I

On 7 November 1801, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, two figures were discreetly admitted to the gardens of Government House in Madras.

Outside, amid clouds of dust, squadrons of red-coated sepoys tramped along the hot, broad military road which led from the coast towards the cantonments at St Thomas’s Mount. Waiting in the shade of the gates, shoals of hawkers circled around the crowds of petitioners and groups of onlookers who always collect in such places in India, besieging them with trays full of rice cakes and bananas, sweetmeats, oranges and paan.

Inside the gates, beyond the sentries, lay another world: seventy-five acres of green tropical parkland shaded by banana palms and tall tamarind trees, flamboya, gulmohar and scented Raat-ki-Rani, the Queen of the Night. Here there was no dust, no crowds and no noise but for birdsong—the inevitable chatter of mynahs and the occasional long, querulous, woody call of the koel—and the distant suck and crash of the breakers on the beach half a mile away.

The two figures were led through the Government Gardens towards the white classical garden house that the new Governor of Madras, Lord Clive, was in the process of rebuilding and enlarging. Here one of the two men was made to wait, while the other was led to a patch of shade in the parkland, where three chairs had been arranged around a table. Before long, Lord Clive himself appeared, attended by his Private Secretary, Mark Wilks. It was a measure of the sensitivity of the gathering that, unusually for a period where nothing could be done without a great retinue of servants, all three men were unaccompanied. As Clive administered an oath, Wilks began to jot down a detailed record of the proceedings which still survives in the India Office Library:

The Rt. Hon. the Lord Clive having required the presence of Lieut. Col Bowser at the Government Garden for the purpose of being examined on a subject of a secret and important nature, and having directed Captain M Wilks to attend his Lordship for the purpose of taking down the minutes of the examination, addressed Lieut. Col Bowser in the following manner:

The object of the inquiry which I am about to institute involves considerations of great importance to the national interest and character. I am therefore instructed by His Excellency the most Noble Governor General to impress this sentiment on your mind and to desire that you prepare yourself to give such information on the subject as you possess with that accuracy which is becoming [to] the solemnity of the occasion … ¹

The oath taken, Clive proceeded to explain to Bowser why he and his colleague, Major Orr, had been summoned four hundred and fifty miles from their regiments in Hyderabad to Madras, and why it was important that no one in Hyderabad should know the real reason for their journey. Clive needed to know the truth about the East India Company’s Resident at the court of Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick. For two years now rumours had been in circulation, rumours which two previous inquiries—more informal, and far less searching—had failed to quash.

Some of the stories circulating about Kirkpatrick, though perhaps enough to raise an eyebrow or two in Calcutta, were harmless enough. It was said that he had given up wearing English clothes for all but the most formal occasions, and now habitually swanned around the British Residency in what one surprised visitor had described as ‘a Musselman’s dress of the finest texture’. Another noted that Kirkpatrick had hennaed his hands in the manner of a Mughal nobleman, and wore Indian ‘mustachios … though in most other respects he is like an Englishman’.²

These eccentricities were, in themselves, hardly a matter for alarm. The British in India—particularly those at some distance from the main presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay—had long adapted themselves to Mughal dress and customs, and although this had lately become a little unfashionable it was hardly something which on its own could affect a man’s career. It was certainly not enough to give rise to a major inquiry. But other charges against Kirkpatrick were of a much more serious nature.

Firstly, there were consistent reports that Kirkpatrick had, as Clive put it, ‘connected himself with a female’ of one of Hyderabad’s leading noble families. The girl in question was never named in the official inquiry report, but was said to be no more than fourteen years old at the time. Moreover she was a Sayyeda, a descendant of the Prophet, and thus, like all her clan, kept in the very strictest purdah. Sayyeds—especially Indian Sayyeds—were particularly sensitive about the purity of their race and the chastity of their women. Not only were they strictly endogamous—in other words they could never marry except with other Sayyeds—in many cases Sayyed girls would refuse even to mix with pregnant women from outside, lest the unborn child in the stranger’s womb were to turn out to be male and thus unwittingly contaminate their purity.³ Despite these powerful taboos, and the precautions of her clan, the girl had somehow managed to become pregnant by Kirkpatrick and was recently said to have given birth to his child.

Early reports in scurrilous Hyderabadi newsletters had claimed that Kirkpatrick had raped the girl, who was called Khair un-Nissa, then murdered a brother who had tried to stand in his way. There seemed to be a consensus that these accounts were malicious and inaccurate, but what was certain—and much more alarming for the Company—was that news of the pregnancy had leaked out and had caused widespread unrest in Hyderabad. Worse still, the girl’s grandfather was said to have ‘expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and had declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city)’.⁴ There he promised to raise the Muslims of the Deccan against the British, thus imperilling the British hold on southern and central India at that most sensitive period when a Napoleonic army was still at large in Egypt and feared to be contemplating an audacious attack on the British possessions of the subcontinent.

Finally, and perhaps most shockingly for the authorities in Bengal, some said that Kirkpatrick had actually, formally, married the girl, which meant embracing Islam, and had become a practising Shi’a Muslim. These rumours about Kirkpatrick’s alleged new religious affiliation, combined with his undisguised sympathy for, and delight in, the Hyderabadi culture of his bride, had led some of his colleagues to wonder whether his political loyalties could still be depended on at all. More than a year earlier, the young Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had written to his elder brother Richard, the Governor General in Calcutta, expressing exactly this concern. As Commander in the neighbouring state of Mysore, Colonel Wellesley had heard reliable reports that Kirkpatrick now seemed to be so solidly ‘under the influence’ of the Hyderabadis that ‘it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam’s court than those of his own government’—that Kirkpatrick might, in other words, have ‘gone over’ to the other side, to have become, to some extent, a double-agent.⁵

The question of how to respond to these allegations was one that the Governor General, Lord Wellesley,^d had agonised over for some time. There were several complicating factors. Firstly, despite all the stories in circulation, Kirkpatrick had an exceptional record in the East India Company’s Political [diplomatic] Service. Without a drop of blood being shed, he had succeeded in expelling the last serious French force from southern India and had successfully negotiated an important treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad. This had, for the first time, brought the Nizam’s vast dominions firmly into alliance with the British, so tipping the delicate balance of power in India firmly in Britain’s favour. For this work Wellesley had, only a few months earlier, recommended Kirkpatrick to London for a baronetcy.

But this was not the only complication. Kirkpatrick’s elder brother William was one of the Governor General’s closest advisers in Calcutta, indeed was credited by Wellesley himself as being one of the principal architects of his policy. While Wellesley was determined to find out the truth about the younger Kirkpatrick, he wished to do so, if possible, without alienating the elder. Finally, he knew it was going to be difficult openly to investigate any of these sensitive stories without causing a major scandal, and possibly inflicting considerable damage on British interests not only in Hyderabad, but all over India. Yet the rumours were clearly too serious and too widespread to ignore.

For all these reasons, Wellesley decided to fall back on the strategy of holding a secret inquiry in Madras, and there to solicit the sworn testimony of the two most senior British soldiers in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr, both of whom had come into close contact with Kirkpatrick, without either of them being close enough friends for their veracity to be compromised.

It was not a perfect solution, especially as Wellesley did not much admire the new Governor of Madras, Edward, Lord Clive. He was son of the more famous Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey forty-four years earlier had begun the East India Company’s astonishing transformation from a trading company of often dubious solvency to a major imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than those of the country which gave it birth. After their first meeting, Wellesley wrote that Clive was ‘a worthy, zealous, obedient & gentlemanlike man of excellent temper; but neither of talents, knowledge, habits of business, or firmness equal to his present situation. How the devil did he get here?’⁶ Yet Wellesley realised it would be impossible to conduct an inquiry in Calcutta without involving Kirkpatrick’s brother, and that there was little option but to delegate the job to Clive.

Moreover, as the future of Britain’s relationship with the largest independent Muslim state in India now hinged at least partly on the exact details of Kirkpatrick’s relationship with the girl in question, it would clearly be necessary during the course of the inquest to ask a series of the most intimate and searching questions.

The whole business, Wellesley concluded, would no doubt prove horribly embarrassing for all concerned, and be much better sorted out by Clive in Madras. So, on 30 September 1801, Wellesley formally wrote to Lord Clive telling him to prepare a secret inquiry into Kirkpatrick’s conduct, while simultaneously sending orders to Hyderabad for Bowser and Orr to be discreetly, and promptly, despatched to the coast.

Over the course of the following few days Orr and Bowser answered, under oath, a series of questions of such intimate and explicit nature that the finished report must certainly be one of the most sexually revealing public documents to have survived from the East India Company’s India: to read it is to feel a slightly uneasy sensation akin to opening Kirkpatrick’s bedroom windows and peering in.

The two witnesses, whose bright soldierly blushes are clearly visible through the formal lines of Captain Wilks’s perfect copperplate handwriting, were asked how Kirkpatrick had come to meet and have an affair with a teenage Muslim noblewoman who was kept in strict purdah, especially when she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it Kirkpatrick or the girl who had taken the initiative: who seduced whom? When did they first sleep together? How often? When did it become a matter of public record? How did the story get out? What was the reaction in Hyderabad? The way the document is written—exactly like a modern trial report or Parliamentary Inquiry—heightens this sense of immediacy and familiarity:

Question: Do you understand that the young lady was seduced by the Resident, or do you rather believe that he became the dupe of the interested machinations of the females of her family?

Answer: I cannot state to which of these suppositions the public opinion most inclines. It is said that the lady fell in love with the Resident, and that the free access very unusual in Mohammedan families which had been allowed to him by the females of that family may appear to confirm the opinion of design on their part.

Question: What is the date of the first supposed intercourse between the Resident and the young lady?

Answer: I first heard it whispered about the beginning of the year. Every day afterwards it became more publicly spoken of and universally believed until the period of the complaint.

Parts of the story that unfolds through the pages of the examination are so strikingly modern that it is sometimes hard to believe it was written two hundred years ago. There is much talk of the embarrassing pregnancy, the family’s desperate attempts to procure an abortion, Kirkpatrick’s last-minute intervention to stop the termination, and the girl’s mother’s heartfelt cry that if only the sectarian religious divisions which had plagued the whole affair did not exist, this man could have had her daughter ‘in the same manner that he might have had her before the distinctions introduced by Musa [Moses], Isa [Jesus] and Mohamed were known to the world’. There is also Kirkpatrick’s unembarrassedly romantic declaration (relayed by Bowser) that ‘whatever might be the ultimate result of these investigations, he was determined never to desert the lady or her offspring’. The remoteness of history evaporates: these are immediately recognisable and familiar human situations.

But, equally, reading through the report there are other moments when the sensation of familiarity dissolves and it is as if we are back in some semi-mythical world of Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights: we read of discreet interviews taking place through bamboo harem screens, of hunting expeditions where cheetahs are let slip at grazing gazelles, of spies following palanquins through the bazaars, and of a threat by the girl’s grandfather ‘to turn fakeer’—become a wandering ascetic—as the only recourse to save the family honour.

Above all, one is also confronted with the unexpected sight of a senior British official who was believed, not least by his Hyderabadi in-laws, to be a practising Muslim, who routinely wore Indian clothes and who—even before this liaison—clearly kept his own harem at the back of his house, complete with Mughal maidservants, aseels (wetnurses), midwives and harem guards. It is all a very surprising world to find in such close and intimate association with official British India. It is certainly unfamiliar to anyone who accepts at face value the usual rigid caricature of the Englishman in India, presented over and over again in films and cheap TV dramas, of the Imperialist Incarnate: the narrow-minded, ramrod-backed sahib in a sola topee and bristling moustache, dressing for dinner despite the heat, while raising a disdainful nose at both the people and the culture of India.

Yet the more one probes in the records of the period, the more one realises that there were in fact a great many Europeans at this period who responded to India in a way that perhaps surprises and appeals to us today, by crossing over from one culture to the other, and wholeheartedly embracing the great diversity of late Mughal India.

Beneath the familiar story of European conquest and rule in India, and the imposition of European ways in the heart of Asia, there always lay a far more intriguing and still largely unwritten story: the Indian conquest of the European imagination. At all times up to the nineteenth century, but perhaps especially during the period 1770 to 1830, there was wholesale interracial sexual exploration and surprisingly widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity: what Salman Rushdie—talking of modern multiculturalism—has called ‘chutnification’. Virtually all Englishmen in India at this period Indianised themselves to some extent. Those who went further and converted to Islam or Hinduism, or made really dramatic journeys across cultures, were certainly always a minority; but they were probably nothing like as small a minority as we have been accustomed to expect.

Throughout, one has a feeling that people are being confronted by an entirely new type of problem as two very different worlds collide and come into intimate contact for the first time. There are no precedents and no scripts: reading the letters, diaries and reports of the period, it is as if the participants are improvising their way through problems, prejudices, tensions and emotions that people have simply never experienced in this way before.

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed. The Great Mughals, as one historian memorably observed, arrived in India from central Asia in the sixteenth century as ‘ruddy men in boots’; they left it four centuries later ‘pale persons in petticoats’.⁷ Until the 1830s, there was every sign that India would have as dramatic a transforming effect on the Europeans who followed the Mughals. Like all the foreigners before them, it seemed that they too would be effortlessly absorbed.

This ‘crossing over’ was a process that dated from the very beginning of the European presence in India. The Portuguese were the first to make the transition. After the conquest of Goa in 1510-some sixteen years before the arrival of the Mughals in north India—the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque made a point of ordering his men to marry the widows of the Muslim defenders they had massacred during the taking of the city. Albuquerque himself presided at the weddings of these ‘fair Mooresses of pleasing appearance’⁸ and provided them with dowries. The fair Mooresses were then forcibly converted to Christianity, and after baptism, many were made to receive the rudiments of the Catholic faith. But this crude attempt at force-feeding unadulterated Portuguese culture to India proved as short-lived, and as unsuccessful, as previous attempts to impose unadulterated Turkish, Sassanian Persian or Greek culture had been during the preceding centuries.

Over the course of the next fifty years, the women, the environment and the sheer distance of Goa from Europe all worked on the new arrivals, so that gradually, generation by generation, the conquistadors began abandoning the ways of Portugal and taking on instead the customs of India. Already, by the time the Portuguese Inquisition arrived in India in 1560, Goa much more closely resembled the Mughal capitals of Delhi and Agra than it did Lisbon or any city in Portugal. As one shocked Jesuit reported back to Rome, ‘the Inquisition is more necessary in these parts than anywhere else, since all the Christians here live together with the Muslims, the Jews and the Hindus and this causes laxness of conscience in persons residing therein. Only with the curb of the Inquisition will they live a good life.’

By 1560, the Portuguese grandees of Goa dressed ostentatiously in silks, shielding themselves with umbrellas, never leaving their houses except accompanied by vast retinues of slaves and servants. Travellers reported how the Goan aristocracy kept harems and that even the Christian women wore Indian clothes inside the house and lived as if in purdah, ‘little seene abroad’.⁹ If they had to go out, they did so veiled or in modestly covered palanquins.

Their menfolk chewed betel nut, ate rice (but only with their right hand) and drank arrack; they rubbed themselves with ‘sweet sanders’,¹⁰ and their hospital doctors prescribed the old Hindu panacea of cow’s urine three times a day to their patients ‘in order to recover their colour, one glass in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening’.¹¹ They drank water from the pot in the Indian fashion ‘and touch it not with their mouths, but the water running from the spout falleth into their mouthes, never spilling a drop … and when any man commeth newly from Portingall, and then beginneth to drink after this manner, because he is not used to this kinde of drinking, he spilleth it in his bosome, wherein they take great pleasure and laugh at him, calling him Reynol, which is a name given in jest to such as newlie come from Portingall’.¹²

Even the ecclesiastical establishment showed signs of taking on the ways of its Indian environment: from 1585 a bizarre edict was issued commanding that only Indo-Portuguese with Brahminical (Hindu priestly) blood would be accepted in the colony’s seminaries to train for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church: ‘all this they have learned and received from the Indian heathens,’ wrote a surprised Dutch traveller, Jan van Linschoten, ‘which have had these customs of long time.’¹³

By 1642, the governor of the Dutch East India Company Anthony van Diemen could report that ‘most of the Portuguese in India look upon this region as their fatherland, and think no more about Portugal. They drive little or no trade thither, but content themselves with port to port trade as if they were natives and had no other country.’¹⁴ His compatriot, van Linschoten, came to the same conclusion: ‘The posteritie of the Portingales, both men and women, doe seeme to be naturall Indians, both in colour and in fashion.’¹⁵

These early descriptions of Indo-Portuguese culture set the tone for what was to come over the next three hundred years, in a wide range of encounters between different Indian peoples and various colonial intruders. It is clear from the start that what was happening was not so much a wholesale substitution of one culture for another, so much as a complex process of fusion. Indo-Portuguese society was neither purely Portuguese nor wholly Indian, but a hybrid mixture of the two: a European template adapted to the climate and social mores of India, or, from the opposite perspective, an Indian environment tinct with European institutions, Indo-Portuguese architecture and an amalgam of increasingly Indianised European cultural importations. The Portuguese in India, and their Indo-Portuguese descendants, did not leave one culture to inhabit another so much as live in both at the same time, accommodating in their outlook and lifestyles rival ways of living in and looking at the world.

To the Dominican fathers of the Goan Inquisition, of course, this process of acculturation was always unacceptable. Any signs that Hindu customs were being followed in a Christian house were enough to get the entire family and their servants arrested and put to torture. A list was drawn up by the Inquisition of banned Indian practices, which can now act for the social historian as a useful index of the different ways in which the Portuguese picked up the habits, tastes and superstitions of their Indian neighbours.

Included in this list are such shockingly heretical practices as ‘cooking rice without salt as the Hindus are accustomed to do’, wearing a dhoti (loincloth) or choli (short, often transparent Indian bodice), and refusing to eat pork. Even certain trees, plants and vegetables were proscribed. It was forbidden, for example, to grow a Tulsi plant, considered by many Hindus to be a talisman against the Evil Eye.^e

Perhaps partly because of the Inquisition, a surprisingly large number of Portuguese made the decision to emigrate from Portuguese territory and seek their fortunes at different Indian courts, usually as gunners or cavalrymen. Again this was a process whose origins dated from the very beginning of the Portuguese presence in India: in 1498, on his famous first journey to India, Vasco da Gama found that there were already some Italian mercenaries in the employ of the various rajahs on the Malabar coast; and before he turned his prow homewards two of his own crew had left him to join the Italians in the service of a Malabar rajah for higher wages.¹⁶ Sixty years later, by 1565, according to the Portuguese chronicler Barros, there were at least two thousand Portuguese fighting in the armies of different Indian princes. By the early seventeenth century, another Portuguese writer thought the number must have reached at least five thousand.¹⁷

The men who ‘went over’ were often from the very margins of Portuguese society. They were attracted by the remarkable religious freedom of India, and also by the better prospects, and higher and more regular pay. Others were no doubt lured from Portuguese service by the delights of a society in which slavery, concubinage and polygamy were widespread and entirely accepted, and where they could emulate the curious figure some British sailors encountered at the beginning of the seventeenth century living it up on the Moluccas ‘with as many women as he pleaseth … he will sing and dance all day long, near hand naked … and will be drunk two days together’.¹⁸ By contrast, conditions of service in the Goan army were very harsh, especially during the monsoon rains, when inactive soldiers, unhoused and often unpaid, could be seen wandering the red earth roads of Goa ‘seeking alms’.¹⁹

Whatever the reason, many thousands of Europeans took service in Indian courts all over the subcontinent. Nor was it just the Portuguese. At the height of the Mughal Empire, so many Europeans took service in the Mughal army that a special suburb was built for them outside Delhi called Firingi Pura (Foreigners’ Town). The inhabitants of Firingi Pura included renegade Portuguese, Englishmen and French, many of whom chose to convert to Islam, and who formed a distinct Firingi (or Foreigners’) regiment under a Frenchman titled Farrashish Khan.²⁰

The Mughals had no monopoly on these renegades: their rivals, the four great Deccani Muslim sultanates that controlled much of southern and central India, were also keen to make use of their services. Attached to the Adil Shahi court of Bijapur, for example, there was Gonçalo Vaz Coutinho, formerly a powerful landowner in Goa, who was imprisoned on a murder charge before escaping to Bijapur where he converted to Islam. Here he was given ‘lands with great revenues, where he remained as a perfect Moor, with his wife and children’.²¹

It was also often to these sultanates of the Deccan that English renegades tended to make their way when, a century later, large numbers of Englishmen first started arriving in India. An eyewitness account of one of the earliest defections was written by the early English trader Nicholas Withington. His account gives a clear picture of the number of independent Europeans on the loose in India at the beginning of the seventeenth century, all of them intent on making their fortunes and quite prepared, if necessary, to change and change again their clothes, their political allegiance and their religion. It also shows the dangers that were inherent in undergoing circumcision—the biggest single obstacle for many potential converts to Islam. ‘There came likewise unto us one that had formerlye rune awaye from our shippes to the Portungales, and agayne from them to us,’ wrote Withington.

In this way passing through the Decannes countrye, he was perswaded by another Englishmen (that was turned Moore and lived there) to turne Moore; which hee did and was circumsized, the Kinge allowinge him 7s 6d per daye and his diett at the Kinge’s own table; but within eighte dayes after his cirumsizion he dyed.

Likewise another of our companie, [a trumpeter] called Robert Trullye … went to [the] Decanne to the King thereof, carryinge along with him a Germayne for his interpritor that understoode the language; and coming there, offred bothe to turne Moores, which was kyndlye accepted by the Kinge. So Trullye was circumsized, and had a newe name given to him and a great allowance given to him by the King, with whom he continued. But they cominge to cutt the Germayne, founde that hee had ben formerly circumcised (as he was once in Persia) but thought nowe to have deceaved the Deccannes, whoe, fyndinge him allreddy a Moore, would not give him entertaynment; soe hee retorned to Agra and gott himselfe into the service of a Frenchman, and is turned Chrystian againe, going usually to Mass with his master … So there is with the King of the Decanne fower Englishemen which are turned Moores, and divers Portungales allsoe. ²²

From the margins of their own society, these early European renegades became important mediators between the world of Europe and the world of India. They also demonstrated the remarkable porousness and fluidity of the frontier which separated the two. From the mid-sixteenth century, with the advent of wholesale defections from Portuguese Goa, followed a century later by a new wave of renegades from the British East India Company bridgehead at Surat in Gujerat, the borderlands of colonial India had taken up the role they would continue to occupy over the next three hundred years: as spaces where categories of identity, ideas of national loyalty and relations of power were often flexible, and where the possibilities for self-transformation were, at least potentially, limitless.

Contrary to the Imperial mythology propagated by the Victorians, the British were initially no more immune than any other nation to the social forces that transformed the Portuguese in India. Indeed it was one of the distinguishing marks of the ragtag assortment of Englishmen who first ventured into the Mughal Empire during the seventeenth century that they excelled in accommodating themselves to what must at first have appeared to them a profoundly foreign society.

Unlike the Portuguese, who usually came out to Goa with the intention of settling in India for good, the English did in general envisage returning home at the end of their postings, and this profoundly affected the way they looked at the country in which they lived.^f Nevertheless, the success of the East India Company in its formative years depended as much on contacts across the lines of race and religion as it did on any commercial acumen, and to varying extents the traders, soldiers, diplomats and even the clergymen who ventured eastwards had little choice but to embrace Mughal India. Nor should this tendency surprise us: from the wider perspective of world history, what is much odder and much more inexplicable is the tendency of the late-nineteenth-century British to travel to, and rule over, nearly a quarter of the globe, and yet remain resolutely untouched by virtually all the cultures with which they came into contact.

There was, however, nothing very new in this crossing of cultures. English merchants trading in the Middle East had been mixing with Muslims and converting to Islam for centuries.^g Much of the initial contact between Britain and the wider Islamic world took place against a background of seventeenth-century naval skirmishes, where Muslim technological superiority at sea led to the capture and sinking of large numbers of British vessels. Between 1609 and 1616 it was reported that 466 English ships were attacked by Ottoman or Barbary galleys, and their crews led away in chains. By May 1626 there were more than five thousand British captives in the city of Algiers and a further 1500 in Sali, and frantic arrangements were being made in London to redeem them ‘lest they follow the example of others and turn Turk’.

By the 1620s the Turkish naval presence was no longer confined to the Mediterranean, and had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles: in August 1625, ‘The Turks took out from the Church of “Munnigesca” in Mounts’ Bay [Cornwall] about 60 men, women and children, and carried them away captives.’²³ What was more worrying still were reports that some of these raids were being led by Englishmen who had converted to Islam and ‘turned Turk’: for example, in September 1645 seven ships ‘from Barbary’ landed in Cornwall and their crews were led inland ‘by some renegade of this country’.²⁴

It was reports that very large numbers of British captives were converting to Islam that really rattled the Stuart authorities. Worse still, while some of these conversions were forced, many were clearly not, and British travellers of the period regularly brought back tales of their compatriots who had ‘donned the turban’ and were now prospering in the Islamic world: one of the most powerful Ottoman eunuchs during the late sixteenth century, Hasan Aga, was the former Samson Rowlie from Great Yarmouth,²⁵ while in Algeria the ‘Moorish Kings Executioner’ turned out to be a former butcher from Exeter called ‘Absalom’ (Abd-es-Salaam). ²⁶ Equally, a dragoman^h encountered by some English travellers first in Constantinople, then later in Aden, was described as ‘a Turk, but a Cornishman born’.²⁷ There was also the Ottoman general known as ‘Ingliz Mustapha’: in fact a Scottish Campbell who had embraced Islam and joined the Janissaries.²⁸ⁱ

The English Ambassador to the Ottoman court, Sir Thomas Shirley, purported to have little time for these renegades, describing them as ‘roagues, & the skumme of people, whyche being villaines and aethiests are fledde to the Turke for succour & releyffe’. But his reaction is undoubtedly as much a reflection of English anxiety and insecurity at this period as it is of any incipient Imperial arrogance. Certainly those who ‘turned Turk’ seemed to include a fairly wide cross-section of British society, including arms dealers and money counterfeiters, sea captains and soldiers of fortune as well as a ‘trumpeter’, ‘divers English gentlemen’ working as pirates out of the North African Barbary Coast, and a lone Englishwoman who became one of the wives of the Dey of Algiers.²⁹

As Shirley pointed out in one of his despatches, the more time Englishmen spent in the East, the closer they moved to adopting the manners of the Muslims: ‘Conuersation with infidelles doeth mutch corrupte, ’ he wrote. ‘Many wylde youthes of all nationes, as well Englishe as others … in euerye 3 yeere that they staye in Turkye they loose one article of theyre faythe.’³⁰ Islam overcame the English more by its sophistication and power of attraction than by the sword: in 1606 even the English Consul in Egypt, Benjamin Bishop, converted and promptly disappeared from public records.^31j

It was thus very much with the weary expectation that large numbers of English traders were bound to be tempted to swap religions and cultures, and to desert the Company in order to join Mughal service, that the first British treaty with the Mughal Empire was drawn up in 1616. Its author, the Jacobean ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, was quite clear about the potential danger posed to the Company by the defection of renegades, and insisted as point eight of the treaty that all ‘English fugitives were to be delivered up to the factory’.^k The Mughal Prince Khurram—later Shah Jehan—disputed this article—‘a stand was made against the surrender of any Englishman who might turn Moor’—but Roe stood firm, realising from his experience of the Ottoman Middle East the crucial importance of the provision. In the end, according to the report sent back to England, the vital ‘point was yielded to the ambassador’s insistence’. ³²

The great Mughal port of Surat on the coast of Gujerat was the focus for the first contacts between British traders and the peoples of the Mughal Empire. Here the British ‘factors’ as they called themselves, inhabited a building that combined elements of both an Oxbridge college and a Mughal caravanserai. On one hand, the day started with prayers and ended at a communal meal presided over by both the President and the Chaplain, whose job it was to monitor the behaviour of the factors, ensure regular attendance at chapel and prevent un-Christian behaviour. On the other hand, this cosy English collegiate scene took place within a ‘Moor’s building’, and after dinner the factors could wash and unwind in a ‘hummum’³³ (Turkish bath). In the absence of European goods, the factors quickly adapted themselves to the material culture of India, and very soon such specifically Indian luxuries as ‘a betle box, two pigdanes [from the Hindi pikdan, a spittoon], and a rosewater bottle’ begin to turn up in the inventories of the factories.³⁴

The best descriptions of the daily life of the Surat factory are contained in travel accounts, for although the official correspondence of the factors is almost entirely extant,^l most of the letters are concerned with the minutiae of trade and touch only very obliquely on the way the factors are actually living their daily lives. Yet occasionally there are hints as to the degree to which the factors are adapting themselves to the world outside their walls.

One such slip occurs in 1630 when President William Methwold admits that the factors have almost completely given up using the Western drugs that the Company was in the habit of sending out to Surat, preferring to take the advice of local Mughal doctors: ‘The utility of the drugs is not to be doubted,’ writes Methwold, ‘but being farr fecht and longe kept, applied by an unskilful hand, without the consideration of the temprature of a mans body by the alteration of climats, they peradventure have small or contrary effects.’ Rather sheepishly he then admits: ‘wee for our parts doe hold that in things indifferent it is safest for an Englishman to Indianize, and, so conforming himselfe in some measure to the diett of the country, the ordinarie phisick of the country will bee the best cure when any sicknesse shall overtake him’.³⁵

Only when an articulate traveller turns up is it suddenly possible to colour in the hard commercial outlines revealed in these carefully phrased public letters. John Albert de Mandelslo, the Ambassador of the Duke of Holstein, visited the English factory at around the same time as President Methwold was writing his medical letter to London. His account reveals that despite the attempts of the factors to portray their establishment as a sort of sober, pious outpost of Trinity College, Cambridge, washed up on the shores of Gujerat, the life of the factors was in fact much more lively than anyone was prepared to let on to London. The factors may have kept to the rule that they should remain unmarried—indeed there is only one reference in the earliest years to a factor formally marrying an Indian girl, and that caused a major scandal ^m—but this did not stop them dressing in Indian clothes and being serenaded of an evening by troupes of Mughal dancing girls and courtesans. North of Surat, the British had rented a ‘lodge’ attached to a garden tomb, or as Mandelslo puts it, ‘a mausoleum of a person of quality of the country’. One evening during Mandelslo’s visit, the factors drove out, and after first taking ‘two or three turns about the garden’ they—presumably well out of sight of their Chaplain—laid on

the greatest entertainment imaginable, and to come to the height of that country’s endearments, they sent for some Benjan women, who were very desirious to see my cloaths, which I still wore after the Germane fashion, though the English and Dutch who are settled in the Indies go ordinarily according to the mode of the country, and would have obliged me to put them off; but perceiving I was unwilling to do it, and withal that I made some difficulty to accept of the profers they made me to strip themselves naked, and to doe anything that I would expect from persons of their sex and profession, they seem’d to be very much troubled, and so went away.³⁶

The further the factors went from the English base in Surat, the more they found themselves adapting to Indian ways. At the end of the seventeenth century Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, adopted the Bengali lungi and married a Hindu girl whom he allegedly saved from the funeral pyre of her first husband. The story is told in one of the first English travel books about India, Alexander Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies:

Mr Channock choosing the Ground of the Colony, where it now is, reigned more absolute than a Rajah … The country about being over-spread with Paganism, the Custom of Wives burning with their deceased Husbands is also practiced here. Mr Channock went one Time with his ordinary guard of Soldiers, to see a young widow act that tragical Catastrophe, but he was so smitten with the Widow’s Beauty, that he sent his guards to take her by Force from her Executioners, and conducted her to his own Lodgings. They lived lovingly many Years, and had several children. At length she died, after he had settled in Calcutta, but instead of converting her to Christianity, she made him a Proselyte to Paganism, and the only Part of Christianity that was remarkable in him, was burying her decently, and he built a Tomb over her, where all his Life after her Death, he kept the anniversary Day of her Death by sacrificing a Cock on her Tomb, after the Pagan Manner.³⁷

It was in the Mughal capital of Agra, however, that the factors found themselves most profoundly challenged both by the might and prosperity of the Mughal Empire, and by the seductive elegance of Mughal civilisation at its zenith. According to one of them, ‘heere in the heart of the city we live after this country in manner of meat, drink and apparel … for the most part after the custom of this place, sitting on the ground, at our meat or discourse. The rooms are in general covered with carpets and with great, high round cushions to lean on.’³⁸ One of the very first English envoys, William Hawkins, even accepted a wife offered to him by the Emperor and ‘in his howse used altogether the customes of the Moores or Mahometans, both in his meate and drinke and other customes, and would seeme to bee discontent if all men did not the like … he was very fickle in his resolucion, as alsoe of his religion’.³⁹

It was not long before one of these factors made a formal conversion. On 5 April 1649, Francis Breton, the East India Company’s most senior official in Asia, took up his quill and began to write a letter to the Directors back home. He had some bad news to break: ‘And heere we wish to our penn might bee sylent,’ he wrote, ‘but to our griefe it must imparte unto you a sad story, itt tending not only to the losse of a man, but the dishonour of our nation, and (which is incomparably worse) of our Christian profession; occasioned in Agra by ye damned apostacy of one of your servants, Josua Blackwelle.’

Breton went on to describe how after prayers one Sunday, Blackwell had ‘privately conveighed himselfe to the Governor of ye citty, who, being prepaired, with the Qazi [judge or senior lawyer] and others attended his comeing; before whome hee most wickedly and desperately renounced his Christian faith and professed himself a Moore, was immediately circumcised, and is irrecoverably lost’.ⁿ

Blackwell was only twenty-three, the son of ‘the King’s Grocer’ at the Court of St James. He had left home at the age of seventeen and early on had been sent to oversee the East India Company’s trading post at the Mughal court. It was an important appointment, for this was the apex of India’s Mughal golden age, and from Agra the Emperor Shah Jehan ruled an empire that covered most of India, all of Pakistan and great chunks of Afghanistan; across the river from the small English community, the great white dome of the Taj Mahal was already rising from its plinth above the River Jumna. Blackwell was ambitious, and he knew that the wealth of the Mughal Emperor surpassed that of any prince in Europe; moreover the sheer size, sophistication and beauty of the Mughal capital at this point could not but profoundly challenge any notions Blackwell may ever have entertained of the superiority of Christendom. The pain of circumcision, he reckoned, was a small price to pay for gaining access to such a bountiful fount of patronage.⁴⁰ The letters sent after Blackwell by his colleagues are explicit about his motives, namely: ‘idle hopes of worldly preferments’ and ‘the vaine suggestions of the Devill’ which led him to hope for rapid enrichment.⁴¹ As far as the other factors were concerned, it was ambition, not religious conviction, that led Blackwell to cross.

Blackwell was soon joined by many more British renegades, most of whom headed into the service of the Deccani sultanates. In 1654, twenty-three East India Company servants deserted Surat in a single mass break-out. Others soon followed, having first run amok in Surat in the manner of many later groups of English hooligans on a night out abroad: ‘Their private whorings, drunkenesse and such like ryotts … breaking open whorehouses and rackehowses [i.e. arrack bars] have hardened the hearts of the inhabitants against our very names,’ wrote a weary William Methwold. Little wonder that the British were soon being reviled in the streets ‘with the names of Ban-chude^o and Betty-chude^p which my modest language will not interprett’.⁴²

As with the Portuguese before them, the willingness of so many Britons to defect to the Mughals was partly a reflection of the disgusting conditions in which the British kept their ordinary soldiers and sailors, many of whom had not chosen to come to India of their own volition in the first place. The correspondence of the Madras Council is often full of complaints that the recruits the Company was sending out to India were the lowest detritus of British society: ‘It is not uncommon to have them out of Newgate [prison], as several have confessed,’ reads one letter, ‘those however we can keep pretty much in order. But of late we have had some from Bedlam.’⁴³

Men like this, often from the furthest geographical and social margins of British society, had little reason to feel any particular loyalty to the flag of a trading company owned by rich London merchants, and to such people the prospects offered by Mughal service often proved irresistible. In the 1670s the British were disturbed to discover that the Mughals had set up an active network of covert recruiting agents in Bombay, and by the 1680s such was their success that Charles II of England found it necessary to call home from India ‘all Englishmen in indigenous service there’.⁴⁴ Few heeded his words. By the end of the century desertion had become a critical problem for the Company as more and more Britons fled into Indian service, sometimes to the Mughal court, but increasingly, like the trumpeter Robert Trullye, to the rich and tolerant sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda which between them still controlled much of southern and central India.

This Deccani context is significant, for the great city states of the Deccan—like those of their contemporaries in Renaissance Italy—were always more eclectic and open to outsiders than even the cosmopolitan Imperial Mughal court in Agra. Relations between Hindus and Muslims had always been easier in the Deccan than in the more polarised north, and it had long been a Deccani tradition that the Hindu kings of Vijayanagar should make the gesture of dressing in public in Islamic court costume,⁴⁵ while every Muslim sultan in the region made a point of employing a Hindu Chief Minister.^q

Into this ethnic and religious confusion was thrown a fantastic influx not just of Portuguese and other European mercenaries, but also galleys full of Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived at the Deccani ports direct from Persia, the Yemen and Egypt. These Middle Eastern immigrants turned the Deccan into the greatest centre of Arabic learning and literary composition outside the Levant, and brought with them a taste for the tilework of the Ottomans and the architectural innovations of Persia and Transoxiana.

This hybridity is immediately apparent in Deccani paintings. Typical is a miniature painted by Rahim Deccani around 1670.⁴⁶ On one side a prince is shown seated in profile wearing Deccani court dress; on the other are two female attendants, one playing a vina, the other looking on, bare-bellied, her dark nipples visible through the light covering of a diaphanous silk choli. So far no surprises: it is a conventional seventeenth-century Indian garden scene, an arcadia of cultivated indulgence. But placed in the centre of the picture is a fourth courtesan, wearing gorgeous silk knickerbockers and the plumed, wide-brimmed hat and tumbling locks of a Jacobean dandy; at her feet is an Indian rendering of a King Charles spaniel. She serves her prince wine in a European glass.

A miniature where the world of Shah Jehan’s harem comes into collision with the wardrobe of Guy Fawkes indicates the astonishingly eclectic tone of the Deccani courts, and helps explain why so many Europeans found themselves so easily absorbed into the ethnically composite élites of the region. Here former Portuguese artillerymen might find themselves in court beside Persian poets and calligraphers, turbaned Afghan warlords, reformed Shirazi sailors, ex-camel cavalrymen from the Hadramaut, renegade French jewellers and, not least, a smattering of newly ennobled English trumpeters.

The courts of the Deccan retained this ability to seduce and assimilate outsiders. One hundred and fifty years after Robert Trullye was circumcised at the court of Golconda, James Achilles Kirkpatrick submitted to the same operation in the court of the dynasty which succeeded the Qutb Shahis: the Asaf Jahi Nizams of Hyderabad.

It was the long campaign of conquest against the Deccan sultanates, begun in 1636 by Shah Jehan and completed half a century later by Aurangzeb in 1687, that fatally overstretched the Mughal Empire, initiating its gradual 150-year-long decline. This in turn created a vast vacuum of power at the heart of India—a vacuum that some among the British were determined to fill.

In the course of the eighteenth century, as British power steadily increased, and that of the Mughals gradually declined, the incentives to cross cultures for financial betterment steadily diminished; as a result open conversions to Islam seem to have become correspondingly less common. But in India at least, as the East India Company slowly transformed itself from a mercantile organisation into a colonial government, discreet conversions did continue, albeit for rather different motives: by the late eighteenth century conversion was usually a precondition for marriage to any well-born Muslim lady.⁴⁷

There were also a significant number of forced conversions. Between 1780 and 1784, following the disastrous British defeat by Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur, seven thousand British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.^r Of these over three hundred were circumcised and given Muslim names and clothes.⁴⁸ Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear ghagra cholis and entertain the court as dancing girls.⁴⁹ At the end of ten years’ captivity, one of these prisoners, James Scurry, found that he had forgotten how to sit in a chair or use a knife and fork; his English was ‘broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom’, his skin had darkened to the ‘swarthy complexion of Negroes’, and he found he actively disliked wearing European clothes.⁵⁰ This was the ultimate colonial nightmare, and in its most unpalatable form: the captive preferring the ways of his captors, the coloniser colonised.

Nevertheless, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, around the time that James Kirkpatrick first arrived in India, British power was growing steadily, and with it the attitudes of the British in India were beginning to change too. With their new confidence and growing power, the British cities of the coast were becoming more and more un-Indian: every year new English theatres and libraries were being built alongside churches modelled on St Martin-in-the-Fields. English newspapers were opened, English card games were played and English balls and masquerades were thrown. The Freemasons opened a Lodge, the Old Etonians started an annual cricket match, and by 1774 there was even a Calcutta Hunt Club.⁵¹ It was not an immediate or complete change, and throughout the eighteenth century elements of the old intercultural hybridity continued. Indian dress, for example, remained popular in private and in informal public situations, as a form of casual ‘undress’ (as it was then called). Until the 1770s it was not unknown even for members of the Council in Calcutta to wear it for meetings; apart from anything else it was, of course, much better suited to the climate.^s

The ease with which so many Company servants continued to take on Indian ways is in part a reflection of the receptive age at which so many of them arrived in India: according to the statutes of the East India Company no one was allowed to join after the age of sixteen, so that any official who had reached the age of thirty had usually spent at least half his life in India. As the disapproving British missionary the Rev. Claudius Buchanan put it, expressing the fears and anxieties of many generations of Imperial and religious officials in Britain: ‘What was to be looked for in a remote and extensive Empire, administered in all its parts by men, who came out boys, without the plenitude of instruction of English youth in learning, morals, or religion; and who were let loose on their arrival amidst native licentiousness, and educated amidst conflicting superstitions?’⁵²

Yet for all this an important distinction was beginning to develop between the British who lived in the increasingly European ambience of the three coastal cities and those who lived in—and to varying extents became part of—the real Indian India beyond the walls of the Presidency towns. The degree to which an individual was exposed to this very different and initially very foreign world depended increasingly on where he was posted, just as the extent to which he reacted to such influences was determined by his individual sympathies and temperament.

As before, the greatest transformations took place amongst those completely cut off from European society, notably those East India Company officials who were posted to the more distant Indian courts. James Kirkpatrick’s counterpart as British Resident in Delhi was the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, an old friend of Kirkpatrick’s elder brother William. Ochterlony was a man already well used to walking the cultural faultlines between different worlds. His father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts. When the American Revolution broke out, the family fled to Canada, and thence to London where David entered the Company’s army in 1777. He never returned to the New World, and having made India his home vowed never to leave.

When in the Indian capital, Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman: every evening all thirteen of his consorts used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.⁵³ With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony amazed Bishop Reginald Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, by receiving him sitting on a divan wearing a ‘choga and pagri’ while being fanned by servants holding peacock-feather punkhas. To one side of Ochterlony’s own tent was the red silk harem tent where his women slept, and on the other side the encampment of his daughters, all, according to the Bishop, ‘hung around with red cloth and thus fenced in from the eyes of the profane’.

Ochterlony’s cortège, which the Bishop later spotted on the move through the country of Rajputana, was equally remarkable: ‘There was a considerable number of horses, elephants, palanquins and covered [harem] carriages,’ wrote Heber. ‘[long lines of regular army sepoys], and I should guess forty or fifty irregulars, on horse and foot, armed with spears and matchlocks of all possible forms; the string of camels [and elephants] was a very long one … [it might have been] an Eastern prince travelling. Sir David himself was in a carriage and four. He is a tall and pleasing looking old man, but was so wrapped up in shawls, Kincob fur and a Mogul furred cap, that his face was all that was visible … He has been absent from his home country about 54 years; he has there neither friends nor relations, and he has been for many years habituated to Eastern habits and parade. And if he shows no sign of retiring and returning to Britain who can wonder that he clings to the only country in the world where he can feel himself at home?’⁵⁴

Every bit as assimilated into their Indian surroundings were those European mercenaries who fought for Indian rulers. A pair of Irish mercenaries who both came out to India in the mid-eighteenth century as common seamen, and who separately jumped ship and worked their way across India training the sepoys of Indian rulers, show how far these transformations could go.

Thomas Legge, from Donaghadee in Ulster, developed an interest in Indian alchemy and divination and ended his days as a fakir living naked in an empty tomb in the deserts of Rajasthan outside Jaipur. He had travelled through central India and Hindustan to Sindh, occasionally taking up work as a cavalry officer and cannon-maker, before heading on again up the Indus into the Pamirs and exploring Kabul and Badakshan. At some point he returned to India where he married a granddaughter of Favier de Silva, a celebrated Portuguese astrologer who was sent out to India by the King of Portugal to advise Maharajah Jai Singh of Jaipur—builder of the great Delhi observatory, the Jantar Mantar—on matters astrological.

At one point Legge met James Tod, the author of the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan whose almost complete absorption into Rajasthani culture led even the Indophile Ochterlony to complain that Tod was ‘too much of a Rajpoot himself to deal with Rajpoots’. Tod, who clearly recognised in Legge a kindred spirit, was fascinated by the ragged visionary who appeared at this camp, and the two men talked deep into the night as the Irishman told Tod of his studies in Indian alchemy and divination, and revealed that in his travels he believed he had discovered the Garden of Eden deep in the Hindu Kush—giving Tod a Hibernian version of one the most ancient legends of central Asia: ‘Deep down in the heart of a mountain,’ Legge told Tod, ‘was situated a beautiful garden, filled with delicious fruit, with piles of gold bricks at one end, and of silver at the other.’ At length Tod delivered Legge back to his deserted tomb, where he resumed his life as a fakir.

He died not long afterwards, in 1808, and was buried in the tomb in which he had lived.⁵⁵

Another of Legge’s contemporaries, George Thomas, had his roots in the opposite end of Ireland, but like Legge took service among the rajahs of the north of India. In due course, at the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas succeeded in carving out his own state in the Mewatti badlands west of Delhi, and was a possible model for Peachey Carnehan in Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King. ‘The Rajah from Tipperary’, as he was known back home, was referred to in India as ‘Jehaz Sahib’—a name which may have derived from an Indian mangling of George, or be a reference to his naval past, jehaz being Urdu for ship.

Once established in his Haryana kingdom, Jehaz Sahib built himself a palace, minted his own coins and collected about him a harem, but in the process totally forgot how to speak English; when asked at the end of his career to dictate his autobiography, he said he would be happy to do so as long as he could speak in Persian, ‘as from constant use it was become more familiar than his native tongue’.⁵⁶ William Franklin, who eventually took down Thomas’s dictated memoirs, said that though Thomas was uneducated ‘he spoke, wrote and read the Hindoostany and Persian languages with uncommon fluency and precision’; indeed his Anglo-Indian son, Jan Thomas, became a celebrated Urdu poet in the mohallas of Old Delhi, and is depicted in miniatures of the period wearing the extravagant dress and raffish haircut of a late Mughal banka or gallant.⁵⁷

Such transformations might still have been common in the interior, but by the 1780s if an East India Company official stayed in Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, or indeed one of the big Bengal cantonments, his exposure to Indian customs could sometimes be very limited indeed. Eighteenth-century Calcutta in particular struck visitors as a dislocated outpost of Europe, as if Regency Bath had been relocated to the Bay of Bengal.

‘Calcutta,’ wrote Robert Clive, ‘is one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond conception.’⁵⁸ If it was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, it was also one where it could be lost in minutes in a wager, or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his horses and buggies.

At the centre of Calcutta lay the Writers’ Building, where the young Company officials were lodged while they underwent their initial training. In form it was little different from the British public schools from which most of the Writers had recently been drawn, and its inhabitants continued to behave as if the building occupied a loop of the Thames rather than a bend in the Hoogly. The favourite after-dinner toast was to turn the traditional ditty ‘Alas and Alack-the-Day’ into ‘A Lass and a Lakh^t a Day’—a succinct comment on the motives that led most of these Writers to come out to India in the first place.

In time, almost all of these Calcutta-based Writers would take on a few superficial glosses of Indianness. These might include riding in a palanquin, attending nautches (Indian dance displays) or smoking a hookah: indeed in the 1780s hookah-smoking became the height of fashion, even for the very few British women resident in Calcutta.^u Nevertheless in this insular world the only way that a Briton in Calcutta could come into close or intimate contact with Indians and Indian society was if he took an Indian bibi, or companion. In the second half of the eighteenth century the majority of Company servants still seem to have done this: of the Bengal Wills from 1780 to 1785 preserved in the India Office, one in three contains a bequest to Indian wives or companions or their natural children.⁵⁹ It can safely be assumed that many more kept Indian mistresses without wishing to leave a formal legal record of the fact.

The practice became so common that the Urdu poets in Lucknow began abandoning the old time-honoured formula of Hindustani romantic poetry—Muslim boy meets Hindu girl with fatal consequences—and began composing masnavi where Hindu girls fell for English men, though with the same time-honoured dénouement. In Rajab Ali Beg Suroor’s The Story of Wonders, the love-struck Englishman (‘a handsome youth of noble lineage and high rank; in his head the ardour of love; in his heart the fire of passion …’) falls so deeply in love with the beautiful daughter of a Hindu shopkeeper that he lapses into love-induced insanity before dying of heartbreak when the girl’s parents forbid the romance (‘he dropped on the bed of dust, crying in anguish …’). The story ends with a scene reminiscentof a modern Bollywood movie when his Hindu lady-love throws herself onto his coffin from a second-floor window as the funeral procession winds its way past her door, leaving her mortally injured. Suroor concludes:

The attraction of passionate love united the separated ones. All who had witnessed this scene shuddered in awe and the more compassionate ones fainted. Rumours about the misfortune spread through the city. The girl’s parents were so grief-stricken that they soon died. This is what Love the troublemaker has done: it laid to rest, side by side in the dust, the victims of separation as well as those responsible for it. People in their thousands would come to look at their tomb …⁶⁰

Many wills from the period rather touchingly confirm the impression of Suroor’s masnavi in suggesting that ties of great affection and loyalty on both sides were not uncommon at this time. Certainly many contain clauses where British men ask their close friends and family to care for their Indian partners, referring to them as ‘well beloved’, ‘worthy friend’ or ‘this amiable and distinguished lady’. The wills also show that in many cases the bibis achieved a surprising degree of empowerment. A few refer to contracts—something like eighteenth-century prenuptial agreements—and many women inherited considerable sums and households full of slaves from their English partners on their death. When Major Thomas Naylor died in 1782, for example, he bequeathed to his companion Muckmul Patna forty thousand rupees,^v a bungalow and a garden at Berhampore, a hackery, bullocks, jewels, clothes and all their male and female slaves.⁶¹ Another East India Company merchant, Matthew Leslie, left each of his four wives a house and twenty thousand rupees, a very considerable bequest.⁶²

Having an Indian concubine did not of course lead to any automatic sympathy with India or Indian culture on the part of a Company servant—far from it. But it was recognised at the time that in practice cohabitation often did lead to a degree of transculturation, even in the transplanted Englishness of Calcutta. Thomas Williamson for one was quite clear as to the effect that taking a bibi had on a newly arrived Englishman: ‘… in the early part of their career’, he wrote, ‘young men attach themselves to the women of this country; and acquire a liking, or taste, for their society and customs, which soon supersedes every other attraction’.⁶³ The explorer Richard Burton echoed a similar idea a little later: an Indian mistress taught her companion, he wrote, ‘not only Hindustani grammer, but the syntaxes of native Life’.^64w

At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the Indian idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap.⁶⁵ Those who returned home and continued to bathe and shampoo themselves on a regular basis found themselves scoffed at by their less hygienic compatriots: indeed it was a cliché of the time that the British in Bengal had become ‘effeminate’.⁶⁶ A few Calcutta men were known to have had themselves circumcised to satisfy the hygienic—and presumably religious—requirements of their Indian wives and companions.⁶⁷

As a result of similar influence, some East India Company servants were even persuaded to become vegetarians. A novel of the period paints an intriguing portrait of a returned Calcutta nabob^x tormented by depression following the premature death of his Hindu bride. He had become ‘a person neither English nor Indian, Christian nor Hindu. In diet he was a rigid disciple of Brama’, eating rice, fruit, potatoes and other vegetables while ‘looking upon the slaughter of a cow as only next to the murder of a human being’.⁶⁸That this tendency was not restricted to fiction is clear from the writings of several vegetarian nabobs from the period, including the Mayor of Calcutta and survivor of the Black Hole, John Zephania Holwell, as well as the enigmatic Irish General whose collection of sculptures forms the core of the British Museum Indian Collection, Major General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart. Stuart, who travelled around the country with his Indian bibi beside him, his buggy followed by a cavalcade of children’s carriages ‘and a palkee load of little babes’,⁶⁹ went as far as employing a group of Brahmins whose ritual purity he regarded as essential for properly dressing his Hindu family’s food.⁷⁰

Not all the relationships recorded in the wills of the period make such happy reading, and there are many in which Indian bibis are treated with a chilling carelessness: Alexander Crawford, writing his will in Chittagong in 1782, goes into extravagant details as to how he wants his executors to care for his dogs and horses. After several pages of this sort of thing he adds, almost as an afterthought, ‘To my girl I desire that two thousand rupees may be given for her care of my children provided that she places them under your charge without any further trouble.’ Unlike the animals, no name is given for her, and there are certainly no last endearments recorded.⁷¹ Judging by the wills they left, many Englishmen were serial monogamists, moving on from one partner to another, sometimes at speed, and a substantial number kept two bibis simultaneously. A few indeed had large harems, even by contemporary Indian standards. Such a case is recorded by Thomas Williamson, whose East India Vade Mecum was the standard guide to life in Calcutta for young Company officials coming out to India, and which was to the eighteenth-century Company servant what theLonely Planet guide is to the modern backpacker. Williamson writes of the case of one Company servant who kept no fewer than sixteen concubines. When asked what he did with them all, he merely muttered: ‘Oh I just give them a little rice and let them run around.’⁷²

William Hickey’s relationship with his Bengali bibi Jemdanee is a good example of the sort of relationship a Calcutta nabob might form with an Indian woman at this time. The relationship started as one of simple concubinage. Hickey makes no bones about the way he inherited Jemdanee after a neighbour returned home to England: ‘I had often admired a lovely Hindustani girl who sometimes visited Carter at my house,’ he writes in his Memoirs. ‘[She] was very lively and clever. Upon Carter’s leaving Bengal I invited her to become an intimate with me, which she consented to do.’⁷³ Yet the relationship quickly developed into something deeper: ‘From that day to the day of her death Jemdanee lived with me, respected and admired by all my friends for her extraordinary sprightliness and good humour. Unlike many of the women of Asia she never secluded herself from the sight of strangers; on the contrary she delighted in joining my male parties, cordially joining in the mirth though never touching wine or spirits of any kind.’

Jemdanee was also a great favourite with one of Hickey’s best friends, Ben Mee: ‘My love and good wishes to the gentle and every way amiable Jemdanee,’ Mee wrote in one letter. ‘Would that her good natured countenance and sweet temper were here … [We would share] some nice highly peppered curries.’⁷⁴ Hickey’s Memoirs are interspersed with these occasional letters from Mee, who soon absconds to Europe on the run from his debtors, from where he sends presents to Jemdanee. From Paris he writes: ‘I lately met with some ornaments, fresh from Paris, which from being so I think likely she will admire and cry ‘Wah! Wah!’ [Hurrah! Hurrah!] at; they consist of bracelets, necklace and earrings. My best love to her and I beg her to wear them for my sake.’⁷⁵

When Hickey is ill ‘my kind hearted and interesting favourite … sat by my side anxiously watching my varying countenances as the agonizing pain I endured increased or diminished’.⁷⁶ When he is better, they buy a ‘large and commodious Residence in Garden Reach, about seven miles and a half from Calcutta, beautifully situated within a few yards of the river, affording us the advantage of water as well as land carriage’. Here Hickey takes four apartments ‘for my sole use, that Jemdanee and her female attendants might be sufficiently private and retired … Jemdanee was so pleased with the novelty of the thing that nothing would satisfy her but remaining there entirely. She therefore sent for her establishment and settled herself in our upper rooms.’⁷⁷

After a while Jemdanee became pregnant, ‘regularly increasing in bulk … expressing her earnest desire that it might prove “a chuta William Saheb” ’.

She remained in uninterrupted health and the highest flow of spirits until the 4th of August when having laughed and chatted with her after my breakfast, I went to the Court House to attend a case of considerable importance. I had not been there more than an hour when several of my servants in the utmost alarm ran over to tell me that the Bibee Sahib was dying. Instantly going home, I found my poor girl in a state of insensibility, apparently with a locked jaw, her teeth being so far clenched together that no force could separate them. She had just been delivered of a fine healthy looking child which was remarkably fair.

Hickey discovered that Jemdanee had become terrified when ‘after an hour in violent agony’ she gave birth to a child, only to be told by the Bengali midwife—Hickey’s European doctor Dr Hare then being absent on business—that she should lie still for she was going to have twins ‘and another child was coming. This so terrified the poor suffering girl, that giving a violent screech, she instantly went into strong convulsions … ’

Doctor Hare arrived in five minutes after I got home, and was greatly surprised and alarmed at the state in which he found her, for which he could in no way account. By the application of powerful drugs which the Doctor administered, she, in half an hour, recovered her senses and speech, appeared very solicitous to encourage and comfort me, saying she had no doubt she should do very well. Doctor Hare also gave me his assurances that the dangerous paroxysm was past and all would be as we could wish. With this comfortable assurance I again went to attend my business in Court, from whence I was once more hastily summoned to attend to my dying favourite, who had been suddenly attacked by a second fit from which she never recovered, but lay in a state of confirmed apoplexy until nine o’clock at night when she, without a pang, expired.

‘Thus,’ wrote a heartbroken Hickey, ‘did I lose as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever a man was blessed with.’⁷⁸ It was several months before he had recovered sufficiently from the death to resume his work in the Calcutta courts.

Hinduism, and Hindu culture in general, proved less accessible to the British than Islam, at least partly because many Hindus regarded the British as untouchable, refusing to eat with them, so restricting somewhat the possibilities for social intercourse. Yet this did not put off many of Hinduism’s more ardent British admirers, and as a subject for intellectual study, Hinduism took precedence over Islam amongst the early British in Calcutta.

In March 1775 a twenty-three-year-old Company official, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, published his translation of A Code of Gentoo Laws.⁷⁹ The response in Britain to this first revelation of ‘the wisdom of the Hindoos’ was electric. As the reviewer in the Critical Review put it:

This is a most sublime performance … [we] are persuaded that even this enlightened quarter of the globe [i.e. Europe] cannot boast anything which soars so completely above the narrow, vulgar sphere of prejudice and priestcraft. The most amiable part of modern philosophy is hardly upon a level with the extensive charity, the comprehensive benevolence, of a few rude, untutored Hindoo Bramins … Mr Halhed has rendered more real service to his country, to the world in general, by this performance, than ever flowed from all the wealth of all the nabobs by whom the country of these poor people has been plundered … Wealth is not the only, nor the most valuable commodity, which Britain might import from India.⁸⁰

Edmund Burke agreed. He read Halhed’s book and, according to Charles James Fox, thereafter ‘spoke of the piety of the Hindoos with admiration, and of their holy religion and sacred functions with an awe bordering on devotion’; in Parliament Burke declared that ‘Wherever the Hindu religion has been established, that country has been flourishing.’⁸¹ This was still the Age of Reason, and loss of faith in the more intolerant and narrow aspects of Christianity combined with a growing interest in non-European civilisations to create an intellectual climate deeply receptive to the sort of ideas Halhed claimed lay at the heart of Hinduism.

Into this arena of intellectual excitement sailed, on 15 January 1784, the Justice of the new Supreme Court at Calcutta, Sir William Jones. Less than six weeks after he had landed, Jones had gathered together a group of thirty kindred spirits, to institute ‘a Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. Its patron was the most enlightened of all the British Governors General, Warren Hastings, who shared the new enthusiasm for Hinduism and who declared: ‘in truth I love India a little more than my own country’. ⁸²Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society of Bengal quickly became the catalyst for a sudden explosion of interest in Hinduism, as it formed enduring relations with the local Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation. In this way it was hoped to educate Europe about this relatively unknown civilisation; as Hastings put it, ‘such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment … [after all, the Indian classics] will survive when British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance’.⁸³

Before long Jones had decamped to Krishnagar, sixty miles up the Ganges from Calcutta, where he adopted the local Indian dress of loose white cotton and rented a bungalow built ‘entirely of vegetable materials’. Here he surrounded himself with Brahmins who helped him learn Sanskrit, a language which he soon realised was ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. As for Sanskrit literature, Jones was agog at the wonders he daily uncovered: ‘I am in love with thegopis,’ he wrote soon after his arrival, ‘charmed with Krishna and an enthusiastic admirer of Rama. Arjun, Bhima and the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad.’

Many of Jones’s letters seem to have been written from here. ‘I concur with you,’ he writes to one friend, ‘in paying adoration to springs and rivers; and I am going soon up the great stream Ma Gunga and towards the Holy banks of the God Jumna.’ He congratulates one correspondent on finding a well-preserved copy of the Gita, another on the way he has learned to sing ‘Hindoostanee airs’. One day he is sending letters up country requesting information from the Pundits of Benares on the different names and avatars of a particular god, on the next recommending the Calcutta doctors to try out various ayurvedic cures. In India, Jones wrote that he had discovered Arcadia.⁸⁴ Valmiki was the new Homer, the Ramayana the new Odyssey. The possibilities seemed endless.

Nevertheless, despite their enthusiasm, few of the Calcutta Sanskritists let their interest in Hinduism stray far beyond the intellectual. Jones himself remained a practising member of the Church of England, albeit one who showed an attachment to the idea of reincarnation: ‘I am no Hindu,’ he wrote, ‘but I hold the doctrines of the Hindus concerning a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious and more likely to deter men from vice than the horrid opinions inculcated by the Christians on punishment without end.’⁸⁵ But there were some others who went further. Technically it is impossible to convert to Hinduism: as much a social system as a religion, to be a Hindu you must be born a Hindu; traditionally there was no ceremony for conversion. No one, however, seems to have told this to ‘Hindoo Stuart’.

Not much is known about this strange Irishman who in the 1780s came out to India while still in his teens; but he seems to have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism, and within a year of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice—which he continued to his death—of walking every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges according to Hindu custom. As his obituary in the Asiatic Journal put it: ‘General Stuart had studied the language, manners and customs of the natives of this country with so much enthusiasm, that his intimacy with them, and his toleration of, or rather apparent conformity to their ideas and prejudices, obtained for him the name Hindoo Stuart, by which, we believe, he is well known to our readers.’⁸⁶ In his writings he explicitly refers to himself as a ‘convert’ to Hinduism.^y

Stuart’s military contemporaries, even those who were enthusiastic Indophiles themselves, never quite knew what to make of their General. At one point Hindoo Stuart was given command of the largest cavalry cantonment in central India, where he found that his deputy was an old acquaintance of James Kirkpatrick’s, William Linnaeus Gardner, who like Kirkpatrick himself was almost certainly a convert to Islam. Gardner’s letters to a cousin give a flavour of life in this bizarre outpost of the East India Company military establishment commanded by a pair of converts to India’s two rival religions.

The first reference to Hindoo Stuart in his deputy’s letters occurs just as the previous General is leaving and it has been announced that Stuart is to take over. ‘General Watson left us this morning,’ wrote Gardner, ‘and, good and kind as he is, I am happy he is off for the farewell dinners are most appalling events, particularly where a Man’s loyalty is measured by the number of Bottles he can gulp down. General Stuart, his successor, I suppose does not pride himself on the capacity of his stomach or the strength of his head as he regularly performs his pooja and avoids the sight of Beef.’

From this point Stuart features regularly in the Gardner correspondence, under the pet name ‘General Pundit’ or ‘Pundit Stuart’. On one occasion Gardner remarks: ‘The General is an odd fish. He wrote to me to come to him at Chukla Ghat where the Hindoos bathe—particularly the women! He has the Itch beyond any man I ever knew. On this spot he is going to build a pagoda [temple]! Every Hindu he salutes with Jey Sittaramjee!’ On another occasion Gardner says he is going to have to take command as the General is planning to go off for a week to bathe at the Kumb Mela. On another he reports how a friend had just returned from the weekly horse fair held at Saugor. In the midst of it he found Stuart sitting ‘surrounded by a dozen naked faqueers who, joining their hands over his head, gave him Benediction’.⁸⁷

Stuart was not just an admirer of the Indian religions, he was also an enthusiastic devotee of Hindu women and their dress sense. In the early years of the nineteenth century he wrote a series of improbable articles in the Calcutta Telegraph in which he tried to persuade the European women of the city to adopt the sari, on the grounds that it was so much more attractive than contemporary European fashions, and warning that otherwise Englishwomen had no hope of competing with the beauty of the women of India:

The majority of Hindoo women are comparatively small, yet there is much voluptuousness of appearance:—a fulness that delights the eye; a firmness that enchants the sense; a sleekness and purity of skin; an expression of countenance, a grace, and a modesty of demeanour, that renders them universally attractive … The new-mown hay is not sweeter than their breath … I have seen ladies of the Gentoo cast, so exquisitely formed, with limbs so divinely turned, and such expression in their eyes, that you must acknowledge them not inferior to the most celebrated beauties of Europe. For my own part, I already begin to think the dazzling brightness of a copper coloured face, infinitely preferable to the pallid and sickly hue of the European fair.^z

If Stuart’s extreme passion for all things Hindu was definitely unusual, showing respect for Hinduism and participating in its rituals was not, and there are frequent references in the sources of the period to Company officials attending pujas, presenting gifts in temples and participating in sacrifices. James Grant, for example, gave a bell to the Durga temple in Benares after the priests there had prayed for his safety when he and his wife and children were caught in a whirlpool in the Ganges immediately opposite the temple.⁸⁸ About the same time the British celebrated the Treaty of Amiens by marching with military bands to the Temple of Kali.⁸⁹

Hindu texts confirm this open-minded attitude. At the suggestion of some Brahmins, General Richard Matthews is recorded in a Tamil history of the period as praying to a Hindu deity at a temple in Takkolam in order to be cured of some crippling stomach aches. According to the anonymous author of the history, Matthews was successfully cured of his pains and thereafter gave generously to the temple. The story opens with the General camped near the temple, where his troops hope to make use of the water from the temple spring. But after his ‘pariahs and lower [caste] attendants’ have entered the temple, the water supply which ‘usually fell through the Cows Mouth [in a jet] the size of an elephant’s trunk with great noise’ mysteriously fails:

The general then promised money to defray the expenses of Homa [fire ceremonies for the purification] that water might fall from the Cow’s Mouth as before; but the Brahmins replied that they could not make the water to fall as before, whereupon the Gentleman was angry at the Brahmins, & gave them leave to return to their Houses and he returned to his tent—

That night the gentleman was seized with a terrible pain in his bowels, which threatened to endanger his life, and believing that it was owing to his forcibly entering into the pagoda & looking into every place, he sent for the Poojaries and questioned them. They recommended him to pray to the God, thro’ whom he would be cured. Next morning General Matthews came & stood in the Pagoda in the presence of the God, and there prayed to the God; he then returned to his tents & in that same moment he recovered from his pain; therefore that gentleman presented a bag of 1000 pagodas to the God and ordered them still to continue to worship; he also added some villages to the allowances of the God. Thereupon the Poojaries brought a number of cows into the pagoda & performed thePooniacharum, or ceremony of purification; and they assembled the Brahmins & entertained them all for the sake of the God; whereupon the water which before fell from the Cows Mouth in a stream of the size of an elephants trunk, fell again.

‘General Matthews,’ adds the author, ‘remained six months in that place; and he used to have the water that fell from the cows mouth brought to him for his own drinking … When the general went away he left his concubine at this place.’⁹⁰

Not all Company officials shared the enthusiasm of Generals Stuart and Matthews either for India in general, or for Hinduism in particular.

Most powerful of the critics was one of the Company’s Directors, Charles Grant. Grant was among the first of the new breed of Evangelical Christians, and he brought his fundamentalist religious opinions directly to the East India Company boardroom. Writing that ‘it is hardly possible to conceive any people more completely enchained than they [the Hindus] are by their superstitions’, he proposed in 1787 to launch missions to convert a people whom he characterised as ‘universally and wholly corrupt … depraved as they are blind, and wretched as they are depraved’.⁹¹ Within a few decades the missionaries—initially based at the Danish settlement of Serampore—were beginning fundamentally to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom, as Jones and Hastings believed, but instead merely ‘poor benighted heathen’, or even ‘licentious pagans’, some of whom, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion, and with it the path to Civilisation.

The Rev. R. Ainslie was typical of Grant’s missionaries. In British Idolatry in India, a sermon printed and disseminated to the Evangelical faithful back home, the excitable Ainslie wrote of his visit to a temple in Orissa: ‘I have visited the Valley of Death!’ he told a hushed congregation. ‘I have seen the Den of Darkness!’ The sermon goes on for nearly twenty pages, describing the ‘sinful and disgusting scenes’ the Rev. Ainslie had witnessed. These ‘sinful scenes’, rather disappointingly, turn out to be nothing more than Company officials assisting the Hindus in their rites. Of the great Juggernaut procession in Orissa, Ainslie comments: ‘The cloths and mantles are furnished for the idol pageantry by British servants. The horrors are unutterable … Do not European gentlemen encourage these ceremonies, and make presents to the idol, and often fall down and worship?’⁹²

One of the most outspoken of the missionaries was the Rev. Alexander Thompson, who after a lifetime of denouncing the evils of Hinduism devoted his retirement to writing a long and intemperate tract entitled The Government Connection with Idolatry in India.⁹³ According to Thompson, the enthusiasm of Company officials of the late eighteenth century had become one of the main causes of a major Hindu revival. Looking back to the 1790s, he reminds his readers that

the chief officers of the Government [at that time] belonged to a peculiar class. Those who between 1790 and 1820 possessed the greatest experience, and held the highest offices in India, were on the whole an irreligious body of men; who approved of Hinduism much more than Christianity, and favoured the Koran more than the Bible. Some hated Missions from their dread of sedition; and others because their hearts ‘seduced by fair idolatresses, had fallen to idols foul’.^aa

The ‘Brahminised’ British—as they came to be known—did not go down before the missionary onslaught without a fight. It was to combat the intolerance of these Evangelicals that Hindoo Stuart anonymously published a pamphlet called A Vindication of the Hindoos.⁹⁴ In this text he tried to discourage any attempt by European missionaries to convert the Hindus, arguing that, as he put it, ‘on the enlarged principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society’. On the subject of Hindu mythology, which the missionaries ridiculed at every turn, Stuart wrote: ‘Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory: and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced.’ He also pointed out that theVedas were ‘written at that remote period in which our savage ancestors of the forest were perhaps unconscious of a God; and were, doubtless, strangers to the glorious doctrine of the immortality of the soul, first revealed in Hindostan’.

The reaction that Stuart generated by writing his defence of Hinduism is a measure of how attitudes were beginning to change at the close of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. A full-scale pamphlet war broke out, with furious attacks made on the anonymous ‘Bengal Officer’ who produced the work, denouncing him as an ‘infidel’ and a ‘pagan’.⁹⁵

Nor was it just missionaries who took against Stuart: his own colleagues were becoming equally scathing. ‘Incredible as it may sound reader,’ wrote one horrified officer, ‘there is at this moment a British general in the Company’s service, who observes all the customs of the Hindoos, makes offerings at their temples, carries about their idols with him, and is accompanied by fakirs who dress his food. He is not treated as a madman, but would not perhaps be misplaced if he had his idols, fakirs, bedas, and shasters, in some corner of Bedlam, removed from its more rational and unfortunate inmates.’⁹⁶

Even passing travellers began to take potshots at the increasingly isolated Stuart: ‘There was one circumstance which staggered my incredulity, ’ wrote Elizabeth Fenton in her journal. ‘There was here an Englishman, born and educated in a Christian land, who has become the wretched and degraded partaker of this heathen worship, a General S—who has for some years adopted the habits and religion, if religion it be named, of these people; and he is generally believed to be in a sane mind, rather a man of ability.’ Pausing in her horror only to add a second semi-colon to her breathless rant, she continued; ‘it makes you pause and in vain attempt to account for such delusion. Those whom it is the will of God to be born in Darkness are not accountable, but that any who ever lived in the light of Christianity should voluntarily renounce its hopes is truly awful.’⁹⁷

Hindoo Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. All over India, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, attitudes were changing among the British. Men who showed too great an enthusiasm for Hinduism, for Indian practices or even for their Indian wives and Anglo-Indian children, were finding that the climate was growing distinctly chilly.

David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker who founded the Hindu College in Calcutta, was actually denied a Christian burial when he died of cholera, on the grounds that he had become more Hindu than Christian. ⁹⁸ Many others found their Indianised ways led to a block on their promotion. When Francis Gillanders, a British tax-collector stationed in Bihar, was found to be involving himself too closely in the temple at Bodh Gaya, to which he donated a bell in 1798, the Directors of the Company back in London wrote to the Governor General expressing their horror that Christians should be, as they put it, administering ‘heathen’ rites.⁹⁹ A little later Frederick Shore found that his adoption of native dress so enraged the increasingly self-righteous officials of Calcutta that a government order was issued explicitly forbidding Company servants from wearing anything except European dress. The following year the army issued similar orders forbidding European officers from taking part in the festival of Holi. ‘Pagan festivals’, along with gambling, concubinage, peculation and drunkenness, were all things to be firmly discouraged in this new climate. The shutters were beginning to come down.

Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were also beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1780s, and it was the burgeoning mixed-blood Anglo-Indian community which felt the brunt of the new intolerance. From 1786, under the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, a whole raft of legislation was brought in excluding the children of British men who had Indian wives from employment by the Company. Cornwallis arrived in India fresh from his defeat by George Washington at York-town. He was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America.

With this in mind, in 1786 an order was passed banning the Anglo-Indian orphans of British soldiers from travelling to England to be educated, so qualifying for service in the Company army. In 1791 the door was slammed shut when an order was issued that no one with an Indian parent could be employed by the civil, military or marine branches of the Company. In 1795, further legislation was issued, explicitly disqualifying anyone not descended from European parents on both sides from serving in the Company’s armies except as ‘pipers, drummers, bandsmen and farriers’. Yet, like their British fathers, the Anglo-Indians were also banned from owning land. Thus excluded from all the most obvious sources of lucrative employment, the Anglo-Indians quickly found themselves at the beginning of a long slide down the social scale. This would continue until, a century later, they had been reduced to a community of minor clerks and train drivers.¹⁰⁰

Faced with limited prospects in India, those Company servants rich enough to send their Anglo-Indian children home tended to do so, and many mixed-blood children were successfully absorbed into the British upper classes, some even attaining high office: Lord Liverpool, the early-nineteenth-century Prime Minister, was of Anglo-Indian descent.¹⁰¹ Much, however, depended on skin colour. As the Calcutta agent John Palmer wrote to Warren Hastings, when discussing what to do with his three orphaned Anglo-Indian step-grandchildren: ‘the two eldest [who] are almost as fair as European children … should be sent to Europe. I could have made no distinction between the children if the youngest was of a complexion that could possibly escape detection; but as I daily see the injurious consequences resulting from bringing up certain [darker-skinned] native children at Home, it is become a question in my own mind how far I should confer a service in recommending the third child’ to proceed to England. It was decided in the end that the ‘dark’ child should stay in India and try to make his way as a clerk, while the others were shipped to Britain to try their luck there.^102ab

It was not just Anglo-Indians who suffered from the new and quickly-growing prejudices in Calcutta. Under Cornwallis, all non-Europeans began to be treated with disdain by the increasingly arrogant officials at the Company headquarters of Fort William. In 1786, John Palmer’s father, General William Palmer,^ac who later became one of Kirkpatrick’s closest friends and allies, wrote to his friend David Anderson expressing his dismay at the new etiquette regarding Indian dignitaries introduced to Calcutta by the recently-arrived Cornwallis. They were received, he wrote, ‘in the most cold and disgusting stile, and I can assure you that they observe and feel it, and no doubt they will resent it whenever they can’.¹⁰³

These new racial attitudes affected all aspects of relations between the British and Indians. The Bengal Wills show that it was at this time that the number of Indian bibis being mentioned in wills and inventories began to decline: from turning up in one in three wills in 1780 and 1785, the practice went into steep decline. Between 1805 and 1810, bibis appear in only one in every four wills; by 1830 it is one in six; by the middle of the century they have all but disappeared. The second edition of Thomas Williamson’s East India Vade Mecum, published in 1825, had all references to bibis completely removed from it,¹⁰⁴ while biographies and memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the early nineteenth century so that the consorts were removed from later editions: for example John Collins, known as ‘King Collins’, who was the Resident at the court of the Marathas’ leader Scindia, was deprived of the harem mentioned in the first edition of Major Blackiston’sTwelve Years Military Adventures in Hindustan.¹⁰⁵

Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs likewise began to be objects of surprise—even, on occasions, of derision—in Calcutta. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of men ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Mussulmans’.¹⁰⁶ Curries were no longer acceptable dishes at parties: ‘the delicacies of an entertainment consist of hermetically sealed salmon, red-herrings, cheese, smoked sprats, raspberry jam, and dried fruits; these articles coming from Europe, and being sometimes very difficult to procure, are prized accordingly’.¹⁰⁷ Pyjamas, for the first time, became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. By 1813, Thomas Williamson was writing in The European in India how ‘The hookah, or pipe … was very nearly universally retained among Europeans. Time, however, has retrenched this luxury so much, that not one in three now smokes.’¹⁰⁸ Soon the European use of the hookah was to go the way of the bibi:into extinction.

Yet what was true of Calcutta was not necessarily true of Company servants who lived outside the walls of the three Presidency towns. If a young Writer was bright, learned the languages and did well in his exams, he might still be posted to one of the Residencies attached to the various independent Indian courts. There he could find himself the only educated European for several hundred miles. In that case—and especially if he found himself in a centre of hybrid Indo-Islamic culture such as Hyderabad or Lucknow, or one of the more lively Rajput courts like Udaipur—he would by necessity be forced to draw his closest friends, his ways of speaking and thinking, and his sexual partners, from his Indian surroundings.¹⁰⁹

Wearing Indian costume, marrying Indian wives and living a hybrid Anglo-Mughal lifestyle had always been more popular, and the transformations more dramatic, in these great centres of Mughal culture than they were in the insular world of the Presidency towns. From the 1790s until the 1830s, however, a division grew up between what was considered acceptable and proper in Calcutta, and the ways of behaviour that were still thought perfectly appropriate in the Residencies attached to the different Indian courts: for example, when the formidable Lady Maria Nugent, wife of the British Commander-in-Chief in India, visited Delhi she was horrified by what she saw there. It was not just the Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, who had ‘gone native’, she reported, his Assistants William Fraser and Edward Gardner were even worse. ‘I shall now say a few words of Messrs. Gardner and Fraser who are still of our party,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘They both wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians, if not more; they are both of them clever and intelligent, but eccentric; and, having come to this country early, they have formed opinions and prejudices, that make them almost natives. In our conversations together, I endeavour to insinuate every thing that I think will have any weight with them. I talk of the religion they were brought up in, and of their friends, who would be astonished and shocked at their whiskers, beards, &c. &c. All this we generally debated between us,’ concluded Lady Nugent, ‘and I still hope they will think of it.’¹¹⁰

Two worlds were growing apart—and it was into that growing chasm of cultural misunderstanding that James Achilles Kirkpatrick fell. If that gap widened into an abyss during the first years of the nineteenth century, it was largely due to the influence of one man.

On 8 November 1797, Lord Wellesley, a minor Irish aristocrat, set out from England to take up his appointment as Governor General of Bengal and head of the Supreme Government of India. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. That process was now drawing to a close. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. It was a place to be changed and conquered, not a place to be changed or conquered by.

This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. His Imperial policies would effectively bring into being the main superstructure of the Raj as it survived up to 1947; he also brought with him the arrogant and disdainful British racial attitudes that buttressed and sustained it.