Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 12

The modern history of Lucknow began in January 1775, when the young prince Asaf ud-Daula succeeded his father, Shuja ud-Daula, as the nawab of Awadh. Shuja had been a true warrior-king, the grandson of a noble Persian soldier who had worked his way up the Mughal ranks to claim control of the province. Shuja’s reign had not been easy. All around him the Mughal Empire lay in disarray, racked by Afghan, Maratha, and now British incursions. As a vassal of the Mughal emperor, Shuja ud-Daula was expected to fight for Delhi; and fight he often did, leading an army he had built up with support from European advisers and technicians, Antoine Polier among them. At the same time, Shuja confronted the steady encroachment of his greedy and aggressive eastern neighbor, the East India Company in Bengal. In a showdown at Buxar, in Bihar, in 1764, Shuja ud-Daula, together with armies of the emperor and the nawab of Bengal, was defeated by the Company—a critical sign of the limits of Mughal power.

Pressed between empires, Mughal and British, Awadh needed a strongman and a strategist like Shuja at its head. Asaf ud-Daula was neither. Fat and dissolute, the prince seemed barely to have stirred from the banquet table when he was called to the throne. Asaf’s first move as nawab was away from politics, which he disliked, and away from his mother, whom he despised. He summoned his chief steward, Murtaza Khan, promoted him to the highest offices in the state, and left him free to run the government. Asaf then paid off his father’s retainers, packed up the old court at Faizabad, and moved west, to the small provincial town of Lucknow. There he settled into an abandoned old palace, far from his manipulative mother and the tiresome affairs of state.

It was hardly an auspicious beginning. In one fell swoop, Asaf had managed to antagonize his rich and powerful mother, Bahu Begum, alienate most of Awadh’s nobility, turn the administration on its head, and shatter the autonomy so carefully cultivated by his father. The East India Company, quick to take advantage of the weak new ruler, “speedily initiated” the nawab “into their modus operandi.”¹² Just months after coming to the throne, Asaf ud-Daula signed a devastating treaty that forced him to cede territory to the Company—and with it, some half of his revenue—and to pay a higher subsidy for Company troops. He was also asked to expel from Awadh all Europeans “unauthorized” by the Company, notably his father’s continental military advisers—further indication of the Company’s growing anxiety about the presence of non-British Europeans in India.¹³ Trends that would continue throughout Asaf’s twenty-two-year reign were established in its very first months. For the next two decades, his province would be split by bitter feuds between his mother’s faction in Faizabad and the Lucknow court. It would be paralyzed by Company pressure on its borders, treasuries, and policies. And it would be ruled by a nawab who didn’t much want to govern.

But Asaf ud-Daula’s move to Lucknow signaled change for the better in one substantial way. He may not have cared about administration, but he adored the arts, and had plenty of money to indulge in them. And though as a ruler he was weighed down by Company demands, responsibilities to the emperor, and his father’s legacies, Asaf ud-Daula enjoyed complete control, for once, over cultural matters. By establishing a new capital for himself, he could look to the great Mughal emperor Akbar as a model. As a young ruler, Akbar had abandoned Delhi, the capital of his ancestors, in favor of Agra and the new city of Fatehpur Sikri, where he assembled the very finest talents in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and letters. What Akbar had done for Fatehpur Sikri, Asaf now set out to do for Lucknow. With a stupendous program of monumental building, patronage, and court entertainments on a scale so lavish they put Orientalist fantasies to shame, Asaf ud-Daula transformed Lucknow into the new cultural capital of North India.

And it was a melting pot. Asaf ud-Daula was a Persian Shiite, ruling largely Hindu and Sunni Muslim subjects, and welcoming a fat payroll of Europeans into his service. Drawing on his Persian inheritance, he sponsored Shiite religious scholarship and festivals, and erected Lucknow’s most important shrine, the Bara Imambara. He also actively patronized the arts and letters of Mughal India. Finally, and perhaps most visibly, he cultivated ties with Europeans that influenced everything from the food on his table to the design of his many palaces. The result was a city so vibrant and various that descriptions of it erupt with adjectives. Overripe, sophisticated, seedy, magnificent, voluptuous, glittering, wicked, melancholic, battered, cosmopolitan, faded, dynamic, bittersweet: Lucknow was all these things and more; a “curious and splendid city,” in the later words of the British administrator Sir Henry Lawrence, where the sublime and the ridiculous folded into one.¹⁴ Lucknow, in a word, was an experience. And you either loved it or hated it.

To the many Europeans and Indians who hated Lucknow, the city was debauched, corrupt, and extravagant. One needed only to look at Asaf ud-Daula for proof. The obese nawab, coiled and quivering with fat, positively oozed debauchery. As one French officer put it, disgusted by the “monstrously fat” young man, “one would never imagine in Europe that depravity could be taken so far…[I]n no country of the world and in no history would one find examples of turpitude equal to those which this man daily presents to his court and capital.”¹⁵ Asaf’s marriage, it was said, had never been consummated. He moved from wine to hashish to opium; from women to boys and back again (said some; others insisted he was impotent); from chickens fed on musk and saffron to gleaming pilaus where each grain of rice was dyed a different jewel tone.¹⁶ He may merely have been conventionally self-indulgent, rather than criminally voluptuous. (And a fitting contemporary for Britain’s famously gluttonous Prince of Wales, the future George IV, another disempowered royal and patron of the arts.) But to those on the lookout for signs of Awadh’s decline and fall, encountering the debauched nawab was omen enough.

“There must be much that is ‘rotten in the state,’ whose chief city, the residence of the sovereign, presents such an appearance,” declared one British visitor.¹⁷ You could see signs of corruption just by walking down the street: poor people shoved into swilling gutters while persons of privilege lumbered past on caparisoned elephants. The court was rife with nepotism; royal favorites fed on state offices like vampire bats. “There was no low or lowminded class, barbers, green-grocers, butchers, mule-vendors, elephantdrivers, sweepers, and tanners,” hissed another critic, the embittered Awadh nobleman Muhammad Faiz Bakhsh, “but some of them rose to opulence and rode proudly through the market-places in fringed palankeens, on elephants with silver litters, or on state horses.”¹⁸ Still worse, as far as the British were concerned, was the worry that this corruption could be catching. It infected them, too. Even Warren Hastings—who was impeached in part for his extortions in Awadh—was appalled: “Lucknow was the sink of Iniquity…It was the school of Rapacity…What will you think of Men receiving the Wages of Service from the Nabob, and disclaiming his Right to Command it; and what of a City filled with as many independent and absolute Sovereignties as there are Englishmen in it?”¹⁹ Thus European and Asian voices joined in deploring the corrupt capital, where British civil servants were “orientalized” and the Indian ruling classes shamelessly aped the West.

In short, Lucknow seemed to be awash in extravagance and excess. The fact that half of Asaf ud-Daula’s revenue was sucked up in payments to the East India Company only made his profligacy look worse. He spent money everywhere: on his eight hundred elephants (in days when a decent elephant cost £500) and his thousand horses (”kept merely to look at,” as he was too fat to ride them); on his hunts, gargantuan processions a thousand animals long, weighed down with everything from his mistresses to ice blocks for his drinking water. He spent money on his wardrobe, banquets, dances, and cockfights. He spent money on his army—of servants, that is, to trim his mustache, snuff out his candles, and feed his pigeons.²⁰ He spent money on his art collection—so much, some estimated, as to rival all his other expenses combined. And he spent money on his city. The nawab’s “building mania,” ranted another Awadh notable, Abu Talib Khan, cost the state coffers some £100,000 per year. To make matters worse, hundreds of poor townspeople would be evicted every time a palace went up; and yet the nawab generally abandoned his new palaces after spending just a few days in them. Even noblemen suffered in a display-obsessed court culture that forced them, “on the principle of ‘like master, like man,’” into a bankrupting contest of conspicuous consumption.²¹

Debauched, corrupt, extravagant, to contemporary critics Lucknow seemed to be “the true image of despotism,” a city of sin of almost biblical proportions.²² And yet alongside this image, there gleamed a picture of the city equally vivid, if strikingly different. As ardently as some abhorred Lucknow, others adored it. Their beloved city was a place of perfumed orange groves and cool marble palaces, eloquent conversation, and exquisite banquets accompanied by the thrum of sitars. Their Lucknow was refined, dynamic, and generous.

To achieve perfect refinement in all things seemed to be the city’s collective ambition. Even ordinary pastimes were raised to the level of high art. Sporting pigeons, trained and flown in flocks of up to nine hundred, were carefully plucked and then painstakingly “re-feathered” with multicolored plumes. Kites were fashioned into human form and lit up inside with lanterns, to ghostly effect.²³ Animal fighting, another favorite hobby, reached such a “pitch of perfection”—according to Lucknow’s greatest rhapsodist, the late nineteenth-century writer Abdul Halim Sharar—that meek, spindle-legged stags were set against one another, just so spectators could admire how elegantly they fought. It was claimed that in Lucknow even everyday Urdu speech had been raised to its highest degree of perfection. “The masses and uneducated people” were said to “speak better Urdu than many poets…of other places,” and outsiders were too intimidated to open their mouths. In the celebrated salons of Lucknow’s noblewomen and courtesans, conversation flowed with such grace “it seemed as though ‘flowers were dropping from their lips.’”²⁴

Lucknow was buzzingly dynamic. In a self-conscious effort to echo the lost glory of Akbar’s India, Asaf ud-Daula patronized writers, musicians, artists, craftsmen, and scholars on an imperial scale. Leading Urdu poets such as Mir Taqi Mir fled the crumbling Mughal capital and came to Lucknow instead, where they developed a distinctive style and school of poetry.²⁵ Modern Urdu prose literature originated in Lucknow, and Persian, the language of status and learning, flourished. As a seat of Shiite scholarship, Lucknow rivaled the religious centers of Iran and eastern Iraq.²⁶ It also attracted European artists: the well-known London painters Johan Zoffany and Ozias Humphry each spent several years there, drawn by the promise of lucrative commissions from the nawab. Across the arts, a “Lucknow style” emerged—a style defined by hybridity. Urdu writers blended different traditions so seamlessly that it was often impossible to tell whether they were native Persian or Hindustani speakers, Muslim or Hindu.²⁷ European artists influenced local painters. Lucknow’s architecture—much of it designed by the nawab’s European employees—fused European and Indian elements.²⁸

Refined and dynamic, Lucknow was also marked by the nawab’s tremendous generosity. Maybe generosity is just profligacy by another name. Still, even Asaf ud-Daula’s harshest critics conceded that there was some virtue in his most extravagant building project, the Bara Imambara. This shrine to the imams Hassan and Hussein was Asaf’s most important architectural legacy (and, incidentally, his only building not influenced by European models). It was a massive undertaking: one Englishman (albeit one given to rash estimates) put the cost at a million pounds.²⁹ But it was also a massive piece of public welfare. Started during the crippling famine of 1783-1784, the project employed perhaps as many as forty thousand people, and paid them with food.³⁰ It was even said that the nawab had pieces of the structure torn down every night, in order to prolong the undertaking. Apocryphal though this story may be, it was just one of the many tales of Asaf ud-Daula’s generosity to work its way into poetry and folklore. According to the poet Mir Taqi Mir, “the great Asaf “ was “renowned…for his generosity and benevolence.”³¹ “All his natural faults were effaced under the cover of his generosity,” wrote Abdul Halim Sharar. “In the opinion of the public he appeared not as a dissolute ruler, but as a selfless and saintly guardian.”³² More than a hundred years after Asaf’s death, Lucknow shopkeepers were still remembering his generosity every morning, opening their stores with the couplet: “If one does not get from God, he receives from Asaf ud-Daula.”³³

Debauched, corrupt, and extravagant? Or refined, dynamic, and generous? Which was the real Lucknow? Indeed, the leading historian of the city asks, “Given the weight of all these foreign elements, can the ’real’ Lucknow be said to have existed at all?”³⁴ Yes. It lay in the combination of all of them at once. Whether one loved it or hated it, the defining fact was inescapable: Lucknow was the most cosmopolitan city in India. Not only was its population diverse; diversity was a way of life. Hindus and Muslims shared state positions, celebrated each other’s holidays, borrowed from each other’s literary and artistic traditions. Europeans caroused and hunted with the nawab, and talked, traded, and intermarried with his subjects. For people of all backgrounds—and from social margins everywhere—Lucknow held out the promise of reinvention in its cosmopolitan embrace.

This mixed society is captured in glorious Technicolor by Johan Zoffany’s Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, painted between 1784 and 1786 for Warren Hastings, and later copied for Asaf ud-Daula. Bustling, populous, energetic, the composition was an unusual one for Zoffany, who had made his name in Britain as a painter of elegant conversation pieces and staged theatrical scenes. Indeed if anything, its microscopic detail and flat perspective lend it the feel of a Mughal miniature—a style Zoffany certainly knew and just might have been echoing.

At first glance, the painting plainly seems to illustrate a world of luxury, lassitude, pleasure, and indulgence.³⁵ This is an image, above all, of the exotic: of Europeans “going native” and of decadent Asians, of lush temptations and shameless self-indulgence. But it is easy to forget, looking at the picture today, just how familiar it all would have been to the people who appear in it (most of whom are identifiable historical figures). They were not merely playing at being exotic. Around the time this was painted, in fact, Colonel Mordaunt’s cockfights—to say nothing of banquets, festivals, weddings, and many other occasions where Europeans and Asians came together—were practically weekly events. Of course artistic license is at work here, and the scene is not without violence, or divisions, or barriers. Nevertheless, the painting exposes the genuinely multicultural possibilities of Lucknow. Who you were, with whom you associated, and how you wanted to live were not either-or choices. You could bridge the boundaries.³⁶

And many of the people shown in the painting did. Antoine Polier is not in attendance, but his best friend, Claude Martin, is, sitting on the sofa in his East India Company uniform. A Frenchman and, like Polier, an outsider to the Company hierarchy, Martin was Lucknow’s premier self-made man, transforming himself there into a British country gentleman and connoisseur. Or consider the two central figures. Mordaunt, standing tall in virginal white underclothes, was the bastard son of the Earl of Peterborough, and traveled to India to get away from social stigma at home. Asaf ud-Daula, for his part, was impotent and heirless, as well as politically disempowered, and thus especially concerned with finding posterity by alternate means, such as cultural patronage. It is a crude joke—this cock match between the illegitimate and the impotent—but also an astute comment on two men who both came to Lucknow to escape the social margins. As, in his own way, had Zoffany. Austrian by birth and British by adoption, he arrived in Lucknow to find fortune after losing the support of his patroness, Queen Charlotte. Snubbed by British royals, he showed himself, at the top of the painting, sheltered by a green umbrella: a traditional Indian emblem of royalty.

Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match is a splendid snapshot of a working world at play. But perhaps the fullest picture of Asaf’s Lucknow in its heyday emerges, instead, from the scrawled sepia entries in a young Englishwoman’s diary. Beginning on January 1, 1787, and continuing into October 1789, the diary of Elizabeth Plowden is a rare and wonderful document: a young mother’s unpublished account of living, traveling, and rearing children in Calcutta and Lucknow. Elizabeth Plowden had first stayed in Lucknow as a new bride in the late 1770s, when her husband, Richard Chicheley Plowden, was serving alongside Mordaunt in Asaf ud-Daula’s bodyguard. In 1781, the Plowdens moved to Calcutta, leaving Lucknow, like many Europeans, with an outstanding debt from the nawab. Richard waited in vain to be paid. And money was tight. With seven children born in almost as many years, the Plowdens barely had enough money to send the eldest back to Britain for school, let alone to return themselves (in the style they would want to, that is). Elizabeth even had to ask her mother “to be an Economist,” “to buy nothing for the House,” and to stay with friends until their fortunes revived.³⁷ In late 1787, the Plowdens went back to Lucknow with their two youngest children—baby William, just a few months old, and toddler Trevor Chicheley—in a last-ditch effort to get their £3,000 from the nawab. They stayed on for a year.

“Miss Brown and myself with the Gentlemen went to Col Mordaunts Cockfight,” Elizabeth scribbled in her diary on June 15, 1788. “The Nabob [was] there, we dined with him at a little after 9. He did not keep the fast of Remyan [Ramadan] but eat [sic] very heartily,” she noted, and “ask’d me a great many questions about my little ones and said William could not be flesh and blood, he was certainly form’d of Wax and Cotton.” Attending blood sports, feasting on curries, chatting with kings, and nursing an infant in between: it was not how most Englishwomen spent an evening. But to read Elizabeth’s Lucknow diary is to discover just how ordinary such seemingly extraordinary cultural mixtures were. All the pillars of Lucknow society were her old friends—Asaf ud-Daula, Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and many others—and she was quickly swept up into a whirl of social engagements, across the lines of East and West. Often she brought her children with her, always a sure way of winning Indian hospitality. Asaf ud-Daula doted on them and gave them toys; the emperor’s son, visiting Lucknow, “helped little Chichely to tea asked his name and took a great deal of notice of him.” Zoffany, for his part, “declared he would like to paint them both without any regard he was so taken with them.”³⁸

In Calcutta, Elizabeth Plowden’s social life had revolved around the city’s Western-style entertainments: plays, masquerades, balls, carriage rides. In Lucknow, she walked into a quite different world. There were days she passed in the company of European friends around town, or in her friends’ country houses nearby. On others, she breakfasted or dined with the nawab and his courtiers. She might steal a few hours between engagements to study Persian or Hindustani with her munshi (teacher). But her greatest passion was for Indian music. Whenever Elizabeth heard appealing Persian or Hindustani airs, she made sure to get copies of them for her substantial collection of sheet music—a process that in itself involved cross-cultural communication on several levels. At the nawab’s one morning,

the Entertainment as usual Notching [dancing] I desired them to sing the song of ’Jo Shamshere Serey Allum Decktey.’ His Excellency told us the Poetry of this song was his own composition. As I had not a correct copy I sent Mirza Golam Hossein to request permission of sending my Monshy to the Nawab’s Ostand [ustaad] for a Copy. The Nawab said he would repeat the words to the Mirza who would write them down if I pleas’d.³⁹

She also learned to sing many Hindustani songs, and entertained her Indian and European friends by performing them, often to the accompaniment of a harpsichord given to her by ClaudeMartin. All told, it was a glorious and relaxing year: of nibbling on “Grapes Pomegranates Oranges dates Pistachio Nuts and other dry fruits” while watching elephant fights and fireworks in the nawab’s perfumed gardens; of seeing a palace at night, lit up for Muharram “with Glass LustresWreathes of Silver and Gold flowers and colour’d Lamps,” as black-clad mourners chanted in memory of the martyred imams; of spending afternoons with friends, sifting through Indian miniatures and the latest prints from Britain, or quiet evenings at home, with a nautch (dance performance) after dinner.⁴⁰

Obviously there were limits to how deeply Elizabeth ever could—or would want to—immerse herself in Indian society. But in a small and remarkable way, she was invited into it. In June 1788, Asaf ud-Daula presented her with a unique testament to their friendship: a Mughal sanad (deed of grant) awarding her the title of begum (queen or noblewoman).

We have conferred upon Sophia Elizabeth Plowden, who is specially gifted with exceptional devotedness, and rare fidelity, high titles and honourable address: She is the ’Bilkis’ of her age and the Begam among the nobility and the aristocracy, with high distinction and exalted fame among her peers and contemporaries.⁴¹

European men’s receiving Mughal titles, generally in recognition of military service, was not unheard of, but the granting of such a distinction to a European woman—particularly when her husband was not especially highplaced—was unusual to say the least. It is hard to know what prompted it, but the text remains an intriguing artifact of a city shaped by cultural crossing.

Richard Plowden was also fortunate: he got his money. (Unlike many. Poor Ozias Humphry spent years hounding the nawab for his money, and pestering friends in Britain to help him, to no avail.)⁴² In late 1788, the Plowdens left Lucknow for good, and returned to Britain in 1790, where they set themselves up in style in London’s Devonshire Place. They left warm memories behind. “I never passed More happy day in my Life but when you was in Lucknow,” Claude Martin wrote to Elizabeth in his broken English, eight years after their last meeting:

Those happy days, I never Can forget, your Company Enlivened the place tho there was many other family in the place, your lively and amiable Manner attracted Every body to your home, Your house was My Magnet. I never visited so much, as I did to you, we have had many Good Lady here, but none that I wisited with so real pleasure as I did you.⁴³

Nor did the Plowdens forget India. Little William and Trevor, along with all their brothers, went on to have careers in India; and there would be Plowdens in India for generations to come.

A shimmering cosmopolis beyond the frontier, Lucknow offered Europeans and Asians alike terrific chances to make money and spend it, to cross cultural lines, and to become self-made in all senses of the word. They were living out the Lucknow dream—of fame, fortune, and self-fashioning. Even for Elizabeth Plowden, the middle-class wife of a middle-ranking Company soldier, Lucknow was a site of reinvention: she arrived as Mrs. Richard Plowden, and she left a begum, formally ennobled by order of the Mughal emperor. She also left with her music collection, thickened with offerings from European and Indian friends. A full participant in Lucknow’s cosmopolitan high society, Elizabeth Plowden straddled cultural lines to a degree she had not, or could not, in Calcutta. For her male friends in Lucknow, such possibilities were greater still. And for three in particular—Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and the nawab himself—the Lucknow dream became real in the most extravagant, unexpected of ways. It is to them, to further tales of collecting and cultural crossing, that the story now turns.