Helping to Govern India: His Highness the Nawab

‘I HATE India!’ said Mem-Sahib gloomily.

It was mid-July. The greater rains had been with us for a month, sluicing, amid electric blazes and thunder crashes, up and down the hot Ganges valley.

The Berhampore Civil Station was a desert. Our respected seniors and their dames had fled before the storm to Darjiling among the rhododendrons, where they dined their coevals, played swift tennis on the courts, flirted atrociously, as Gilber Sahib alleged, and peered through pearl-white mists at splendid Himalayan snows.

We who remained in the plains, amid the illimitable rice-fields of the rain-soaked delta, heat-worn and depressed, had planned to break our loneliness by a visit to the Nawab.

We needed cheering. Mem-Sahib was feverish and dreadfully homesick. Gilber Sahib, our one neighbor, was, as always, pensive in his friendliness. The Assistant Magistrate, who, like Tertius, writes this epistle, was overburdened with the charge of the District: a million and a quarter lean, dark people; among them innumerable half-starved children, to whom multitudes of doomed babies were ceaselessly added, down many-streamed Ganges to the ocean, and up the wide valley to the snowwreathed hills; a distressing thing, not to be mitigated to the Assistant Magistrate by the deputed glory of supreme command, with the right to order about the Collector Sahib’s round dozen of scarlet-turbaned chaprassies, and the daily privilege of inspecting the gaol amid fire-blossomed acacias.

‘I hate India!’ said Mem-Sahib disconsolately; a sentiment not without an echo in the heart of the Assistant Sahib.

The rains had driven some of the intolerable heat out of the air, and, ceasing for a few hours, had left the warm world full of freshness under a superb curtain of gray cloud. We were seated, Mem-Sahib and I, before the first bungalow of a barrack-like row, separated by a red road from the treefringed square. Our cane arm-chairs stood on a square island of concrete amid the soaking grass. We were waiting already helmeted, for the carriage and for Gilber Sahib.

The air was full of the gurgling of minas, guzzling water-logged worms on the vividly green grass, and chattering like school-girls.

Over Gilber Sahib’s white barrack stood a patriarchal mango tree, about whose green glossy dome white egrets congregated. Above the shiny green of the leafage those white birds carried on their mystic dance. Lancebeaked and long-legged they rose, with curved white wings and snowy plumes, poising like blown petals in the air, or setting forth, a silvery line against the gray, or circling in the air and settling back again with wings curved upward amid the green: taking all these lovely poses that enthralled the artist of Japan, until, to liberate his soul, he took brush and made every delicate line of them immortal.

‘I hate India!’ cried Mem-Sahib despairingly; and then, on a sudden, took on a more cheerful air; for round the bend of the Murshidabad road appeared a big, high-swung victoria from the Nawab Bahadur’s stables, bearing down on us with a fine clatter of hoofs. At the same moment, across the corner of the square came Gilber Sahib, a good little Frenchman with chivalry in his heart, and a dash of sadness where some old love-story had left its incurable pain. In a light suit, as befitted these hot-house days, under a helmet of white sola pith, he came over to us, pensive as always, and made his morning compliments to Mem-Sahib, who, being of the Russian persuasion, dearly loved to talk French.

‘Bonjour, madame! et comment ça va, ce matin?’

Cheered by the gentle gray courtesy of Gilber Sahib, the lady responded hopefully and began to hate India a little less, preening herself for the drive in the big victoria now drawing up beside us on the road: a magnificent pair of Australian bays, a Punjabi coachman splendid in silver and crimson, and two gorgeous though barefooted grooms, also from the upcountry, their button-shaped turbans barred with silver.

The grooms hopped down from the back of the carriage, swung the door open with many salaams, and inducted us to our seats, the lady and Gilber Sahib having the place of honor while the Assistant Magistrate sat facing them, with the bronze-image countenances of the grooms looking down at him.

With a swing and clatter of hoofs we were off. Our kindly Moslem nobleman always sent, for his visitors. And we, who helped to govern India, might, if need were, borrow a carriage, or an elephant or two, or a horse. But there must be no presents, save only fruit or flowers; no handfuls of sapphires, no tinsel slippers filled with gold mohurs and left under sofa-cushions, as in the large days of old.

Meanwhile Gilber Sahib was gladdening the lady’s heart with the gossip which she so frankly enjoyed.

‘ His late Highness, ah, madame! ’ he said, with pretty French gestures and smiles, ‘his late Highness “was galant homme et homme galant! He shared the tastes of Solomon, — il avait les goûts de Salomon, sans avoir sa sagesse! The good Prophet Mahomet, chère madame, recognizing the irresistible sweetness of the ladies, permitted his followers to take four charmers in lawful vedlock.’

Mem-Sahib declared that she could sympathize perfectly with that, and could not see why it should not be extended to husbands, so that one might have one for each mood.

Gilber Sahib shook a reproving finger.

‘His late Highness,’ he resumed, ‘obeyed the ordinance of the Prophet; in his zeal, he even exceeded it — by some dozens. There was a lovely princess from the Vale of Kashmir, with long, languishing eyes; there were other Indian brides; there was a wildly enthusiastic Englishwoman, whom His Highness gathered in from a small hotel in a London suburb, and who, when overwrought, enforced her conjugal persuasions with a riding-whip or a pistol; two of her daughters are growing up in the harem now; and there was an Abyssinian girl — ’

Here came into the memory of the Assistant Sahib a fragment of that most haunting of all lyrics: —

‘—A dark, lithe, smiling beauty,’ went on Gilber Sahib, ‘who danced her way into his late Highness’s not unsociable heart. And do you know, madame,’ Gilber Sahib here became very mysterious, ‘her son turned out to be the wisest of them all; and when the old Nawab died, full of years and progeny, the British Government chose him to succeed, and inducted him into all the glories of the Nizamat.'

Mem-Sahib perked up. She forgot how hot it is in India in July. Her lips framed a question. Gilber Sahib mysteriously nodded, and pressed his finger to his lips.

‘On le dit, au moins, madame!’

He went on to say, still with little shrugs and smiles, that there was fierce Oriental jealousy between the brothers. The son of the Kashmiri princess — a charmingly handsome gentleman whom we knew very well — held that he, and not the child of the Abyssinian beauty, should have been heir to the Nawabs, and so lay ever in wait for the incumbent, seeking, in default of beer, which is forbidden to pious Mussulmans, to put poison in his sherbet; knowing which, the elect brother tasted no food but what his own faithful cooks had not only prepared, but had also tasted themselves.

All of which I recount, not to approve the habit of gossip, but to characterize Gilber Sahib.

While we were thus pulling august persons to pieces, our dashing equipage had whirled us past the barracks once tenanted by the fatal regiment among whom flamed up the Mutiny of 1857, ever since void of military occupants; past the club, now quite deserted, in a meadow rank with ’thiefthorn ’ grass, which fastens itself abominably in one’s socks and trouser-legs, —the club where Gilber Sahib and the Assistant Magistrate each afternoon of the rains played melancholy billiards, sipping weak beverages flavored with quinine and gin; past the Chota Lal Dighi, which is the lesser Scarlet Tank, with its mirrored date-palms and pearlbedewed gossamers; past the Maidan, where we held the races in February, whereat one of our official ladies flirted emphatically with the new Assistant Police Sahib, who was a very pretty youth, and sang ‘The Long IndianDay’ with entrancing pathos; and so on, to a cross-road near a pond bedecked with blue and red water-lilies, where, amid shadowy Indian trees, stood the barred house of a Raja, who, being out of favor with the world, one day incontinently hanged himself, and who still flitted there, a disconsolate wraith.

I have a posthumous grudge against that Raja. I cannot for the life of me see why a love-lorn Raja of Ind should not be at liberty, if so minded, to hang himself and have a ghost. Yet I never drove past that lugubrious abode but I had to hear the tale of the up-hanging Ra ja, — the narrator truculently counting on a horror I did not feel. If the Raja had a mind to hang himself, why, then, be hanged to him, and there’s an end.

But perhaps that is only the effect of Indian heat upon the nerves.

We sped along the wide road, rosered and set in Indian greenery, with plumed date-palms on either side, or fan-palms stark as bottle-brushes; the air hot as a palm-house, quivering with the hum and whirr of myriad locusts, and sweet with the scent of yellowblossomed babul bushes.

Then other memories were evoked. Our swift course brought us to the outskirts of Kassim Bazar, where two centuries ago Dutch, French, and English factors vied for Bengal silks; where, in a sad, unkempt cemetery, rest, if rest they can so far from home, the wife and child of Warren Hastings, who was Resident here in Clive’s day. Of the once vast city, nought remains but crumbling ruins smothered in Indian jungle. So swift is change in the changeless East.

There still remained the good Nawab Bahadur’s stables, where we reined up amid a patter of dusky grooms; and a second pair of fine ‘ Walers,’ as we of Anglo-India call the big-boned st eeds from New South Wales, took the place of the first, foam-lathered from their eighteen-mile rattle through the heat. The change was made nervous, at least for the horses, by the trumpetings of elephants; for His Highness’s two score and ten huge pachyderms were anchored, like enormous gray boulders, in a mango-grove by the wayside, where they cheerfully munched heaps of roots and bales of hay, trumpeting hilariously, with the sound of paying out chain-cable from an iron ship; whereat the horses grew hysterical, gibing under the hand of our masterful Punjabi.

On our journey’s briefer second stage, we saw a pretty bit of Indian color. The red road was framed with the gold-ribbed plumesof young cocoanut palms, with a backing of feathery bamboo thickets, and rich Bengal greenery. To us, round a corner of the road, entered a group of brown Bengalis, three women and two men, like draped bronze statues. Each woman carried, poised on her head, and steadied by a st atuesque right arm, a broad, deep basket, heaped up, as it seemed, with golden almonds brilliantly yellow against the green.

Mem-Sahib cried out with delight.

‘Something in my line, madame!’ said Gilber Sahib.

‘Mais, comme c’est joli!’ exclaimed the lady.

Gilber Sahib raised his white helmet with a gallant little bow, as though the compliment were personal to him. Then he made amends, explaining that the women were carrying baskets of silk cocoons to the filature. We called on Gilber Sahib once, in his big white barrack, and found him seated amid cables of coiled gold, like a Modernist genie of the Arabian Nights.

Meanwhile, we had completed our journey and reached Murshidabad. Visible city there was none, so wreathed were all things in gardens and trees. We did, it is true, pass through one brief line of shops, where, in little open booths under thatched screens, were piled brass water-pots, or strange-hued fruit and vegetables, or big red earthen jars, or bales of Madras muslin and Kashmiri cloth. The grooms hopped to the ground, and ran ahead through the sparse crowd of Bengalis, shouting ‘Kabardàr!’ which meant, from its practical effect, ‘Make way for your betters!’ and little brown naked kiddies scurried away before them. A gray cat, just escaping, was caught up by a pathetic old woman with a mahogany face framed in white hair, who hugged it lovingly and made fiendish grimaces at the too headlong grooms.

‘She loved her hired, and her bired loved her!’ pensively murmured Gilber Sahib, half thinking in Bengali, as we whirled round the corner to the guard-house of the Palace.

A dozen little soldiers, who, barefoot and beltless, were luxuriating in a smoke, dropped their hookahs suddenly as we swung into sight, and shuffled into belts and slippers to salute us. I knew those little soldiers well. We had an interview every pay-day. Then, passing a wide, barren lawn, we drew up under the high porte-cochere, our journey’s end.

Big and magnificent in its way, the home of the Nawabs of Murshidabad, but not with the Eastern splendor of the Rajput palaces. Here was rather the Italian Renaissance in red stucco: a long, five-storied pile with Corinthian columns. Mem-Sahib said it reminded her of St. Petersburg, which is, indeed, equally outlandish. The palace was built for the Nawabs by the British Raj, in a day of less instructed taste.

The Nawab’s secretary received us, like a Persian god, in a lower hall decked with tiger skins and Afghan weapons. There were also little Italian goddesses of white marble, which drew the eye of Gilber Sahib. They were comfortably clad for the Indian heat. The Persian god convoyed us up the stair to the state apartments, where His Highness the Nawab Bahadur of Murshidabad was waiting to receive us.

Very graciously he did it, with the perfect manners of an Oriental; cordially too, for we had met a good many times before, and had made friends. His Highness, on this occasion, was dressed in white, with a purple fez, a thimble-shaped cap with an aigrette of heron feathers.

The big punkah flopped and flagged between the columns, as we sat and talked. Mem-Sahib, who was born in the Caucasus amid Georgian and Circassian dignitaries, and so had a happy way with Oriental princes, took us all aback by suddenly asking the good gray prince how many brothers he had. His Highness looked at her with a queer little smile, half tolerant, half amused, and began, with great show of seriousness, to count them on his fingers, first of the right hand, then of the left; after going once or twice round, he halted, started again, then stopped and said, —

‘I am afraid I must ask my secretary ! ’

The Persian god replied, with dignity, —

‘Your Highness had a hundred and nineteen brothers!’

Mem-Sahib, no whit abashed, then asked this good Oriental nobleman concerning his sisters.

He smiled very charmingly, saying,—

’I am afraid I do not know; we never counted them!’

Which reminds one of those Biblical reckonings, ‘besides women and children!’

Perhaps apprehending further piercing inquiries, the good prince rose, and, slightly stooping, led us to an ornate portrait of his father, the parent of this so numerous progeny: a magnificent and kingly Oriental, with eye like an eagle, and dight with gold lace and many decorations. A right fierce spirit, one would say, this Moslem squire of dames; far more warlike than his quiet, gray-haired successor, whose slight figure, all in white, stood in marked contrast to the great warrior.

We sat down beneath the portrait, and, as always at this season, under a flapping punkah, and the conversation turned, I know not by what gradations, to religion.

The Nawab, a Shiah by faith, and therefore inclined to toleration, declared that he was imbued with the idea that all religions at heart are one.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘there are deep differences. It seems to me,’ he went on, with the gentle seriousness so characteristic of him, ‘that Christianity has been the better religion for women; my own has been better for men. What an ideal of manliness the Prophet’s faith holds up; think of the Osman li Turks or the Arab Sheiks, or our own Moguls: all devotedly religious. A virile faith. But the religion of Jesus has always been wonderfully tender to women and children, and I think to-day your churches are built on the hearts of women; but your leading men, in politics or science or literature, seem to me to be estranged from Christianity. It does not hold their intellects as it holds the hearts of the women. But of course I speak as a stranger,’ he added, with the shy smile that was so winning, ‘and really know very little of these things. For my own part,’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I think that Buddhism attracts me more than any other religion. There is such a spirit of gentle charity through all Buddhist history; no religious wars. I have been reading Edwin Arnold’s book, and it appeals to me; he who sows wheat reaps wheat; who sows sesame reaps sesame. The understanding of that should reconcile every one to his place and lot. And then, most of all, it holds out such a beautiful ideal of final peace; perfect ceasing from all sorrows, freedom from the last remnant and memory of ourselves, in Nirvana, where the Silence reigns!’ And the good prince became silent, with a far-away look in his eyes, as of one who was infinitely weary of the burden of being, and full of immeasurable longing for the Beyond.

‘ Buddhism is the true Oriental religion,’ he went on; ‘we, who are genuine Orientals, have in our blood the feeling of the great Nirvana, the brooding stillness and peace. You Westerns are frightened at it, and long for strife. We long for rest.’

Gilber Sahib sat with a slight smile of gentlest irony. One suspected him of being a Voltairean at heart, full of skepticism concerning these high matters. But, with a Frenchman’s pretty politeness, he said nothing, contenting himself with that little ironical smile.

Then, to amuse us, His Highness very cordially offered to take us and show us his Treasury, and led the way along corridors under a magnificent painting by Vandyke, the present of some Anglo-Indian ruler, to a small chamber, whose door was heavily barred with steel. There he showed us all kinds of wonderful and costly things in gold and silver, gleanings from Aladdin palaces, which filled the heart of Mem-Sahib with joy. Particularly entrancing to her were the good prince’s personal adornments, kept here for safety: aigrettes of table diamonds and rubies; a set of emerald buttons, each as large as one’s finger-nail, and a full score in number; and, final glory, three huge table emeralds, each as large as Mem-Sahib’s visiting card, which the good prince wore as beltbuckles— one at a time, of course.

One could see Mem-Sahib warming up to the point where she must inevitably ask more questions. His gentle Highness, who, I think, was secretly not a little diverted by the vivacious lady, and who showed her many marks of kindly friendship, caught the coming question in her eyes, smiled a little smile of amusement, and anticipated inquiry by telling us a tale of the brave days of old: —

‘The Grand Mogul lay a-dying in his palace at Delhi,’ he began, looking back in thought to those wild, tumultuous days, ‘and the great viceroys were gathered round him: the Nawab of Oudh, the Prince of Kashmir, and the Nawab of Bengal. His Majesty took a long time dying, much longer than they had expected; and the three great viceroys found the time hanging somewhat heavily on their hands. So they diced awhile, and then, growing weary of this also, they went to look at the Grand Mogul’s Treasury. From looking, they came to longing; and the upshot of it all was, that they determined to anticipate the possible testamentary dispositions of the Mogul Emperor, and divide his treasure then and there. Kashmir got the sapphires,’ he said, with a quaintly humorous smile, ‘Oudh got the diamonds; and, as for the emeralds, why, here they are!’

Gilber Sahib had been bon enfant too long, and now had a reaction. He yielded to the temptation to make light mischief.

‘Ah, those were the good times, before the English came!’ he said; ‘do you not wish they were back again?’

There was a touch of personal feeling in this, too; for had not Gilber Sahib’s own people held great empire once, as rivals of the English, and even fought in the Nawab’s army at Plassey against the indomitable-hearted Clive? — fought, and been defeated, though Clive was outnumbered twenty to one. The good Nawab smiled.

‘You must remember,’ he said, ‘that my ancestors were very good friends of the English, even before Plassey. We pulled together with Clive, and Clive helped us into power, when SurajudDaulah fell by the weight of his own evil stupidity. We have always been very good friends.’

Here the Assistant Magistrate ventured to ask a question, which might, perhaps, have been indiscreet: —

What, in the good Nawab’s view, was the chief difference brought in by English rule?

The Nawab reflected. One could see reminiscence and half-stifled regret chase each other in his kindly brown eyes. Then at last he spoke: —

‘For the poorest people, and that means the vast majority in India, the change has been greatest. And I think the greatest change of all has been this, that, under English rule, every peasant knows exactly what he must pay in taxes. That, it has always seemed to me, is the weakest part of our Mussulman systems; it is always just the same thing, whether in Macedonia, or in Egypt, or here in Bengal. The imperial government farms out the collection of the revenue, and the tax-farmers mercilessly oppress the people with their extortions. You can hardly realize what a horrible mountain of suffering and misery may grow from that one thing; a far greater total, it seems to me, than even the violence of pillage and war. That came seldom, but the hawks and vultures were always there, and no man knew what he must pay, or what he could keep. That seems to me the greatest boon; yet our peasants are poor, miserably poor.’ He was silent, his face clouded over and touched with pain, and his lips again murmured, ‘miserably poor!’

Here seems to me the touch of tragedy in this gentle prince’s life: that he sees so much misery, which makes so strong an appeal to his heart, and yet, with all his titles and decorations, has so little power to counteract it, save by ample doles of charity, which, from certain reasons, I knew him constant ly to make. There might well have been some wider field of work for his good, gentle heart. I imagined him thinking, though he did not say it, —

‘ You have done most for the poorest and most wretched; but, for the rest of us, you weigh somewhat heavily on our souls! ’

But that may be a fancy. His Highness rose, with something of a sigh, and invited Mem-Sahib to pay a visit to his ‘mothers,’ as he said, in his courtly way, and also to one splendid grandmother, a very queen of the ancient world. Mem-Sahib told us wonderful stories of that visit, and of the strange Haroun Al Raschid regions through which she was led, and of the marvels she saw and heard; all of which the Assistant Magistrate may some day record.

The quiet hours sped; the good Nawab nourished us; the time came for our return.

Once more we found ourselves in the high-swung carriage, with the masterful Punjabi in command. Evening was descending upon us; the gray mantle of clouds had rolled away, and there were transparent spaces of pure light, gradually growing dim and spiritual. Crickets began their whirring refrain, in the grass, from the stems and branches of trees, till the whole world throbbed with their pulsations.

The air was drowsy, the wind soft as a zephyr of paradise, gently swaying the dark, ferny arms of the palm-trees shadowed against the dying glow of the sky.

Then, as we sped swiftly on, came darkness; and, with darkness, the stars, — great, colored jewels, standing forth, as it seemed, from the purple curtain of night; the benign air, and darkness, and the crickets’ song.