRIED TO THE REGIMENT

1750–1778

1 Where Passions Rage 13 2 In Between Empires 26 3 The Butcher of Patna 43 4 Enchanted by Her Heroism 62 5 A Home of Their Own 77

PART TWO: DAUGHTER OF THE EMPEROR

1778–1788

6 Steel Beneath the Muslin 95 7 Fit for Service 124 8 Fearless Foreigner 146 9 Violence, Rapine and Barbarity 16610 Errors of Judgement 18911 A Gathering Storm 21412 A Salutory Experience 237

PART THREE: THE ONLY LADY AT THE TABLE

1788–1836

13 A Genius for Majesty 25514 Best-laid Plans 269

Epilogue 291 Afterword 298 Notes 300 Select Bibliography 320 Index 327

Contentsvi

Prologue

I n the golden age of letter writing, before steam power had shrunk the miles and the telegraph had stolen the news, no mail was more eagerly awaited than that penned

by husbands, brothers, sons, fathers and sweethearts who had gone out to India to make their fortunes. Once delivered – and that could be a year after they were written – such letters were savoured like no others. Scanned in silence, read out loud, reread at leisure and studied minutely, they would then be tied with ribbon and tucked in some place of privilege – the smallest drawer in an escritoire, perhaps, or a scented pocketbook – until such time, please God, as the next one arrived or, better still, the writer himself returned.

Whether short and stilted or long and eloquent, their news was as exciting as their familiar handwriting. Spiced with tales of moustachioed maharajas riding jewel-encrusted elephants and of naked men with long matted hair, they told of tiger-infested jungles, temples dedicated to outlandish heathen gods, debilitating heat and life-threatening illness, fortunes made and fortunes lost. Feats of heroism on the battlefield vied with accounts of the rankest intrigue

1

Julia Keay2

at the numerous Indian courts; and among these, the scarcely credible exploits of a fraternity of freelance European adventurers excited particular wonder and accentuated the impression of an exotic land where fact was stranger than fantasy.

In these letters of the early nineteenth century, and in journals and memoirs written for posterity as much as family, one name crops up with intriguing frequency – that of a mysterious and apparently warlike ‘Begum’, or princess. ‘Begum Sumru joined us with four battalions…’, ‘Begum Sumru was with her forces operating against a fresh rising of the Sikhs’, ‘Begum Sumru arrived in her palanquin, supported by a hundred men and a six-pounder gun’, ‘…we dined at Begum Sumru’s palace…’, ‘I breakfasted and dined with the old witch…’. A begum is the female equivalent of a nawab, a Muslim prince, but this lady’s enjoyment of the rank also owed something to several wordier titles conferred on her by the Mughal emperor. Of these Farzand-i-Azizi meaning ‘Beloved Daughter [of the state]’ was the most prized. At the imperial court she would be called by this honorific and, shortened and personalized as ‘Farzana’, it is thus that popular history has come to remember her. A heroine needs a proper name. Unlike ‘Begum Sumru’, ‘Farzana’ conveys the requisite intimacy while still implying the status she so jealously guarded.

Although few of those who met Farzana could boast more than a passing acquaintance, her fame seems to have been reason enough to mention her in their letters. Encounters with ‘the old witch’ of her later years evidently made just as lasting an impression as brushes with the petite temptress of her youth. She was not someone you forgot. Like the bejewelled elephants and the endless court intrigues, she neatly embodied the contrasts that characterized India in the chaotic years between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the coming of the British Raj. Viscount Combermere, the British commander-in-chief in India during 1825–30, hailed her as a living relic of this

Farzana 3

extraordinary period, indeed ‘a kind of Taj Mahal whom no foreign visitor could afford to miss’.

Nor did they. Invitations to her soirées in the heart of what is now Old Delhi were eagerly solicited and never, ever, turned down. Governors General and garrison commanders, judges and adjutants – some with bonneted wives, all with uniformed retainers – would pile into their carriages, swords clanking, stays creaking, to be driven off to her city palace. Set in an elegantly lit Mughal garden just outside the main Lahori Gate of the emperor’s Red Fort, here they were entertained in regal style, dining on the begum’s celebrated pilaus, downing her finest clarets and listening politely as her orchestra played a medley of God Save the King and the Marseillaise from an alcove in the corner. She never ate in the presence of her guests, and accounts vary as to whether she ever touched the wine, but unfailingly, when the memsahibs withdrew, Farzana gestured to a servant to bring her hookah and then settled down to a companionable smoke amid the men and their cheroots.

Awed by her apparent age (‘she must be a hundred years old’, wrote the French naturalist Victor Jacquemont in 1834,1 ‘she is bent in two and her face is shrivelled like dried raisins’), they yet marvelled at her ‘naturally quick understanding’, were charmed by her ‘delightful wit and wonderful memory’ and were much intrigued by what little they could glean of her exotic past. A Christian by then, and so not forced to live in the seclusion imposed on Muslim and Hindu women, she was the only emancipated Indian female most of these foreign acolytes would ever meet. They hung on her every word as she told of an age few could recall, of armies and atrocities, gallantry and treachery, and of an India more bitterly divided than at any stage in its history.

Equally sought-after were invitations to visit Farzana at her country estate in the nearby Doab (the land between the ‘two rivers’,

Julia Keay4

the Jumna and the Ganges). This was at Sardhana, a township forty miles north-east of Delhi and so too far for an evening excursion. Only by having fresh horses posted at frequent intervals along the way could even the most dare-devil rider make the journey in less than three hours. Necessarily, then, there was the added pleasure of being allocated one of her well-appointed guest houses and savouring Indian hospitality at its princely best. Dancers and firework displays entertained the visitors; iced sherbets revived them. The curious could seldom resist the chance to inspect the choice bloodstock in her stables or the formidable weaponry displayed in her armoury.

In the brakes of her estate there were snipe to shoot, pigs to stick and peacocks to pamper. For the impecunious guest there was also the added attraction of exploiting the amiable naivety of her feckless heir and relieving him of a few gold mohurs at the card table or inveigling him into some dubious investment. For everyone there was the added attraction of catching up with old friends stationed at the British military base in nearby Meerut who seemed to have an open invitation to visit Sardhana as often as they liked. Guests might also, if they chose, attend the incense-heavy services in her personally commissioned church. And without fail, after they dispersed in a flurry of carriages, they all filled their letters and diaries with reminiscences of a decidedly unusual lady, once harem Jezebel, then warrior queen and latterly a less than likely candidate for Papal canonization.

Farzana’s neoclassical palace in Old Delhi is still standing, though it is scarcely intact, very hard to find and without its elegant garden. Instead of parterres of oleanders, a maze of scruffy lanes and alleyways crowd its every approach, while Delhi’s new metro burrows beneath. Known today as Bhagirath Palace after one of

Farzana 5

its twentieth-century proprietors, the building’s imposing façade is barely discernible through the forest of dilapidation. Festooned with electricity cables, trussed with ties and braced with joists, guyed by the poles and awnings of market stalls and defaced by scrawls of graffiti, its columns blackened and chipped and its cornices crumbling into the warren below, the palace is being devoured piecemeal by an insatiable commerce. Its once gracious interior now hosts a gloomy labyrinth, partitioned, divided and subdivided into ever smaller retail units. With the exception of a savings bank, which occupies part of the ground floor, all these cubicles and compartments sell electrical components – condensers and capacitors, bushes and brushes, microchips and circuit boards, the hard currency of a booming economy’s latest reincarnation. A waft of hookah smoke or a blast of filmi music might just trigger some dim memory of a more glorious past. Then, plummeting to what might once have been a bit of the dance floor, a boxed refrigeration unit hurtles from its unseen roost into the waiting embrace of a turbaned porter. No trace of grace or hint of favour here.

Not much sign, either, of the dusty, rutted track along which Farzana’s guests would be driven out from Delhi to her country palace in Sardhana. Although the journey is certainly quicker now and possibly safer – the fear is no longer of bandits on wild wiry horses, but of gung-ho Jehus gunning the engines of overloaded trucks – the route is nothing like as scenic. The four lanes of National Highway 58 are so choked with traffic and the air so heavy with fumes that drivers mask their faces with their handkerchiefs. Pedestrians plod along in shrouds, like upright corpses. Persevere, though, and the congestion eventually eases. The air starts to clear; gaps appear between the factories and apartment blocks; there are workshops and tea-stalls and patches of waste ground. Mango and banyan trees outnumber electricity poles; sugar cane grows tall in the fields, goats rummage in the bushes and water buffalo wallow in muddy ponds. A left turn

Julia Keay6

at Meerut and the road shrinks to a single track of patched tarmac. Shrubby hedges obscure the view, hiding landmarks.

‘Sardhana?’ ‘That way.’ Two hours from the high-rise heart of modern Delhi, a sprightly

Sardhana seems comfortable with its unassuming profile. Though now merely ‘in the district of Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh’, the little town was once the hub of its own mini-state. Guidebooks unkindly describe it as ‘decayed’, and the surrounding countryside is undoubtedly flat and featureless. But there have been high points in its history, none more so than in the early nineteenth century. The soil is rich, the air fresh and the pace of life reassuringly slow. Sleek cows chew the cud on the roadside, flea-blown dogs sleep in the shade and a group of schoolchildren dawdle by a food-stall.

‘Anyone know where the church is?’ A dozen small thumbs point south. ‘That way.’

The road winds on, skirting high walls and petering out in a large empty car park. Through the swirls of a wrought-iron gate, the first sight of Farzana’s place of worship is nothing less than astonishing.

Painted in pastel yellow and a white so white that it verges on the ultraviolet, the Basilica of Our Lady of Graces merits its tag of ‘an architectural wonder’. Set in a well-tended rose garden surrounded by mango trees, it is approached along a wide path of sharp gravel (believed a deterrent to snakes) lined with gleaming plaster tableaux of the Stations of the Cross. An Italian military engineer, Major Antonio Reghelini, designed and built the church between 1820 and 1828, but not without some input from its proprietor. Farzana had her own ideas of what constituted a place of worship. The skyline boasts two lofty steeples, three domes, all of them surmounted by gilded crosses, a great octagonal lantern of chiselled slate and, like the Delhi palace, are entered via a stately Palladian portico with eighteen paired pillars. Here welcoming nuns hand visitors into the

Farzana 7

care of an elderly man whose henna-ed hair hints more at the Muslim hajji than the Christian sacristan.

The mixed signals given out by the architecture and the personnel are echoed in the interior. The huge main altar of white Makrana marble is inlaid with floral motifs like those of the Taj Mahal, while the image of the Virgin and Child in the niche above is draped with multicoloured fairy lights and festooned with garlands of jasmine and marigold. The flowers, on closer inspection, turn out to be plastic; but the chequerboard floor is certainly marble, as is the towering memorial that almost fills a side chapel.

Carved in Rome from the finest white Carrara by Canova’s protégé Adamo Tadolini, this eighteen-foot-high stalagmite of statuary was shipped out to India in sections, reassembled on site and installed and dedicated in 1848. The lower tiers incorporate eleven life-size figures plus three bas-relief panels portraying scenes and personalities from Farzana’s past, while seated aloft on her musnud or throne is the sculpted figure of the church’s founder and patron herself. More panels on the sides bear the dedicatory inscription in Latin and English:

Sacred to the memory of Her Highness Joanna Zeb-ul-nisa,the Begam Sombre,

styled the Distinguished of Nobles and Beloved Daughter of the State, who quitted a transitory Court for an eternal world, revered

and lamented by thousands of her devoted subjects,at her palace of Sardhana, on the 27th of January 1836, aged

ninety years.

A mile to the north, ‘her palace of Sardhana’ is easier to find, although harder to explore. On the flagged verandah at the top of the wide fan of steps, and beneath another massively pillared portico, an anxious watchman stands guard, his finger to his lips. Through

Julia Keay8

the open windows row upon row of teenage boys can be seen, elbows on desks and heads down, writing feverishly. They are in the middle of their Higher Secondary Certificate Examinations – ‘please not to disturb; but yes, it is permitted to walk around outside.’

Now housing the St Charles Inter College, a Hindi-medium school run by the Catholic Church, Sardhana Palace remains impressive when seen from ground level, although the roof apparently collapsed in the 1990s and has been replaced by sheets of corrugated iron pending yet-to-be-completed fund-raising. Like the church, it was designed by Antonio Reghelini, who also doubled as one of Farzana’s senior officers. She had two other palaces (a less ostentatious mansion in Sardhana and the city palace in Delhi) and several other substantial properties, but this was the nerve centre of her fiefdom, the headquarters of her army and her final home. It remains the most impressive surviving relic of her quasi-royal status.

The palace compound must originally have been far bigger. Now there is room only for a few ancillary school buildings and the fragments of a formal garden. In Farzana’s day it was spacious enough to contain bungalows for her European officers, barracks for her troops, stabling for hundreds of horses, a hospital, a school, and accommodation for the horde of political advisers, lawyers, letter writers, doctors, clerics, cooks, grooms, gardeners and domestic servants that comprised her personal household. Nearby, there were more bungalows for her guests and a jumble of low hutments for her nearly 700 pensioners. Of these last, more than 500 were either retired soldiers and their families or the widows and orphans of those who had died in her service. The remainder were listed in the palace ledgers as ‘old and lame’, ‘old and blind’, ‘old and insane’, ‘insane’, ‘lepers’ and ‘paupers’. Maintaining a vast establishment was all part of being a begum, as was constructing palaces and places of worship. It advertised one’s status and confirmed one’s legitimacy. But it was also a heavy burden. The Begum arranged for this thousand-strong

Farzana 9

community to be housed, clothed, fed, educated and nursed at her own expense; and in truly regal, not to say despotic, fashion, she ruled every aspect of their lives.

Here, then, presided Farzana in her declining years. To one who was honoured as ‘distinguished of Nobles and the Beloved Daughter of the State’, who consorted with the powerful, befriended the poor and patronized every faith, it was a worthy setting. Her wealth and fame, no less than her charitable works, her lavish parties and caustic wit, seduced a generation. Foreigners often referred to her simply as ‘Her Highness’. As India’s only Christian princess, they were happy to claim her as their own.

But what of the other Farzana, the sometime slave, the aspiring courtesan, fiery campaigner, ruthless murderer and power-hungry virago? What of the seductress who possibly married a German, certainly married a Frenchman and enjoyed a tempestuous twenty-year relationship with the legendary ‘Rajah from Tipperary’? What, too, of the warrior queen who skilfully manoeuvred her 3,000-strong army through more than twenty-five years of anarchy and war without, it was said, ever losing a battle or surrendering a gun? These other Farzanas are no more hinted at in the hushed sanctity of her church or the faded grandeur of her Sardhana estate than among the capacitors and transistors that cram her Delhi palace. Yet her popularity owed not a little to all these incarnations. In their mystery lay the key to her mystique.

JULIA KEAY was the author of severalacclaimed biographies including The SpyWho Never Was, With Passport and Parasoland Alexander the Corrector. She also wrotenumerous BBC radio documentaries,including two plays, and, with her husbandJohn Keay, co-edited two editions of theEncyclopaedia of Scotland and the thirdedition of The London Encyclopaedia. Thetext of Farzana was completed just beforeher death in 2011.

‘This book, about an amazing woman, nowstands as a fitting memorial to another.

Julia will be greatly missed, and this book showswhat an enjoyable writer we have lost.’

WI L L I A M DA L R Y M P L E

mongst the riches of nineteenth-century India, as the British fought their wayacross Mughal territory, an orphaned street-girl ends up at court with the ear of theEmperor. That girl was Farzana, and shewould become a courtesan, a leader ofarmies, a treasured defender of the lastMughal emperor and the head of one of the most legendary courts in history.

In this beautifully written book, the author’slast, Julia Keay weaves a story which spansthe Indian continent and the end of a goldenera in Indian history, the story of a nobodywho became a teenage seductress and diedone of the richest and most prominentwomen of her age. Farzana rode into battleatop a stallion, though only 4 ½ feet tall, andled an army which defended a sickly MughalEmpire. She dabbled in witchcraft whilegaining favour with the Pope, and died afavourite of the British Raj. Farzana is anevocative and moving depiction of one of themost remarkable, and least-known, historicallives of the nineteenth century.

Jacket design: B R I L L

Jacket image: Begum Samru’s household, c.1820, Delhi, India. Public domain.

Farzana

Far

za

na

‘A delight to read’ Charles Allen, Literary ReviewA

Julia KeayForeword by

William Dalrymple

Jul

ia

Ke

ay

The Woman Who Saved an Empire

www.ibtauris.com

9 781784 530556

ISBN 978-1-78453-055-6