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  None qualified as mansions. Only the surgeon’s, with its pocket portico and tall arched windows, pretended to grandness. But its distinction had nothing to do with the status of the medical profession. Divided into apartments, it had formerly housed the agents who carried on the largest part of the Company’s trade in India. That business, as at Ghazipur, was opium.

  Production of the narcotic had begun under the Mughals, who were fond of it themselves. Unlike alcohol, opium was not proscribed by Islam, and its production and sale became a state monopoly. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, control of the trade passed first to the merchants of Patna and then to the British. By the end of the eighteenth century, after the Company turned to opium to erase its trade deficit with China, East Indiamen laden with half a million pounds of opium each departed almost daily for Canton, returning months later with cargoes of tea.

  Few Indians used the drug themselves. Warren Hastings, the first de facto governor general, had decided shortly after his appointment in 1773 to spare natives its temptation:

  “Opium is not a necessity of life, but a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted but for the purpose of foreign commerce only, and which the wisdom of the Government should carefully restrain from internal consumption.”

  The welfare of the Chinese, in other words, was someone else’s problem. (Which it rapidly became: the tenfold increase in the amount of opium exported to China by the Company between 1790 and 1836 resulted, by one estimate, in a fiftyfold increase in the number of addicts there.)

  Despite the Company’s withdrawal from trade, it retained a monopoly on granting licenses for opium production and sale. Revenue from such licenses, which totaled £729,000 in 1834–35, would reach £3.3 million in 1849–50. The drug still accounted for a fifth of its revenues in India, with the percentage in Bihar as high as four-fifths. The opium agents stricken from the Company’s payroll in Patna a few years before Nigel arrived were busier than ever. Some had gone into business for themselves. Others worked for private firms. They resided now in the Company Bagh, the Eurasian neighborhood sandwiched between Patna and the low rise at the edge of the civil station.

  Even at that distance from the Golghar, a half mile or so, the Company Bagh could be recognized for what it was: a bastard child of East and West, unplanned and unloved. Mean, meandering streets, flat-roofed tenements, a colorless bazaar. Here and there, fine houses of a certain age, oddly placed and haphazardly maintained. Most belonged to the class of “commercial men.” A few housed well-to-do natives of the zamindar class. There were two or three churches, and the District Court House. Overhanging all was a sallow pall of dust that merged in the distance with the undulating smudge of the old city wall. Beyond, through its western gate, lay what the British called the Black Town.

  One of its last European residents was Francis Buchanan, a surveyor whose journal of life there in 1811–12 reads like an indictment. To his mystification, natives often spoke of their fondness for Patna. As far as he was concerned, “it would be difficult to imagine a more disgusting place.” Amenities such as paving, cleaning, and lighting, considered essential in any European town of similar size and prominence, were “totally out of the question.” The principal street, though “tolerably wide,” was “by no means straight or regularly built.”

  The only thing Buchanan found to praise about the city was the “great number of fine-formed women” who frequented the riverbank, fetching water. But their burdens roused him to further indignation. Unlike most of the larger Indian cities, Patna lacked any waterworks. Thus, he wrote, “the capital of Behar continues to stand parched and dusty by the river’s brink. The Ganges is at her feet and offers her its treasures, but her arm seems palsied, for she does not stretch it down to receive them.”

  Even wells were poorly utilized. Those near the river were inconveniently deep, and liable to contain water too saline for drinking. Better wells could be found farther inland, but no one had ever attempted to distribute their supply to the city.

  About the Golghar, Buchanan struggled to contain his exasperation. He noted that the structure was “intended” as a granary. But it had never been filled. Captain Garstin, so diligent in perfecting arrangements for depositing the grain, neglected to provide for dispensing it: the four sets of doors opened inward. Even a small amount of grain inside would prevent them from opening at all.

  There was no reversing the doors on their hinges without enlarging the access tunnels, no enlarging the tunnels without running the risk of bringing down the dome.

  It was irremediable.

  There stood the handiwork of the engineer John Garstin, by profession an apostle of the “regularly built.” How then had it risen so hugely and absurdly on that graceless shore of ocher clay, as illogical and irregular as anything conceived or concocted by the wild, unknown men in the Black Town, that warren of chaos beyond the Company Bagh?

  If only it was made by the natives, then that would explain it.

  But it was not.

  12

  * * *

  A Policeman

  NIGEL’S LETTERS HOME from Patna sketched his life in broad, sunny strokes. He reported that his job was auditing the tax receipts of the zamindars who controlled the district’s extensive croplands. He said nothing about the predominant crop, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy. (After he finally visited the Black Town, he included the East India Company’s original factory in a list of the principal buildings there, noting its cavernous dimensions but omitting mention of its conversion to an opium warehouse.) Yet opium, without a doubt, was the central sun around which his work at the Patna Collectorate revolved. It was the principal source of the taxes whose assessment he calculated and whose collection he certified.

  He was silent, too, about the outbreak of cholera in Patna in 1845, and insisted with some energy on his own good health, which he credited to a daily regimen of exercise in the cool of the morning, followed by a cold bath and a hearty breakfast of eggs, ham, and “fruit of all descriptions.” Mindful, perhaps, that he was already on record about the dullness of station society, he never hinted that he missed Calcutta or regretted his decision to leave.

  The plain truth, though, was that he had effectively killed his chances of climbing high on the Company career ladder when he put in for his transfer to Patna. There he earned an annual salary of £500 as an assistant to the collector, who in turn earned £2,000 and reported to a district collector making £3,000. As long as his health held out, Nigel could count on a collectorship coming his way in a few years’ time. The odds of his taking charge of a district after that were better than even, especially if the pace of territorial expansion kept up. But that would have been the extent of his prospects. If he had remained at Government House, he might have aspired to an income of £7,000 a year, sitting among the heads of the service as secretary to government. The price of leaving Calcutta—and spurning the Bengal Club—was visibility. Without it he was just another young Englishman doing his duty, in a place where no one who was anyone wanted to be.

  Patna did have a certain homely appeal, in its informality and its gentler connection between the rulers and the ruled. Gentlemen paying their evening calls forsook jackets, wearing instead two-layered waistcoats of white linen, with the outer garment sleeved. A sensible adaptation to the climate, it amounted to unthinkable freedom by the standards of Calcutta. The standard conveyance of the capital—a palanquin borne by natives—was shunned by most Europeans for the tonga, a light horse-drawn carriage that was faster and more comfortable but decidedly less imperial. (Highborn Indians and arriviste natives of the zamindar class, Nigel noted, stuck to palanquins.)

  The official intolerance for Indians and their culture that was codified by Richard Wellesley had by then taken firm hold in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. There, as well as in some of the larger Bengal cantonments, an Englishman’s exposure to Indian customs had become limited indeed. But the old ways died hard in the provinces. And part a
nd parcel of the old ways for the British in India was what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, would term “chutnification.” They came, they saw, and in one way or another their imaginations were conquered.

  Nigel arrived a generation too late to see any overt signs of Indianization among his colleagues in Patna. With its orderly ranks of bungalows and antipathy for the Black Town, the station had swung into step with the march of empire from its coastal strongholds into the bewitching mosaic of the Indian heartland. Compared with the rate of change in Calcutta, though, the cadence was a trifle off—just enough to whet his appetite anew for the “real India.” When he learned he would be leaving Patna for a fortnight after Christmas to conduct a field audit in Ghazipur, he was eager to go:

  “I should not want to live and work in the riotous surroundings favoured by Indians everywhere, irrespective of their class or creed. Yet one feels troubled at times by a sense of missing out on the good as well as the bad. I do look forward to being reminded once again of the colour and novelty of what is after all an exotic place to practise even the most mundane of professions!”

  The 150-mile journey to Ghazipur took six days. En route, he slept in shabby dak bungalows, government guesthouses situated twelve to fifteen miles apart that provided free accommodation to traveling officials and welcomed others for a small fee when space was available. They were places, wrote Kipling in My Own True Ghost Story, where one was apt to meet “all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed.”

  “Daks” were tended sometimes by families but more often by elderly khansamahs, male cooks and house stewards who could be counted on to remember the idiosyncrasies of every sahib they had served. The khansamah of the bungalow on the last stage to Ghazipur was a Rajput from western India. He sat on his haunches in a gray-washed kitchen, where gobbets of curing goat flesh hung from the rafters and chile peppers spilled from an overturned wicker basket. He told Nigel that he admired the British. To their lasting credit, they did not take bribes. This was a novel development in the governance of India and a welcome departure from the ways of the past, which denied justice to the poor.

  The khansamah stirred the embers in a cooking hearth made out of mud and finished with a wash of cow dung. He recited for Nigel the names of the warrior kings of the Rajput clans, who fought off the Greeks and bore the brunt of the invasions by Turkic and Afghan warlords. He spoke of the three sieges of Chittorgarh, each with its own jauhar—the mass self-immolation of the female population to avoid capture. He missed the kite-flying festival of his native Ahmedabad and the fat, sweet pineapples that perfumed the bazaar. Rooted in the hard-packed earth beside the kitchen doorway was a stunted mango tree. It never bore fruit. He supposed that he would die in that dusty bungalow on the road from Patna.

  The sky outside turned orange, melting upward into violet. A fretful rooster announced a new arrival. The khansamah gave out a chuckle. He had promised Nigel a supper of spinach and hard-boiled eggs. Now there was another mouth to feed. That, he said, called for something heartier. He reached for a whetstone.

  The latecomer, whom Nigel identified as H—— , was a moustached policeman from Ulster with eleven years’ service in India. Over chicken curry he regaled Nigel with his adventures as part of a task force established to suppress a murderous cult of highway robbers. Lurid accounts of the campaign against the Thugs had been a staple of colonial journalism since the 1830s. But Nigel was fascinated to meet someone with firsthand knowledge of the killers.

  Thuggee, which dated back to the twelfth century, was a hereditary brotherhood whose scouts infiltrated groups of travelers and lured them to encampment sites where their confederates lay in wait. They strangled their victims with a rumal, the strong cloth noose that every Thug wore knotted around his waist.

  Initiates subscribed to a strange code of ethics. They were taught from childhood that the Tantric goddess Kali had personally instructed the fathers of thuggery to kill without permitting bloodshed. Kali had also forbidden indiscriminate killing. Among those not to be harmed were the maimed and the leprous, fakirs and Ganges water carriers, musicians and dancers, sweepers, oil vendors, carpenters, and blacksmiths. (Women also constituted a protected class, but wives traveling with their husbands were routinely strangled in order to preserve the brotherhood’s secrecy.)

  Nor did Thuggee target Europeans. That probably explains why the British had long turned a blind eye to a cult that first came to their attention in the late seventeenth century. Until the abolition of ritual infanticide at Sagar Island in 1802, there was also a tradition of noninterference with Indian religious customs, however wicked they seemed to Christian sensibilities. The rise of evangelism changed all that, and East India Company chairman Charles Grant cited reports of mass murders committed by bands of stranglers roving the countryside of central India as evidence of the “darkness, vice, and misery” that ought to compel more strenuous efforts to “Christianize” the population.

  Though such reports began reaching Calcutta in 1812, the government had no way of connecting the killings for several years, until the bodies of fifty victims were found in a series of wells along the Ganges. Close examination of the corpses convinced the authorities that a single secret society was responsible.

  At a time when the methodology of detective work was in its infancy even in England, the British acted decisively to crush Thuggee. Profiling was employed to differentiate suspected Thugs from dacoits—garden-variety highwaymen who roughed up their victims but rarely killed except in self-defense. Data from each discovered attack site was collected, analyzed, and shared, eventually enabling police to predict the times and locations of future attacks. Agents disguised as merchants and pilgrims staged meticulously planned ambushes, surprising large bands of Thugs who believed they were attacking harmless travelers.

  H—— had specialized in intelligence gathering, primarily through informants recruited from captured Thugs. About fifty, he said, had chosen to save themselves by turning King’s evidence. Thousands more were imprisoned or transported to penal colonies in the Andaman Islands. Of the five hundred executed, many asked permission to place the hangman’s noose around their own necks.

  (A witness to the execution of eleven Thugs convicted of murdering thirty-five travelers in 1830 reported that “one of the youngest, a Mohammedan, impatient of the delay, stooped down so as to tighten the rope, and, stepping deliberately over the platform, hanged himself as coolly as one would step over a rock to take a swim in the sea!”)

  Few in Calcutta ever guessed how many active Thugs there were, said the policeman.

  He was thirty-four, exhausted and overdue for home leave. He hated ships and life at sea. He meant to recover his health en route by breaking his journey for six months at the Cape of Good Hope. The climate there was said to be delightful. If the colony suited him, he might well stay. Police work was challenging anywhere. But in India there were ever more obstacles to getting it done.

  “He reflected that the Government, confident in the superior wisdom of the Capital, makes scant allowance for the exercise of discretion by its agents in the provinces,” wrote Nigel. “They are thus enjoined to act with reference neither to their knowledge of local conditions in the first place, nor their gauge of Native Feeling in the second.”

  Working relationships between Englishmen and Indians naturally suffered. They were, in fact, officially discouraged. Yet what was the suppression of Thuggee if not proof that close cooperation between the races could accomplish great things? Natives, of course, had good reason to work with the British—as couriers, informants, and trusted intelligence agents. Their people were the ones at risk, just as their ancestors had been at risk, just as their children would remain at risk until the cult was broken. (The fanciful notion that it survived covertly into the twentieth century would serve as the premise of the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.)<
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  The British, on the face of it, had acted out of noblesse oblige. Unthreatened themselves, they spared no effort or expense in fighting the menace to those they ruled—a menace that modern historians contend was exaggerated by the Company but at the time was held to be responsible for as many as thirty thousand deaths in the 1830s alone. When you thought about it, though, Calcutta had a vested interest in the outcome. Thuggee was ecumenical. Though initiates regarded their victims as sacrifices to their patron deity Kali, the cult was open to Muslims and Sikhs as well as Hindus. Any secret organization that united Indians across the barriers of religion and caste—let alone one whose members were ruthless killers—posed a threat to the established order. And any threat to the established order was a threat to British rule.

  The campaign against the Thugs, to borrow from the lexicon of another century, was a surgical strike.

  Surgery is a delicate art. H—— feared that the British in India were losing their touch. He blamed it on the end of the Company’s trading privileges. You could not trade with people unless you got to know them, over time. How many Englishmen had any contact with Indians at all anymore, apart from their servants and employees?

  Listening to the policeman, it occurred to Nigel that there might be something ominous about the ever-widening gulf between the races, something more consequential than his melancholy sense of missing out on local color. In matters of human relations, of course, there was no one so predisposed to pessimism as a policeman. But the man had a point. The subjection of the subcontinent depended on mutual accommodation more than military power. Most of what the British had in India they owed in the first place to alliances and arrangements, to compromise and contracts. They had not so much conquered the country as cajoled it.