Empire Made Read online

  He was clearly a Muslim, one of the “few trusted merchants” the General had mentioned. Then, late that afternoon, came the eureka moment. There it was, in a lengthy list of guests invited to observe maneuvers of the Nepalese army in 1850: “Mr. Hillock.”

  Could it be? I wondered, but only for a moment.

  It had to be.

  The vowels were wrong, but the timing was right. And what was the likelihood, anyway, of both a Halleck and a Hillock turning up among the first few dozen Europeans to set foot in forbidden Nepal?

  I had by then abandoned hope of finding Nigel’s tombstone. Boris had agreed with the woman at the British Council library in Patna that there probably wasn’t one.

  (And he knew for a fact that Nigel had not been interred at the small British cemetery on the grounds of the old residency at Lainchaur, where Boris himself intended to be buried. It was where he took his daily walks, in an effort to make the acquaintance of his future neighbors. He knew the name on every tombstone.)

  If Nigel died most anywhere in Nepal, he would have been cremated. In the unlikely event he met his end in the highlands, where firewood was at a premium, he would have been accorded a “sky burial.” His remains would have been exposed to the elements on a mountaintop, to decompose or be eaten by carrion birds. If I was going to find anything of Nigel, his name in an antique ledger was probably the best I could do, and the sight of it thrilled me more than I ever could have guessed.

  Suddenly, he seemed real.

  And there was more. A couple of hours into my next visit to the library, there was “Hillock” again, the only European in a party that departed Thapathali for shooting in the Terai. And this time the name was linked by a bracket with that of another member of the party, whose name I recognized.

  Sri Sri Sa’adat ool-Moolk, the supplier of Rana family jewels.

  The two men’s names were again linked by brackets in a third instance of “Hillock,” posted four years later, in 1854.

  What struck me at the time, of course, was the evident years-long connection between Nigel and a purveyor of “dimond stones and rubees.”

  Perhaps there was something, after all, to the Halleck family legend.

  What was lost to me in the diamond dazzle was the significance of the dual honorific preceding the name of Sa’adat ool-Moolk. In the royal protocol of Nepal, only the king himself was entitled to a triple “Sri.” The Rana prime ministers, for all their power, were obliged to settle for two, and they constituted an exception to the rule that “Sri Sri” connoted royal blood.

  Nigel’s friend was no ordinary jewel dealer.

  24

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  A Prince

  WHEN NIGEL FIRST mentioned his Afghan friend S—— in a letter sent from the Punjab, he called him “a Prince.” For generations afterwards, Halleck family members who read it supposed that he simply meant “of a fellow.” When they imagined him hobnobbing with royalty on the other side of the world, they thought only of Jang Bahadur, who pretended to come from an aristocratic background but never went so far as to claim descent from a monarch. But Nigel’s Victorian penchant for random capitalization camouflaged unvarnished fact. In the archives of the India Office in London, the name of Sa’adat ul-Mulk is prefaced with “Shahzada,” a Persian honorific meaning “son of the king.”

  Nigel’s companion on his journey west from Ludhiana to Peshawar and then eastward to Nepal was none other than the great-great-grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani, an Afghan cavalry commander in the Persian army who founded an empire in 1747 that came to encompass present-day Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, eastern Turkmenistan, most of Pakistan, and northwestern India, including the Kashmir region. At the time of his death, twenty-five years later, the Durrani Empire was the second-largest Muslim empire in the world, after the Ottoman.

  Sa’adat’s great-grandfather inherited the empire but proved too “humane and generous” to maintain a centralized government, and it began to contract. It dwindled further under his grandfather Mahmud Shah, who lost the throne to his brother Shah Shuja in 1803, reclaimed it in 1809, and fled to Herat, in western Afghanistan, in 1817. By then the Durrani Empire had shrunk to the limits of Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar, and only Herat remained in the hands of the Sadozais.

  They were not a happy family. Father fought son, brother fought brother, half brother fought half brother, uncle fought nephew, in what ethnographer Louis Dupree called “a never-ending round robin of blood-letting and blindings.” When Mahmud Shah died of poisoning in 1830, it was widely supposed that his son—Sa’adat’s father, Kamran Shah—had administered the fatal dose.

  “Kamran Shah can best be described as a human tiger,” wrote the Victorian historian G. P. Tate. “A debauchee of the worst type, there ran through his disposition a strong vein of ferocity and cruelty. On occasion, during his early manhood, he displayed determination and the courage of his race; but in later years, after all avenues of action had been closed to him, he became a tyrannical ruler, and gave himself up to horrible vices.”

  However modest his reserves of compassion and charm, Kamran impressed the British intelligence officer Arthur Conolly with his dual act of patricide and regicide. Conolly, who had coined the term “the Great Game” as shorthand for the imperial contest for control of India’s destiny, reached Herat after traveling in disguise all the way from Moscow. His four-thousand-mile reconnaissance mission had convinced him that only a reunified Afghanistan could halt Russian progress toward India. And after continuing on to British territory, he advised his superiors that “Kamran the Cruel” was the sole claimant to the Afghan throne who was up to the task.

  Sa’adat was the third of Kamran’s eight sons, collectively deemed “quite worthless” by one historian and dismissed as “degenerate descendants of the great Ahmed Shah” by another. But when their father was deposed in a palace coup by his prime minister Yar Muhammad in 1842, the four eldest of these “effeminate men” led five hundred others in seizing the citadel where Kamran was imprisoned and bravely held it for fifty days, repulsing five battalions with “the greatest intrepidity,” until artillery and mines brought down the walls around them.

  Yar Muhammad—unwilling, perhaps, to make martyrs—sent the princes out of the territory of Herat unharmed. Kamran was strangled; after his death, Sa’adat’s mother was tortured daily for four years without revealing the whereabouts of a diamond-encrusted girdle that was famed throughout South Asia and would be worth an estimated $300 million today. Sa’adat fled with his elder brother Seif into the mountains of Ghor, in central Afghanistan, where they allied with two independent chiefs and plotted with Yar Muhammad’s cousin to harass the usurper in Herat. When their attacks proved futile, the alliance soured, and he was imprisoned for a while in the onetime harem of a palace in Kandahar, quarters that a French officer and fellow inmate in 1845 judged “worthy of a prince.”

  Two of his brothers died of cholera in exile in Persia in 1846. Another sank there into opium addiction. Three or four of his sisters were sold by Yar Muhammad to the Turkmen, who disposed of them in the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara. Sa’adat was said to have settled in Teheran, where doles paid out to Kamran’s surviving sons by their cousin the shah went to finance lives that G. P. Tate described as “given up to low pleasures, and the indulgence of their depraved appetites.”

  Why Sa’adat decided to leave Persian protection in 1848 and settle in Ludhiana is unknown. Since he was reduced in Teheran to living on an allowance, it probably had to do with money. Perhaps the storied jeweled girdle had been entrusted to one of his relatives in Little Kabul, and his mother, whose ordeal at the hands of Yar Muhammad had ended with her ransom by the shah, sent him to retrieve it. Or, given the turbulence of internal Afghan politics, he may have held out hope that the ascendance of the rival Barakzai clan, which made the Sadozais personae non gratae in their own country, would prove short-lived. In the meantime, he may simply have wished to live closer to Afghanistan.

  The S
adozais, unsentimental to a fault in most matters, were ever enthralled by the allure of their homeland. Ahmad Shah, the founder of the dynasty, invaded India eight times and installed a puppet emperor on the Mughal throne. He could have occupied it himself. If he had based his empire in India, with all its riches and resources, it might have lasted for hundreds of years instead of barely fifty. But Ahmad Shah demurred. The warrior regarded today as the father of modern Afghanistan was also a poet, who wrote in Delhi that grief clung to his heart “like a snake” when he remembered the mountaintops of his homeland.

  Sa’adat’s entry into Nepal as a dealer in “dimond stones and rubees” would explain his visit to Jagdalak before he set out with Nigel for Kathmandu. Sadozai nobles had long claimed the gemstones there as their shared patrimony. But he may have had another reason for asking Nigel to accompany him into that forbidding wilderness of rock without water. He may have wanted his English friend to gaze for himself on the mountains of Afghanistan.

  25

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  A Welcome

  SA’ADAT’S ARRIVAL IN Kathmandu presented Jang Bahadur Rana with an unexpected opportunity to enhance his own prestige. The maharaja understood that his past as a mere bodyguard was too recent to efface it from public memory. But he believed that the presence of foreign royalty in his household served to bolster his stature through association, and he had recently made a show of granting asylum to Rani Jindan Kaur.

  As a prince of the blood royal, Sa’adat was even better suited than Jindan to Jang Bahadur’s project of image building. The details of his illustrious lineage, moreover, were a perfect fit with the maharaja’s aspirations. Jang Bahadur’s ancestors were immigrants from India, who styled themselves as Rajputs upon arrival in Nepal. It was a claim supported by the flimsiest of genealogical evidence, and the established families harbored doubts from the beginning that the newcomers actually belonged to the highest Hindu warrior caste. If anyone could dispel the lingering air of the parvenu that clung to the maharaja’s social status among the surviving nobility, it was Sa’adat. With the Afghan in residence at Thapathali, Jang Bahadur might remind his court at every opportunity that the prince’s Sadozai forebears were Rajput Hindus, who converted to Islam and migrated west.

  Influenced by word of Jindan’s reception, which he seems to have received directly from Henry Lawrence, Sa’adat would have been reasonably certain that the maharaja would admit a fellow royal to his forbidden kingdom. But he surely never expected to be acknowledged as a distant cousin. Jang Bahadur’s enthusiastic welcome must have come as a great relief after the successive bad patches of Sa’adat’s recent past: living rough in the Hindu Kush, imprisonment in Kandahar, exile in Teheran.

  There was also the matter of Sa’adat’s complicated relationship with his ostensible protectors, the British. They may well have instigated his departure from Little Kabul in Ludhiana, simply because they had reason to wish him elsewhere. As a plausible claimant to the Afghan crown, he was capable of causing trouble on the North-West Frontier, already seething with trouble caused by the British themselves as they abandoned the policy of indirect rule championed by Henry Lawrence. Nor would the British have been confident that they could guarantee Sa’adat’s safety there, which they valued less for his sake than for their own, in case they decided to back him at some later date as a candidate for the throne.

  His blood must have run cold at the prospect. He would have needed no reminding of the final, ignominious reign of Shah Shuja, which ended with a bullet to his uncle’s head as soon as British backing was withdrawn. If he harbored doubts about settling in Kathmandu, his remoteness there from British interference could only have quieted them. In the closed society of Nepal, he would neither be stalked by his enemies nor watched by his friends.

  Except, that is, for the newest one. Jang Bahadur, rightly suspected of clandestine dealings with Calcutta by the anti-British faction in the Nepalese army, had pointed to his reception of Jindan as proof of his independence. In truth, the maharaja had secretly promised to keep a close eye on her. If he came across any evidence that she still plotted to revive the Sikh dynasty, he assured Lord Dalhousie, the governor general would be the first to know. Sa’adat would have been accorded similar surveillance.

  The extent of British involvement in the rise of Jang Bahadur will probably never be known. The future maharaja had called regularly on Henry Lawrence during his term as resident, and solicited his advice. Though promoted to the rank of general not long before Henry received his summons to the Punjab, he had continued to maintain a low profile. “He takes no very prominent part just now,” wrote Honoria Lawrence at the time, “and seems to spend his energies in devising new uniforms.” But she went on to predict his future distinction, and even his means of achieving it, through “another slaughter in the Durbar.”

  After Lawrence’s departure, Jang Bahadur thought it prudent to publicly distance himself from the British, a policy influenced by his dislike of the new resident, Colonel George Ramsay. But even as he declined to receive Ramsay except on official occasions, he maintained regular back-channel contact with the residency surgeon, James Dryburgh Login. Like his brother John, who had been appointed guardian of Duleep Singh upon Rani Jindan’s imprisonment, Login owed his position to the exertions of Henry Lawrence, with whom he stayed in close touch.

  According to Login’s sister-in-law, Lady Lena Campbell Login, the young surgeon’s influence over Jang Bahadur was “remarkable,” and it had reached its zenith not long before Sa’adat and Nigel presented themselves at Thapathali Palace. It was Login, she wrote, who inspired Jang Bahadur with “a great desire to go to England to judge for himself what sort of people they were who ruled India.” In defiance of Brahmin priests who threatened him with loss of caste for crossing the ocean, the maharaja had decided to present himself at Buckingham Palace and ask Queen Victoria for her personal assurance that the sovereignty of Nepal would remain unchallenged by the East India Company.

  It was a bold, unprecedented move. For 250 years, the only constant at the tumultuous courts of the subcontinent had been the chronic irritant of the British in one guise or another, beseeching and wheeling and dealing and finally commanding. Yet in all that time, not a single native potentate had troubled to return the favor. Religious scruples had discouraged Hindus, who were taught that leaving India meant cutting themselves off from the regenerating waters of the Ganges and thus entailed the end of the reincarnation cycle. Muslims and Sikhs lacked doctrinal constraints, but they joined with Hindus in fearing a more immediate temporal outcome. It was one thing to relinquish direct authority for a year or more to relatives or allies, quite another to reclaim it.

  Jang Bahadur felt confident that he could minimize the risk to his power by carefully apportioning military commands so that no one or two of his brothers might bring sufficient force to bear to overwhelm the others in his absence. To safeguard the state of his eternal soul, he would see to the inclusion in his luggage of huge casks of water from the Ganges for his daily ablutions. He outlined his plans in a letter to Dalhousie, seeking permission for the journey and official leave for James Login to accompany him.

  Both requests were granted. But by the time word reached Kathmandu, James Login was dead from cholera.

  Jang Bahadur clearly required a cicerone for the journey, and despite the dearth of companionable Englishmen in Nepal, he was not long in finding one. There is no record of Nigel or anyone else receiving sanction from the Company to take Login’s place. Nor is there evidence that Henry Lawrence put forth a candidate—unsurprisingly, since he had fallen out of favor with Calcutta and knew that anyone he suggested to Government House would be a marked man. He nonetheless remained adamantly opposed to further expansion of the Indian Empire, and wished Jang Bahadur every success on his mission to England. Though there was nothing Lawrence could do about the death of his protégé Login, there was nothing to prevent him, either, from putting in a private word with the maharaja for another yo
ung Company man, one he knew to share his views and one moreover who was already on leave and required no dispensation to depart.

  Whether Lawrence played a role in securing his place or not, Nigel was the only European in a party led by the maharaja that departed in March 1850 for shooting at a hunting camp in the Terai, the first stage of a journey that would proceed to Calcutta and the steamship docks on the Hooghly. There, at the end of the first week in April, he joined Jang Bahadur and twenty-three other members of his party in embarking for Southampton.

  After nine years in India, Nigel was headed home.

  26

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  A Showcase

  JANG BAHADUR’S VOYAGE by paddle sloop to England seems to have been uneventful. (Unlike that of two British officers who departed Calcutta on the long journey at about the same time, entrusted with conveying the Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria; after cholera broke out on board, the ship received a hostile welcome in Mauritius and was nearly sunk, then narrowly averted the same fate afterwards in a monumental gale as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope.) But the maharaja’s arrival was front-page news. As the first prince of the East to visit Britain, he created a sensation.

  One newspaper account described him as athletic, dark, and handsome, dressed in splendor, “like most Oriental despots,” with special reference to his sarpech headpiece adorned with rubies, pearls, and diamonds. Waltz king Johann Strauss II composed “The Nepaulese Polka,” with sheet music featuring a half-page lithograph portrait of “General Jang Bahadur Koomwur Ranajee.” On an evening out at Covent Garden with Queen Victoria, Jang Bahadur tossed gold coins onstage at the conclusion of an aria, calling out “Pick up!” in Nepali, and his countrymen believe to this day that this is how the word “tip” entered the English language.