11 The Tyrant and the Scholar

11

 

The Tyrant and the Scholar

 

On the morning of 12 May 1857, a young army captain galloped into the Himalayan hill station of Simla with a telegram. The message had been sent from Delhi to the captain’s father Sir Henry Barnard, commanding officer of the Sirhind division of the Bengal army stationed two hundred kilometres north of the city at Ambala. His son was now forwarding it to the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. The message, sent to Ambala on India’s newly installed telegraph system, reported the opening shots in what British colonial powers would term the Indian or Sepoy Mutiny, and many Indians refer to as the First War of Independence. There had been no shortage of wars against British hegemony in South Asia, most recently the Anglo-Sikh conflicts of the 1840s. This was different. This was a rebellion from deep within, striking at the heart of the British security apparatus: the military and police. What began as a revolt among troops at the garrison town of Meerut, not far from the foothills of the mountains, soon spread south to Delhi and across the northern plains of India.

The commander-in-chief, General George Anson, tucked the telegram

under his plate while he finished his breakfast in the cool of another Himalayan morning. Anson had little experience of the subcontinent. He had seen no fighting since Waterloo, when he was a young subaltern in the Guards, and had spent much of the interim as a member of parliament. He had a passion for horseracing and cards; his appointment the year before had been an unwelcome interruption. Being an officer in the Queen’s service, Anson had little respect for the Indian army, which he regarded as ill disciplined; nor did he have much sympathy with the cultural concerns of Indian sepoys. Like many of the British troops under his command, he had come to the hills from Ambala to escape the heat of the Indian summer, which played havoc with his health, and at first was reluctant to move. He gave orders for arsenals to be secured and troops to move down from the mountains toward Delhi. Three days later, as the situation spiralled towards disaster, he was back in Ambala, complaining that the ‘conduct of the Native Army has destroyed all confidence in any regiment’. He would be dead from cholera within a fortnight and by then India was ablaze.

In the town of Simla itself, news of mutinous ‘native’ troops soon spread

panic: a microcosm of the wider crisis, just as the hill station itself was a microcosm of the British in India. Forty years earlier, Simla, the future summer capital of the Raj, had been a small mountain hamlet set in dense forest, a prize taken from the Gorkhas in 1815 and given to the maharaja of Patiala as reward for his support in the war against Nepal. The region had been studded with Gorkhali forts, including one at nearby Jutogh, and so the country became familiar to British officers and agents stationed nearby. Simla’s rugged scenery combined contemporary romantic ideals of the sublime with relief from the often deadly hot summer months. The congenial political officer Charles Kennedy built the first ‘pukka’ house there and visiting friends began to acquire land so they could do the same. This started a small property boom. Sanatoria opened nearby. When the governor general Lord Amherst stayed in 1827, he set a fashion that turned Simla from a summer retreat into a bustling social whirl, ‘the resort of the rich, the idle and the invalid’, as the pleasingly waspish French botanist and traveller Victor Jacquemont described it in 1829.

A colonial community sprang up whose allegiance can be read in the

names of the gimcrack houses they occupied: Richmond Villa, Woodbine Cottage, The Briars and Annandale View. In a letter to his wife Emily, the architect Edwin Lutyens caught Simla’s surreal appearance: ‘If one was told that monkeys had built it, one could only say, “What wonderful monkeys – they must be shot in case they do it again.”’ It was a world of amateur dramatics and archery on the lawn, but most of all Simla was gossip. ‘Nowhere possibly in the world,’ wrote a correspondent for the Pioneer newspaper later in the century, ‘are the passions of human nature laid so open for dissection as they are in remote hill stations on the slopes of the eternal abodes of snow.’ Servants of empire enjoyed lifestyles they couldn’t possibly afford at home and their hours of leisure freed them to talk. Yet despite this liberation from domestic cares, they found that in Simla ‘discontent breeds, and jealousy and scandal dominate. The smallness of society, eddying round in such a tiny backwater, makes for stagnation.’

In the late 1830s, just as the town hit its stride, a teenage bride born in

Sligo on the west coast of Ireland arrived in Simla. Her beauty, enriched with a splash of Spanish genes, prompted lots of ‘jealousy and scandal’. For now she was still Eliza James. Her stepfather, Simla’s deputy adjutant general, had sent Eliza home to his relatives in Scotland to have the wild streak educated out of her. It didn’t work. She eloped to India at fifteen with ‘a sort of smart-looking man with bright waistcoats and bright teeth,’ according to Emily Eden, the witty sister of the governor general Lord Auckland. He was twice her age but still an impoverished subaltern. ‘[Eliza] is very pretty,’ Emily Eden thought,

and a good little thing, but they are very poor, and she is very young and lively, and if she falls into bad hands, she would soon laugh herself into foolish scrapes. At present the wife and husband are very fond of each other, but a girl who marries at fifteen hardly knows what she likes.

When the couple returned to Calcutta, Eliza’s ‘bright waistcoat’ abandoned her. On the boat back to Europe, once again on her own, she changed her name to Lola Montez, a self-styled Spanish dancer who would one day count Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria among her lovers, as well as Jang Bahadur Rana, prime minister of Nepal.

The self-absorption of colonial life was no less pervasive among the men

in Simla. The Irish journalist William Howard Russell, whose war reporting of the Crimea had made him famous, toured India in 1858 at the end of the rebellion and spent several weeks in the town, leaving an unflattering snapshot of the moments before dinner at the Simla Club:

Servants are hurrying in to wait on the sahibs, who have come to dinner from distant bungalows. The clatter of plates and dishes proclaim that dinner is nearly ready. The British officers and civilians, in every style of Anglo-Indian costume, are propping up the walls of the sitting-room, waiting for the signal to fall on. The little party in the corner have come down from the card-room, and it

is whispered that old Major Stager has won 700 rupees from young Cornet Griffin, since tiff[in]; but Griffin can never pay unless he gets his Delhi prize-money soon; and that little Shuffle, the Major’s partner, who does not look twenty yet, but who is well known as a cool hand, has extracted nearly twice as much from that elderly civilian, who has come up with a liver and full purse from the plains. The others are the soldierless officers of ex-sepoy regiments, Queen’s officers, civilians, doctors, invalids, unemployed brigadiers, convalescents from wounds or illness in the plains; and their talk is of sporting, balls, promotions, exchanges, Europe, and a little politics, re-chaufféd from the last Overland Mail; but as a general rule, all serious questions are tabooed, and it is almost amusing to observe the excessive esprit de corps which is one of the excellences as [well as] one of the defects of the English character, and which now breaks up the officers of the Queen’s, of the Company’s service, and of the civil departments into separate knots.

Russell saw the anxieties of men whose prospects had been turned upside down by the rebellion and the far-reaching reforms it provoked as the East India Company was wound up and the Crown took control. At its remove from the plains, Simla was full of people taking stock, assessing their careers, calibrating their prestige, as well as recreating the social patterns of British life in the Himalaya. The place itself, which had its own rich, complex and indigenous story, was to its new occupiers simply raw material to be acquired and improved, an appropriation reflected in the toponyms the British gave to Simla and the mountains around it: Lord Bentinck’s Nose, a hill on the town’s north-west horizon that was said to resemble that of the governor general who did the land deal that secured the town for the British in the 1830s; Boileauganj, for the soldier and engineer John Theophilus Boileau, who designed and in 1844 laid the cornerstone of Christ Church, finally consecrated in 1857, bringing Anglicanism to the Himalaya just in time for the greatest existential crisis the British had faced in India for a century.

For the most part, from Meerut to Madras, British officials faced

rebellion with courage and determination. The judge at Fatehpur, Robert Tucker, who had erected stone pillars near his bungalow inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Hindi and Urdu, died on the roof of his courthouse, bible in one hand and pistol in the other, having killed a dozen of his assailants. His gravestone read: ‘fell at the post of duty 1857, looking unto Jesus’. This was not the story in Simla. Gossip had given the town a brittle temper. On 14 and 15 May, with the commander-in-chief now on his way to Ambala, rumours swirled that at the nearby barracks of Jutogh, the Nasiri battalion of Gurkhas (not one of the Gurkha battalions formed during the war with Nepal but a newer unit) was in a state of mutiny. Rumour had it that the troops had refused General Anson’s order to march in support of his move on Delhi. The wife of the army’s advocate general Colonel Keith Young wrote to her sister that people believed the Gurkhas

would attack Simla and loot it instead. Our Commissioner (Lord William Hay) and others said it was merely report, and that the regiment was staunch; however, some of the Goorkhas were seen in the bazaar laughing and talking about the Delhi business, and when an Englishman passed he was hissed at. Another report had spread that they intended to go down as ordered, but would join either Europeans or Natives, whichever was strongest.

Even rumours of a Gurkha mutiny were enough to terrorise Simla’s European population. The bank had been designated a safe gathering point under the command of Major General Nicholas Penny, a reportedly experienced officer, but dozens of families were diverted on their way there for fear the Gurkhas had already reached the bazaar. Especially vulnerable were families living in Chhota Simla, an outlying district easily cut off from the security of the town centre. A woman called Emma Young described how she scrambled down into a ravine, or khud, near her house, fearing the Gurkhas had already occupied the bazaar. Later, when she arrived at the bank, she found a hundred armed European men and two artillery pieces, enough to stave off an attack.

But General Penny was quite incapable of maintaining order, and was evidently in the greatest possible fright himself. He allowed many to get intoxicated; and, if the Gurkhas had chosen to come, they could easily have murdered us all. It was a most disgraceful scene and made one ashamed of one’s countrymen.

Her opinion was shared by Mrs Keith Young: ‘some of the gentlemen, we hear, have behaved so badly, showing shocking cowardice – men who, one would have thought, would have braved anything. People are never known until they are tried.’

That evening, Simla’s deputy commissioner Lord William Hay, later the

Marquess of Tweeddale, wearily returned from Jutogh, having sought and been given reassurances from the Gurkhas that they would not mutiny, to share the good news with those occupying the bank, some of whom then melted away to their homes. He had seen enough, though, to know it might still go the other way and suggested that the town’s women should leave. Colonel Keith Young returned to his house the following morning. ‘All quiet. Two sepoys came to the house soon after I got there: very civil, and declared they never intended to alarm any of the “sahib logue” [literally “master race”, meaning Europeans]. The scoundrels!’ Despite the good humour, he and his wife still quit Simla to sleep at the hilltop palace of the rana, or prince of Keonthal, a state that remained loyal to the British, at the nearby village of Junga. (The rana was promoted to raja for ‘good service during the mutiny.’ His people may not have seen it that way.) Meanwhile, talk of a massacre at Simla had spread to the plains, and on 17 May Young was writing to a friend reassuring him all was well:

I write a line to tell you that there is not a word of truth in the reported ‘Simla massacre’. F. [his wife] and I and the dear ‘babies’ are as well as you could wish, enjoying ourselves at this place, some sixteen miles from Simla. We came out here this morning – ‘fled’, you may say – for fear of the mutineering Nusseree [sic] Battalion at Jutogh rising against us and resorting to deeds of violence.

When the British finally returned to their homes, they were exactly as they left them.

*

During the war in 1814 with the Gorkhalis, the British general Sir David Ochterlony had made an offer to disaffected troops in the Gorkhali army to swap allegiance. Initially, that offer brought a few hundred to the British side. The first ‘Gurkha’ battalion was raised from these men and was called the Nasiri, commonly translated as ‘friends’, but more accurately meaning ‘helpers’: a Mughal term that Ochterlony meant as a mark of deep respect for their useful service. Later, when the fighting in the west was done at the end of the first campaign, some 4,700 troops from Gorkha’s western army surrendered to the British. Ochterlony judged that recruiting these men would be preferable to turning them loose to join the other armed bands predating on northern India.

Four battalions were formed and from the start their relationship with

their British officers was unusually close, a stark contrast to regiments of the line. Their presence helped stabilise the region after the turmoil of invasion and war and stimulated the local economy. Yet these new battalions were not local irregulars. Around 1,500 were Gorkhalis, as Prithvi Narayan Shah would have judged them: Chhetris, Magars and Gurungs from the heartland of the Gorkha project. The officers and many of the non-commissioned officers would have come from this group. The rest, however, were from regions the Gorkhas had conquered: Kumaon, Garhwal and districts still within Kathmandu’s control, including Palpa and Jumla.

Calcutta cautiously welcomed this new source of irregular troops that

was cheaper and potentially more reliable than the Bengal Army’s core of Brahmins and Rajputs from Bihar and Oudh. A trickle of new recruits, often with links to serving soldiers, continued to arrive from Nepal, despite Kathmandu’s determined prohibition on recruitment. Most, however, came from outside Nepal, from the Himalayan hill-states west of the Mahakali river. One battalion, the Kumaon, was stationed near here, to guard against military incursion from Nepal. A second Nasiri battalion was raised and with the Simur these three were tasked with protecting the hills of the Sutlej region from the growing threat of invasion from Ranjit Singh and his Sikh Empire. Ranjit, meanwhile, was also recruiting Gurkhas, as he modernised his army. Some of these men came from within Nepal, but he also tried to tempt those serving the British, whose rates of pay were lower.

Today, after the immense bravery and sacrifice of the Gurkhas in the

service of the British through two world wars, it might seem surprising that their intentions and loyalties seemed so opaque to the frightened residents of Simla. But at that time there was a gulf of understanding between the broad mass of colonial servants and those who understood the Himalayan regions the troops called home: British officers who commanded the Gurkhas and the handful of diplomats and political officers from the Foreign and Political Department with deep experience of the region. The ‘Simla panic’ became part of the rebellion’s narrative. When the journalist William Russell described his stay there, he wrote:

Simla was full of women, and men more timid than the women were, and many bad characters were in the bazaar ready for plunder and outrage if the troops broke out. A revolt on the very border of Punjab might have roused the Sikhs beyond [Sir John] Lawrence’s control, and then, indeed history would have had to philosophise over the fall of our empire in India.

A few Gurkhas did rebel. When British troops left the hills for Delhi, a detachment of the Nasiri battalion stationed at nearby Kasauli, under the command of a subedar or warrant officer called Bhim Singh, found itself in possession of the garrison’s treasure chest, which they promptly broke open to help themselves to arrears in pay. Then they marched towards Simla, coming across General Anson’s baggage train, which they destroyed, and a few Englishmen and women, whom they robbed. Anson sent a captain called David Briggs back to talk them round. Briggs was a sensible choice for such a fraught mission. He had been employed for several years supervising construction of the Hindustan–Tibet road, a white elephant dreamed up by the governor general Lord Dalhousie to re-energise Himalayan trade in the aftermath of the Anglo-Sikh wars. Construction relied on corvée labour provided by local chiefs and was bitterly resented. A colleague of Briggs told the House of Commons in 1857 that local people ‘detest every one and every thing connected with the road’. The Gorkha occupation of the Sutlej hills had been disastrous, but there was little more affection for the British. Even so, in the course of his work, Briggs had formed strong bonds in the region and these he exploited in cutting a deal with the disaffected Gurkhas. Almost all were pardoned and properly paid, although the Nasiri battalion was disbanded in 1858 soon after the rebellion was suppressed.

Despite this pocket of disaffection, the Gurkhas proved themselves not

just bravely capable but also astonishingly loyal to their employers. The Nasiri battalion at Simla was exceptional: it was still quite new, recruited to replace the earlier, more famous battalion of the same name that had been promoted to become a regiment of the line. These established Gurkha regiments would prove wholly trustworthy.

On 14 May, news of the rebellion reached Dehra Dun, in the foothills of

the Himalaya between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, where Major Charles Reid commanded the Simur battalion. Within four hours, his Gurkhas, almost five hundred strong, were marching towards Meerut, where the rebellion had first erupted, their pockets crammed with ammunition and two elephants following behind with more. Along the way they were alternately harried and tempted by rebels, but they never wavered. When Reid learned of the uprising against General Sir Archibald Wilson at Delhi, he pointed his troops there instead, marching forty-three kilometres in one night. As the Gurkhas finally reached Wilson’s force, the men of the 60th Rifles opened fire, thinking them the enemy, but cheered when they discovered they were Gurkhas.

Senior officers still had their doubts, as they did about all native troops,

and these native reinforcements were stationed near the artillery, which was given orders to open fire if the Gurkhas offered any trouble, although General Wilson himself judged them ‘true as steel’. Major Reid he trusted absolutely, unlike some of his other officers. The cheerfulness of the Gurkhas endeared them to the ordinary ranks; the riflemen of the 60th and the Himalayan sepoys were soon calling each other brother. ‘They shared their grog,’ Reid wrote, ‘and smoked their pipes together.’ They also carried each other’s wounded from the battlefield. More than half the Simur became casualties before Delhi was recaptured in September 1857 but they still ignored the appeals of the rebels to swap sides. Soon the Gurkhas carried the same bounty on their heads as the British did. Their courage was relentless. Reid told a story about finding a wounded Gurkha boy sheltering behind a rock and holding a rifle. The boy explained the rifle was his father’s. He had been loading it for him at a forward picket when his father had been killed. After that he had helped an English soldier from the 60th, and then carried him from the battlefield after he was injured. The boy had then returned to fight himself, before being wounded in both legs. ‘But I am not much hurt.’ He was fourteen years old. Reid enlisted him on the spot and had him carried to hospital. After Delhi Reid requested and got permission for the Gurkhas to call themselves riflemen rather than sepoys.

Even before 1857, the Gurkhas had their champions, especially after the

Anglo-Sikh wars, when the British discovered just how well they could fight. In 1852, before a select committee of the House of Lords in London, Sir Charles Napier, who as commander-in-chief had promoted the original Nasiri battalion, described them as

very fine soldiers; if we had 30,000 of them in addition to 30,000 of our own Europeans, we should have a force in India that could do what we liked; we should no longer hold India by opinion, but by actual force.

Asked if it would not be better to raise Sikh regiments, Napier replied: ‘Yes, but you do not know the Sikhs are true…. the Sikhs may be good soldiers but the Goorkahs [sic] are as good, and are devoted to us.’ The source of that devotion was complex although money was unquestionably at its heart. Napier himself said that ‘those people are starving in the hills’, and recalled their yell of joy when he told them he had negotiated an increase in pay.

Their wider allegiances seemed less predictable, especially in Calcutta.

Northern India had been awash with guns for hire in the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries and many British officials saw Gurkhas as just another group of mercenaries who would readily change masters if things went badly. Nepal itself remained hostile forty years on from the Treaty of Sagauli. The logic of these arguments was capped with arrogance: Christian moral superiority among the elite and among younger officers a swelling abscess of casual racism. Napier for one regretted this growing distance between sepoys and officers, who no longer saw advantage in learning Hindustani when it was social connection that won promotion.

How different this from the spirit which actuated the old men of Indian renown, whom smaller men should take as guides! The desire to converse with the Sepoys would alone have induced me to study their language.

Napier frequently clashed with the governor general Dalhousie, a man

half his age. (‘Events are rising on the horizon which require the hand of a giant,’ he wrote in 1850, ‘and a pigmy only is present.’) Dalhousie had misgivings about Napier’s proposal that the Gurkhas be integrated into the Bengal army:

I would not have the corps all Goorkhas first because I don’t think it expedient to have these corps all foreigners and second because our own hill subjects are as good soldiers and have a claim on us to be employed.

Dalhousie would remain sceptical about those Gurkhas recruited from inside Nepal, though they were only a fraction of their total. In fact, the Gurkha battalions, far from being specifically Nepali, were both ethnically and nationally complex, something British military officers and civil servants often failed to grasp.

Despite his misgivings, Dalhousie did accede to Napier’s demands that

Gurkha battalions be brought into the regular Bengal Army and paid properly. Towards the end of his term in office he also came to see that Napier’s advice to Parliament was right: an increase in Gurkha troops was essential to the security of India. But at the time, Napier’s warnings went unheeded; it would be decades after the Indian rebellion before the British were allowed to recruit from within Nepal.

*

When the rebellion began in 1857, an ageing former diplomat living at the new hill station of Darjeeling added a sardonic footnote to an essay he had written a quarter of a century ago: ‘On the Origin and Classification of the Military Tribes of Nepal’. Brian Houghton Hodgson, formerly British resident at Kathmandu, had left the Company’s service more than thirteen years earlier but there was no one in Calcutta with remotely his understanding of Nepal, and none had pressed so consistently as he had for the expansion of Gurkha regiments. ‘Since this paper was written,’ he added,

the value and availability to us of the Gorkhali soldier tribes have been well tested, and it is infinitely to be regretted that the opinions of Sir H[enry] Fane, Sir C[harles] Napier and of Sir H[enry] Lawrence, as to the high expediency of recruiting from this source were not acted on long ago.

For the past decade, Hodgson had lived on and off at Brianstone, his bungalow at 2,300 metres looking north to the glittering immensity of Kangchenjunga. Soon after he arrived in 1846 the peak had been mistakenly judged the highest on earth and when the mornings were clear he could watch the rising sun touch its summit like a flame. In April 1848, the young botanist Joseph Hooker arrived at Brianstone for what became a prolonged stay of many months. The view of Kangchenjunga entranced him.

From its vast shoulders the perpetually snowed range I scrutinised east and west for about seventy miles, without the smallest break of the snowline. It is a wonderful panorama, startling in its effect when first revealed by the rising mists on a cloudless morning.

Looking out at this sweeping prospect, Hodgson attempted to process the vast amount of knowledge he had acquired during nearly a quarter of a century spent in Kathmandu. ‘My subjects are Ethnology and Zoology and Education,’ he wrote to his devoted sister Fanny, ‘– all ample fields and yet enough untrodden to render intelligent truthful labours permanently valuable.’ The events of 1857 were an unexpected interruption to this secluded life of scholarship: the discarded threads of Hodgson’s diplomatic career had suddenly reconnected.

A year before the rebellion began in Meerut, Hodgson had received a

request from the prime minister of Nepal, the charismatic Jang Bahadur, whose brutal rise to power had ended years of internal strife in the Nepali court and made the king his puppet. Hodgson had left Kathmandu by then, but the two men had once known each other quite well. Hodgson saw in Jang something of his great-uncle, the prime minister Bhimsen Thapa, whose fall from power Hodgson had witnessed. But he shared also the widespread distrust of officials in Calcutta for Jang, who had, more or less, slaughtered his way to the top. Jang now wanted Hodgson to keep an eye on his future son-in-law Gajraj Singh Thapa, from one of Nepal’s grandest families, who was coming to Darjeeling to brush up his English, fast becoming the lingua franca of the subcontinent. Then in his mid twenties, Gajraj was so taken with tea and Darjeeling’s tea plantations that he introduced the first plantations to Nepal.

Gajraj had been in Darjeeling, staying with Hodgson, for a year when the

rebellion began. As he had done in the Sikh wars, Jang Bahadur now offered assistance to Calcutta, putting the whole of Nepal’s military at the disposal of the British. For the governor general Lord Canning, the offer was a mixed blessing. If the situation deteriorated further, then the large Gorkhali army might switch sides. The situation deteriorated anyway, with brutal massacres of European women and children at Cawnpore and the ferocious siege of Lucknow. Jang might have taken offence at how Calcutta dragged its heels, but he was above all an opportunist and asked Hodgson to use his influence in his favour. Jang needed a friend of Nepal to reassure Canning he was genuine in his offer of support.

To press Jang’s case, in October 1857 Hodgson and his wife Anne went

to Calcutta, staying with an old friend, Sir John Colville, chief justice of Bengal. Colville made an introduction to the governor general, whose father Hodgson had met while at the colonial boarding school, Haileybury, the East India Company’s training college. ‘I could not but be sensible that I had been out of the coach for years,’ Hodgson wrote afterwards. ‘Moreover that I was liable to be ignored as an avowed friend of the Nepalese, who were then looked upon with much suspicion and dislike.’ Lord Canning’s wife Charlotte was a favourite of Queen Victoria and a brilliant watercolourist and botanist. She had been to the Kangra valley and painted the famous hill-fort there, so knew the Himalaya. Yet when introduced to Anne Hodgson, she simply swatted away the idea of help from Nepal: ‘you praise these Gorkhas like your husband, but I can assure you they are looked on here as being little better than the rebels.’ Despite the cool reception, over games of billiards Hodgson talked to Canning about Jang, about his motivation and what he might expect in return for Nepal’s help. No one understood Jang’s perspective better. Hodgson impressed on Canning that much had happened since the Treaty of Sagauli forty years earlier, events Hodgson had witnessed for himself. Hodgson wasn’t simply a retired civil servant offering a relevant and informative briefing. This was a compelling human story with at its heart two very different men: a scholar and a tyrant each learning about the other’s world.

Had Hodgson’s father, also called Brian, been luckier in business, the fate

of his son might have been different. What he did offer were the genes of Methuselah – father and son would live into their nineties – and a passion for hunting. His house, Lower Beech in the Cheshire parish of Prestbury, was full of dogs; one of Hodgson’s earliest memories was his father dressed in a scarlet hunt coat standing with his grandfather, who kept the Old Hall hotel at Buxton, freshly returned bloody-handed from a cockfight. But investments in his cousin’s Macclesfield bank and an Irish copper mine failed; the family was ruined. Only the support of relatives allowed some semblance of respectability. The Hodgsons left Prestbury for more modest lodgings, first in Macclesfield, then Congleton. Brian started at the grammar school in Macclesfield, where he excelled at cricket and scuffled with boys from the local borough school.

Hodgson’s beautiful and charming mother Catherine, matched with an

affable but ineffectual husband, did what any woman in her position would: she started networking. Friendship with the Earl of Clarendon secured a government post for Brian senior as warden of a Martello tower in Clacton on the Essex coast, and while his father looked out for Napoleon, Brian junior went to school in Surrey. James Pattison, a former silk manufacturer and a neighbour in Congleton, was also a director of the East India Company, and as such had the right to nominate one civil service candidate each year, a privilege that provoked ferocious lobbying and corruption. James Mill, who published his gigantic History of India in 1817, quipped that Britain’s empire was ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes’, but in truth to enter the Company as a ‘writer’ or secretary was to join one of the best-paid commercial entities in the world, like climbing aboard Goldman Sachs, though with a far higher risk of not reaching retirement: the fatality rate among civil servants in India was twice that of those who remained in Britain. Still, Pattison must have liked Catherine and her oldest son, for he bestowed his nomination on Brian. He was less generous to the children who worked in his silk mill.

With Pattison’s nomination, Brian Hodgson started at Haileybury a year

early, aged fifteen. He was installed in the house of the college’s academic star, Thomas Malthus. Here some of the most influential intellectuals and politicians of the early nineteenth century gathered to discuss issues of the day. Hodgson’s patron James Pattison, soon to be chairman of the East India Company, visited his young protégé, bringing with him his close friend George Canning, then president of the Board of Control, later prime minister. Canning gave the young Hodgson a seminar on Indian colonial history and ‘a brilliant sketch of the career possible for an Indian civilian’. Hodgson was being offered the keys to the kingdom; his family were looking to him to rescue them from debt: he must not fail.

Hodgson excelled at Haileybury, coming top of his year and winning

prizes for Bengali, a distinction that put him in the front rank when, aged seventeen, he embarked for Calcutta and his civil service training at Fort William College. The climate almost immediately killed him. Born in the soft, temperate drizzle of the Cheshire plain, the sweltering heat and prodigious rains of the monsoon quickly took their toll. His health broke and never wholly recovered, despite his longevity. His doctor told him: ‘Here is your choice – six feet underground, resign the service, or get a hill-appointment.’ The advice put Hodgson in a bitter quandary. He had dedicated himself to releasing his family from debt, but there were few opportunities he might survive. In 1819, Darjeeling, a future hub of tea production, remained a forested hill. Simla was still an obscure Himalayan village. There were only two postings available in the mountains: in Kumaon, recently wrested from the Gorkhali kingdom of Nepal, and in the capital of Nepal itself, the residency at Kathmandu. These posts were in the control of the Bengal Civil Service’s Foreign and Political Department and were highly prized, their award resting ultimately with the governor general.

Ordinarily, such a post would be out of the question for someone so

young and untried but Hodgson’s connections in Calcutta rescued him. An aunt was a friend of Lady Elizabeth D’Oyly, wife of Sir Charles D’Oyly, artist and Company man, who held the most entertaining and glamorous salon in Calcutta. Hodgson was hardly a party-goer. His nickname at the Tent Club, dedicated to hunting wildlife, was the ‘young philosopher’. Yet he was welcome at D’Oyly’s, where the expressed aim was the exclusion of bores, and if he was quieter than some of his fellows, he enjoyed the conversation and company of women, another hint of his mother’s influence. So it was, with a word from Eliza D’Oyly to her cousin Flora, wife of the governor general, the Marquess of Hastings, Hodgson secured the post of assistant to George William Traill, commissioner of Kumaon. In August 1819, Hodgson graduated top of his year, debating publicly at graduation ceremony in both Persian and Bengali. Next day his appointment was made official; he was on his way to the Himalaya.

His new boss George Traill, commissioner of Garhwal and Kumaon, was

a no-nonsense frontiersman who would spend twenty-one years roaming the mountains, visiting each inhabited place to catalogue the region’s wealth and resources. Kumaon had suffered for generations from a sequence of invasions, first from Afghan Muslims who terrorised local farmers and moaned about the cold, then from the Gorkhali army. They oppressed Kumaon with such cruelty that it passed into proverb and legend; half of Kumaon’s farms had been abandoned. Traill lifted many of the Gorkhali taxes and came up with a more equitable system. The report he eventually produced from these investigations became a model for administrators elsewhere in India. The governor general might have ruled in Calcutta, but Traill was king of the Kumaon. It was under Traill that Hodgson served his apprenticeship, following his master throughout the winter of 1819 and the first part of 1820, climbing over endless mountain ridges to every remote village where they discussed, with no need of interpreters, everyday problems with the headman. Traill made a point of learning about every aspect of Kumaon life, a habit Hodgson would adopt as his own.

In October 1820, when Hodgson was transferred to Kathmandu as

assistant to the resident, the notion he would spend the rest of his career there would have appalled him. The posting was simply another rung on the ladder. Having learned from George Traill, he now had

another man to form myself upon, a man with all the simplicity and more than the courtesy of Traill – a man who was the perfection of good sense and good temper; who liking the Nepalese and understanding them, was doing wonders in reconciling a Court of Chinese proclivities to the offensive novelty of responsible international dealing.

This was Edward Gardner, who had taken up his post in the summer of 1816. As we saw earlier, his mission was straightforward: to do as little as possible as politely as possible. Nepal must be calm and China reassured that its western marches were safe from the East India Company. He spent much of his time gardening.

Hodgson had few professional duties to occupy him, beyond acting as

Gardner’s secretary. He was limited by decree from straying more than half a day’s walk from the residency. There was plenty of time to learn Gorkhali, the Khas language now known as Nepali, and Newari, the language of the Kathmandu valley, to go with his Bengali and Persian. Yet ambition gnawed away at him. Hodgson appealed to friends in Calcutta and within two years of his arrival Brian Hodgson was gone, promoted to deputy secretary in the Foreign and Political Department. This was preferment, marking Hodgson as destined for great things, perhaps a seat on the Company’s council or government of an Indian province. But once back in the broiling heat of Calcutta, his health collapsed again. Going back to the hills might save Hodgson, but his old job in Kathmandu was taken. He was saved by that rare phenomenon, a powerful but kindly man. William Butterworth Bayley was a senior and trusted figure in the Calcutta secretariat and knew everyone. When Hodgson appealed to him, Bayley sent him back to Kathmandu as the residency’s postmaster, a job invented just for Hodgson in order to save his health. ‘Go back to Nepal and master the subject in all its phases,’ Bayley told him. ‘In the present times you can learn little there. But we have had one fierce struggle with Nepal and we shall have another yet.’ Mastering Nepal ‘in all its phases’ would be his life’s work.

Hodgson was sustained in Kathmandu by letters from home and his

deepening interest in study. He had a long and intense correspondence with his sister Fanny, a detailed and at times moving insight into his isolated life. He poured out his frustrations and hopes to her. Fanny found herself the recipient of despatches from the most exotic posting in the subcontinent. Like his father before him, Hodgson was a keen shot and with his sport came a growing interest in the Kathmandu valley’s natural history. He began to make an in-depth study of its birds and animals, its flowers and agriculture.

I have three native artists always employed in drawing from nature [he told Fanny]. I possess a live tiger, a wild sheep, a wild goat, four bears, three civets, and three score of our beautiful pheasants. A rare menagerie! And my drawings now amount to two thousands.

He worked hard in the residency garden too, planting oats and potatoes and at the cottage given to the resident up in the hills above the city, he made a little corner of England. ‘The sward is emerald,’ he told Fanny, ‘and the familiar tokens it displays in its daisies fern, thistle, and colewort, are dear to the exile.’ He showed the same enthusiasm for his developing interest in Buddhism. Hodgson’s collection of Sanskrit texts was unprecedented for a European. Those he sent the scholar Eugène Burnouf in Paris helped launch the academic study of Buddhism in the West. His deep knowledge and appreciation of Buddhist doctrines earned him the friendship of Tibetan lamas as well as the court in Kathmandu. Part of his growing influence with Nepal’s rulers stemmed from this cultural sympathy. He gave up alcohol and meat, partly to protect his weak liver. ‘I live,’ he told his sister, ‘like a Brahman.’

For his masters in Calcutta Hodgson made a detailed study of the

organisation of the Nepali military – and the possibility of adding to the Company’s Gurkha battalions. In the process, Hodgson judged that the Company’s strengthening grip on northern India, far from pacifying Nepal’s appetite for war, had only sharpened it. British annexation had damaged Nepal’s economic model and left the elite thirsting for military action and the loot that came with it. Prithvi Narayan had created a hereditary ruling class whose organising principle was military service. ‘Soldiers have been and are heads of the law and finance at Kathmandu, and administrators of the interior. Soldiers have been and are everything.’ Bhimsen Thapa kept those soldiers in a state of habitual aggression.

In my humble opinion, [Hodgson told Calcutta, the Gurkhas] are by far the best soldiers in India, and if they are made participators of our renown in arms, I conceive that their gallant spirit and unadulterated military habits might be relied on for fidelity.

Gurkha loyalty, Hodgson added, would be assured by receipt of a regular pay cheque. By absorbing Nepal’s reserve troops, around ten thousand in number, the British could give the elite in Kathmandu the cash it needed and dilute Nepal’s military frustration. The idea was sound but when he wrote this, in the early 1830s, India was at peace. The governor general Lord William Bentinck and the secretariat in Calcutta thanked Hodgson politely for his report and ignored it.

Nine years after his return to Kathmandu and thirteen years since he first

saw the city, Hodgson feared he was drifting in a backwater with no influence or importance. Despite being confirmed as resident in 1833, he told his sister: ‘I am 33 – the last thirteen years passed in the wilderness without wife, children or the presence of a female. No change, no society!’ When his brother Will died, not long after his younger brother Edward, Hodgson told his sister that at least their brothers were spared the disappointments and disillusion of middle age. ‘Happy, thrice happy they who quit this troubled scene ere the bloom of their virtuous feelings has been rubbed off!’ Hodgson was left to pay off his brother’s debts. Despite his growing reputation as an academic, Hodgson felt disappointed, duty-bound to support his ageing parents with no chance of further advancement. It was at this point, just as he had begun to think of his pension, that Hodgson was plunged into the most demanding period of his career.

*

While the Nepali king Rajendra had been a minor, under the regency of Tripura Sundari, her uncle Bhimsen Thapa was able to maintain his tight grip on the army, shutting out the Thapa family’s great rivals, the Pandes. Then in 1832 Tripura died of cholera and Rajendra came of age, a man Hodgson described as ‘mad, cruel, violent, mean, pusillanimous and weak’. Slowly at first, but then with increasing speed, Nepal’s elite imploded in violence and intrigue. Bhimsen was now in his sixties and relied increasingly on his forceful young nephew Mathabar Singh. Hodgson could see his old adversary weakening and took advantage, proposing a new trade agreement. Bhimsen was sympathetic in principle and wasn’t strong enough to antagonise Hodgson. Equally he couldn’t appear too close to the British in front of the court. So he sent his nephew Mathabar to Calcutta in the winter of 1835 to ask permission to travel to London with letters for William IV, seeking international recognition for his regime. Hodgson blocked that move, which dented Bhimsen’s prestige. The stage was being set for Bhimsen’s downfall.

Nepal’s king Rajendra had two wives, both called Laksmi Devi. The

senior queen, Samrajya Laksmi Devi, was a Pande, mother of the crown prince Surendra; the junior queen, Rajya Laksmi Devi, was a Thapa. The king fretted between them, alternately screamed at or ignored. When Samrajya’s young infant son Devendra died, rumours spread he had been poisoned. The doctor who attended him was tortured horribly and gave up Bhimsen Thapa as a conspirator, shortly before being crucified. Bhimsen was imprisoned and his nephew Mathabar fled to India.

Bhimsen’s replacement was Ranjang Pande, son of Damodar, who had

been beheaded in 1804 as Bhimsen came to power. Virulently anti-British and determined to restore his family’s fortunes, his rise to power coincided with a worsening political situation for the East India Company which was now embroiling itself in Afghanistan, alarmed at the rise of Russian influence in that region. Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire, was also becoming a threat and had established diplomatic links with Kathmandu. Tension between the British and the Gorkha regime grew so great that the governor general Lord Auckland sent sixteen thousand troops in 1838 to Nepal’s southern border. Despite the military presence, Hodgson was horribly exposed.

Luckily for the Company’s resident, Ranjang overplayed his hand.

Assuming the king would sanction a lucrative war, he had ordered an expensive refit of the military: new cannon, musket balls and gunpowder. But as he raised taxes to pay for it all, opinion in the aristocracy turned against him. So, to secure his position, Ranjang decided to remove once and for all the latent threat posed by Bhimsen and Mathabar. Assassins were sent to India to poison the latter, now living in Simla, albeit uncessfully, while Bhimsen was charged with murdering the previous king Rajendra’s father, Girvan Yuddha, an old rumour that was wholly false. More doctors were tortured for information, including a Newari who was impaled in front of the king before having his heart torn out. No evidence was forthcoming, but Bhimsen was thrown back in jail anyway. Exhausted and threatened with torture, Bhimsen was told, falsely, that his wife had been paraded naked through the streets of the city. The old man, burning with shame, committed suicide. At the death of his longstanding adversary, Hodgson told his superiors that apart from Ranjit Singh, there had been no greater native statesman of recent times.

For much of 1840 the situation hung in the balance. The East India

Company was stretched, fighting the First Opium War in China while simultaneously occupying Kabul. Rajendra approached the Chinese, on the hunt for allies. In April, a Nepali force seized several villages across the border in India. Hodgson’s personal safety was threatened and he sent the residency’s head munshi (interpreter) to the palace, warning Rajendra of swift and terrible consequences if he was murdered. The Gorkhali army was on the brink of mutiny, infuriated at cuts in pay and itching to loot Lucknow and Patna across the border. ‘True, the English government is great,’ a general told Rajendra, who had been summoned to the parade ground to hear the army’s grievances, ‘but care the wild dogs of Nepal how large is the herd they attack?’ They wanted Nepal’s old colonies east and west of Nepal’s imposed borders returned, and with it Gorkha prestige.

Alerted by Hodgson’s warnings, the governor general Lord Auckland

promised troops and Hodgson issued an ultimatum, demanding the Nepalis withdraw their forces. As the crisis reached its climax in September he wrote to his parents: ‘I steal a moment from official writing to tell you I am well, and that you need entertain no fears for me though war ensue with Nepal, as it probably will immediately.’ Instead, the Gorkha show of strength evaporated to nothing. Seventy-five years after Prithvi Narayan Shah consolidated a mosaic of small Himalayan states into a new nation, fear, greed and jealousy had hollowed out its elite and left the economy moribund. Nepal’s vaunted martial threat had been shown to be little more than posturing. Nepal paid the East India Company compensation, Ranjang was fired and a chief minister more congenial to the British interest was appointed. Auckland heaped praise on Hodgson’s handling of the crisis.

Never again would Nepal pose a serious threat to the British in India. The

senior queen Samrajya, outraged by the change in government, continued to resist the East India Company’s influence but she died in late 1841, aged just twenty-three. That winter the British army suffered its worst humiliation of the nineteenth century when more than sixteen thousand troops and civilians perished during their retreat from Kabul. Yet Nepal’s elite, fatally weakened by court factionalism, was no longer able to take advantage of British vulnerability. In May 1845, Sir Henry Lawrence, Hodgson’s successor as resident, could write to Calcutta in reference to this infighting: ‘So much blood has been shed in Nepaul, that it must now continue to flow.’ He called the rising tide of assassinations and savagery ‘sanguinary proceedings’, and concluded that because there was ‘no chance of domestic peace …

I do not therefore augur danger to the British Government. There is not a soldier in Nepaul, scarcely a single man, that has seen a shot fired; and not one that could head an army.

The East India Company judged that only insurrection within India could make Nepal a threat again, a prediction that would come back to haunt them.

Hodgson himself had left Kathmandu in December 1843, evicted by the

new governor general Lord Ellenborough, who disliked Hodgson’s influence on Nepal’s domestic affairs as much as Auckland had been grateful for it. The king Rajendra was distraught. He had known Hodgson for most of his life and at their final audience burst into tears, calling the departing resident, a man he had often wanted dead, the ‘saviour of Nepal’. Taking a jewel from his turban, he turned to the new resident, Sir Henry Lawrence, and begged that Hodgson be allowed to accept the gift, for the debt he owed ‘Mr Hodgson’s prudence and patience under many and great provocations’. The jewel was declined. Ellenborough was not so grateful. He had instructed Lawrence to offer Hodgson the job of sub-commissioner in Simla, a humiliating demotion designed to provoke Hodgson’s resignation, which promptly followed.

*

The darbar was now split between three factions: the feeble Rajendra, the psychopathic teenage crown prince Surendra, a man who took pleasure in watching torture, and the previously junior queen Laksmi Devi, a woman no less manipulative and determined than the senior queen Samrajya had been in promoting the interests of her own son. As Lawrence put it: ‘Mr Nepal, Master Nepal and Mrs Nepal’. Lawrence stayed in Kathmandu for barely two years, but that was long enough to witness the return, rise and brutal murder of Mathabar Singh, Rajendra’s latest mukhtiyar, or chief minister, and his replacement by Jang Bahadur: the potentate whose offer of assistance to the British Hodgson would present to Canning over billiards some fourteen years later, in 1857.

Laksmi Devi had tempted Mathabar home from Simla, where he had

been living on a British pension following his uncle Bhimsen Thapa’s suicide and the attempt on his own life. To reassure him, Laksmi sent Mathabar’s nephew to fetch him: this was Jang Bahadur.

Jang’s father was Bal Narsingh Kunwar, a soldier in the bodyguard of

Rajendra’s grandfather Rana Bahadur. When in 1806 Rana Bahadur was murdered, it had been Bal Narsingh who struck the killer down, earning the gratitude of Bhimsen Thapa. After Bhimsen’s putsch, in which he became chief minister and many of his enemies were murdered, Bal Narsingh was promoted to kazi, or minister, and later governor of Jumla. Jang’s mother was Bhimsen’s niece, Ganesh Kumari. When their first son was born, Bal Narsingh wanted to name the boy Bir Narsingh, but the Thapas put their foot down and changed his name to Jang Bahadur: ‘brave in war’.

With the Thapas the pre-eminent family in Nepal, Jang’s childhood was

privileged, but when the queen Samrajya Laksmi Devi sent Bhimsen to prison, Jang, then aged eighteen, disappeared from view. For a time he was quite literally in the wilderness, working as an elephant-tamer in the jungles of the terai to pay off his gambling debts. After a spell in Benares, the family fortunes began to rise again and in 1839, Jang returned to Kathmandu. He came to the attention of Rajendra during an elephant hunt in early 1840. A wild elephant was surrounded but no one could get near it until Jang strode up and lassoed the creature’s rear legs. Rajendra was so impressed he promoted Jang to be a captain in the artillery. Later that year, the biggest elephant in the royal stables went wild, trampling its keeper to death. Once again, it was Jang who brought the animal under control. A notorious womaniser, he had to be fetched from a nearby brothel. (Jang claimed to have slept with 1,400 women over the course of his life. His descendants claim he offered any woman twenty thousand rupees if she could make him ejaculate before he was ready. No one ever claimed the prize; it was said Jang’s opium addiction was responsible. He also freely admitted to making up stories about himself.)

Once he had been fetched back from Simla at queen Laksmi Devi’s

behest, Jang’s uncle Mathabar was appointed chief minister in late 1843 but soon had cause to regret his homecoming. Jang owed much to Mathabar, but increasingly the pair clashed. Mathabar was a genuinely impressive man; Lawrence called him ‘a hero compared with the best of them’. Jang, although twenty years younger, was from the same cloth, only shrewder and more ruthless. Mathabar decided to take his nephew down a peg or two, transferring him from the bharadari, or council of nobles, to prince Surendra’s bodyguard, which Jang resented. Meanwhile, Rajendra, Surendra and Laksmi Devi bickered incessantly. In contrast to Hodgson’s day, the East India Company maintained a position of icy indifference and with no lead from the British, Mathabar preferred Surendra as the element of that trio he could manipulate most easily. This alienated the queen and, when Laksmi Devi extracted permission from her husband Rajendra to assassinate Mathabar, it was Jang who was ordered to carry it out.

Summoned to the palace late at night and leaving his bodyguard behind,

Mathabar came before the king and queen, both already in bed. Jang then stepped out from behind a screen and shot his uncle. Once he was sure Mathabar was dead, Rajendra leaped out of bed, kicked Mathabar’s corpse and claimed responsibility for the killing. No one believed him. As the crown prince Surendra observed, Rajendra couldn’t kill a rat, let alone a man like Mathabar. Lawrence told his superiors: ‘The Maharaja may have mangled the corpse; but I must doubt His Highness having the courage to fire a gun, much more to face his late Minister.’ Even so, he discounted rumours of Jang’s involvement. ‘Poor as is my opinion of Jang’s moral character, I do believe him guiltless.’ And yet guilty he was.

The crime weighed on Jang, on his conscience and in the knowledge that

if he could do that to his own uncle then Jang would never be safe himself from anyone, even his own family. Years later, while showing the colonial official and author Laurence Oliphant around his house in Kathmandu, he paused before some portraits.

Jang called our attention to one of these; it was … of a strikingly handsome man, whose keen eye and lofty brow seemed almost to entitle him to the position he held between the Duke of Wellington and the Queen [Victoria]. ‘See,’ said Jang, enthusiastically, ‘here is the Queen of England; and she has not got a more loyal subject than I am.’ Then turning to the picture of the man with the keen eyes and high forehead, he remarked, ‘That is my poor uncle Mahtiber [sic] Singh, whom I shot; it is very like him.’

The murder of Mathabar Singh prompted a lull, during which the East India Company went to war with the Sikh Empire and Sir Henry Lawrence was recalled from Kathmandu to take up a new post, first assisting the governor general Sir Henry Hardinge and then as agent at Lahore. At Sagauli in January 1846, on their way back to Calcutta, Lawrence’s wife Honoria, an adroit and witty observer of Nepali life and politics, wrote to their friend George Clerk, a member of the East India Company’s board of directors in London. Likening the factions at court to Kilkenny cats, she was certain the calm mood could not continue:

Jang Bahadoor, Mathbur’s nephew, is likewise a general and called commander-in-chief. He takes no very prominent part just now, and seems to spend his energies in devising uniforms. But he is active and intelligent, and if (perhaps it would be more correct to say, when) there is another slaughter in the Durbar, the struggle will probably be between Jang Bahadur and Guggur [Gagan] Singh.

Honoria Lawrence was right. In September that year, late in the evening, the queen’s favourite and presumed lover Gagan Singh was ‘shot in a chamber of his house’, according to the acting resident Captain Ottley, ‘while in the performance of his devotions [prayers]’. His son hurried to the palace to tell Laksmi Devi. Incandescent with fury, Laksmi Devi hurried on foot to Gagan’s house. When she saw the body she broke down and wept, and for a moment couldn’t continue with the rituals she had come to perform, placing gold and basil, and drops of Ganges water, in Gagan’s mouth. Then, in a moment of female solidarity, she turned to Gagan’s three widows and forbade them to commit sati on their husband’s funeral pyre. That mercy done, she acted.

Taking a sword from her attendants, Laksmi marched back to the palace

and told Jang to summon the bharadari to the kot, or armoury. While she waited, she cried over and over, as Ottley reported, that ‘until the man who had assassinated so faithful a Minister should be discovered and put to death, she would neither take food nor taste water.’ Jang complied with her order but took the precaution of bringing three regiments loyal to him to wait outside. He smelt danger but also opportunity. When the courtiers were gathered, Laksmi Devi pointed the finger at the wrong man and ordered him killed. The courtier charged with this task, Abhiman Singh, refused. He knew the man was innocent because he had in fact been one of the conspirators; he said he would kill no one without authorisation from the chief minister, a relative of the king called Fateh Jang Shah. The king Rajendra was sent to fetch him. Night wore on; tempers frayed.

Having fulfilled his mission and told Fateh Jang to go to the kot,

Rajendra decided to visit the British residency and seek its help. Captain Ottley, a young man uncertain what to do, sent his munshi to tempo-rise. And so it was that the king of Nepal waited at the gates of a foreign power to complain to a man who wouldn’t listen about the murder of his wife’s lover. The munshi gently suggested Rajendra go home; the king returned to the kot. When he got there, the gutters were running with blood and crowds were thronging the entrance, preventing him from entering. He gratefully rushed home and did what he had done before in times of crisis: hid in bed. Rajendra’s reign was almost over.

When Fateh Jang Shah had finally arrived that night, Jang had told him

they should back the queen and execute Abhiman Singh. Though Fateh refused, Abhiman now feared a plot. He told his bodyguards to load their muskets. Seeing this, Jang climbed up the narrow stairs to warn the queen who was watching from above. She descended to the courtyard, again demanding the man she had accused be killed. When that didn’t happen she tried to assault him herself. Fateh Jang Shah and Abhiman restrained her, but while following her back up the stairs, someone, probably one of Jang Bahadur’s brothers, opened fire. Given the numbers of troops gathered near the kot supporting various parties inside, a massacre was now inevitable and when the sun rose on 15 September, bodies of soldiers and bharadari alike were piled in the courtyard. Fifty-five were judged ‘worth having their names preserved’, but the true death toll was higher. Jang had his men dig a vast square pit and then shouted up to prince Surendra, who was watching from above: ‘Whatever they could do for you, I can do.’

Even before the night was over, the queen had declared Jang prime

minister but if she thought she could manage him as she had others, it was a bad miscalculation. Jang had no intention of replacing the malleable Surendra with the queen’s son, as she wished. When she replaced him as chief minister, Jang killed his replacement and sent the queen into exile at Benares. Rajendra meekly followed. Although they continued to plot Jang’s downfall, there was little loyalty left for them to draw on. Rajendra attempted an invasion but was easily defeated and placed under house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life, outliving Jang Bahadur by four years. Surendra became king, but was also kept in isolation. Laksmi Devi remained in exile at Benares; a photograph taken years later shows a debauched and prematurely old woman living on a tiny British pension; the date of her death is unknown. The crown of Nepal was now wholly the puppet of Jang Bahadur. With his brothers at his side, Jang felt comparatively secure. He had himself promoted to pradhan mantri, a direct translation of the British term ‘prime minister’. In time, his family’s origins were also massaged. Plain Jang Bahadur Kunwar became Jang Bahadur Kunwar Ranaji. The ‘Rana’ suffix gave him a princely air, a touch of Mughal swagger with a hint of Rajput class. He even had Surendra ‘confirm’ the Kunwar’s noble Rajasthani origins. Jang Bahadur’s Rana clan would dominate Nepal for the next hundred years.

*

Having got a grip of Nepal, Jang’s interest turned to the British Empire. He had grown up during a period when British influence in Kathmandu had grown from marginal presence to major influence on court politics. He knew threats to cure the elite’s greed and dissatisfaction with an invasion of India would likely end in catastrophe. Better to placate his gigantic neighbour than provoke violence. But his fascination was more than political. What kind of world did the foreigners inhabit? How had they achieved such power?

To answer his own curiosity, on 15 January 1850, seven years before the

Indian rebellion and his offer of assistance to Lord Canning, Jang Bahadur left Kathmandu for Britain, or Belait as it is in Nepali, like the Hindustani source for ‘Blighty’. Leaving his brother Bam Bahadur in charge, Jang took with him a retinue of around twenty-five, including his two youngest and favourite brothers, an artist, a singer, a doctor – ayurvedic, naturally – and someone to write down the group’s impressions of their travels, a document known as the Belait Yatra. Accompanying them was Captain Cavenagh of the Bengal Army, who later wrote his own account, and a British Calcutta lawyer called Macleod, who acted as interpreter and private secretary.

First they travelled to Patna, tiger-hunting en route, where the

pervasiveness of British influence was faithfully recorded. ‘Toasting,’ wrote their chronicler, ‘is a custom at British banquets.’ The Nepalis toured Calcutta, inspecting sewage works and weaving machines, bottle manufacturers and the mint where India’s rupees were fashioned. The governor general greeted them with a nineteen-gun salute, not quite the full twenty-one, but more than for other Indian princes. Jang and his retinue, like all good Hindus facing a voyage across the kala pani, or ‘black water’, made a pilgrimage to Puri to prepare their souls for the journey ahead. Then they embarked on the P&O ship Haddington. Jang had the boat to himself, which was fortunate given that he became violently seasick. He was quoted as complaining: ‘The waves rose high like mountains and people sleeping on the bedsteads were in danger of being rolled down.’ The chronicler, whose identity is uncertain, recorded Nepali bewilderment at how efficiently the ship was managed, apparently without violence. And, of course, for a writer who had never seen the ocean, unbroken views of water were compelling. ‘There was no mountain, no tree, no bush, no land to be seen. The sun rose out of the water and sank back into it.’

The crew were equally bemused with their illustrious passenger. What

was he? A king? A prime minister? Or an ambassador? And what to make of a man wearing clothes of the very finest silks and jewels worth a fortune who nevertheless liked to milk the cows on board ship and strip to his dhoti in public to wash himself. Most intriguingly, he ate alone, to avoid the spiritual pollution of eating with non-Hindus. At Suez the group disembarked and travelled overland to Cairo, where a riverboat took them to Alexandria and the SS Ripon whose fore-cabins and saloons had been reserved for Jang and his retinue. Steaming past Gibraltar, which became ‘Jivapur’ to Jang’s chronicler, they reached Southampton – ‘Sautanghat’ – on 26 May 1850.

Both hosts and visitors were transfixed by each other. The chronicler was

overwhelmed by the comparative wealth of ordinary people. ‘Not one bad-looking or undernourished individual was to be seen.’ There was none of the smallpox victims or disfigured lepers so common in the streets of Kathmandu. Meanwhile British writers were both intrigued and appalled by what they saw. ‘The servants of the embassy were evidently of the lowest caste,’ observed the Morning Post. ‘Some were meanly and miserably clad, many of them without shoes, and their clothing formed a striking contrast to the magnificent costume of the chiefs.’ The gifts Jang had brought were worth more than £17 million and yet his servants were shabby.

The Nepalis were given digs on Richmond Terrace, or ‘Rijavant Karij’ as

the chronicler transcribed it, a neoclassical block of eight houses completed in 1825 between Downing Street and the Thames. Jang made himself at home, although the Nepalis’ habit of slaughtering goats on the premises was met with alarm from their British attendants. Billeted close to the Palace of Westminster, Jang witnessed London approaching the zenith of its imperial splendour. Piped water, hot-air balloons, the theatre, steam engines, parks, railways, ironworks: all of it impressed. Jang said: ‘The English have made fire, water and wind their slaves.’ The chronicler noticed how everyone in Belait wore a watch. ‘Getting dressed, eating, keeping appointments, sleeping, getting up or going out – everything is determined by the clock.’ The Nepalis had become explorers in a previously undiscovered land. And as the chronicler observed, it was a land on which Laksmi, the goddess of wealth, had smiled.

Most compelling was the system of government. ‘The sovereign,’ the

chronicler wrote with, you sense, an attitude of incredulity,

cannot confiscate anybody’s property, punish anyone, resort to violence or insult, nor hand out and cancel appointments at his own pleasure, as if he were absolute master of his own resources.

Instead, there was a parliament that could dismiss the prime minister should he fail in his duties. Most tellingly, the sovereign was subordinate to the will of the same parliament. That must have pleased Jang. ‘A man’s rank is of no account if he does wrong,’ wrote the chronicler, but he recorded too how the common people had responsibilities to wider society.

For their part, Londoners were enthralled watching the first high-caste

Hindu to visit Europe being driven down Piccadilly. The press tried to outdo each other with descriptions of Jang’s exoticism. The Times noted how sleek he appeared alongside his ‘two short, or rather, fat brothers, who accompany him. His features are of the Tartar cast.’ He learned the polka; one enterprising London music publisher was soon selling scores to a dance entitled ‘Long Live Jang Bahadur!’ Thackeray wrote a ditty about Jang’s impact on London society (‘Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat / All bleez’d with precious minerals … ’) published in the new satirical magazine Punch. Jang and his brothers hated the opera – all that screeching, they complained – but they clapped anyway, so hard in fact, that Queen Victoria, whose box they were sharing, asked why they should be applauding so hard when they hadn’t understood a word of it. Jang responded prettily: ‘No, Madam, nor do I understand what the nightingales sing.’

The Times also reported that Jang was attempting to pick up a little

English, although one writer who met him later in Kathmandu noted he had only three phrases: ‘How d’you do?’ ‘Very well, thank you,’ and: ‘You are very pretty.’ Jang’s roving eye and his obvious appeal to English women followed its inevitable if discreet course. The Kunwars adored Cremorne Gardens, with its gigantic dancing platform, modern gaslights and quiet corners where gentlemen could meet the brightly dressed prostitutes. Jang preferred whores and adventurers to noble-born women, because talking them into bed took less effort and had fewer consequences. A shop girl called Laura Bell, born on Lord Hertford’s Irish estates and recently arrived from Belfast, caught Jang’s eye and he lavished gifts on her, mostly valuable jewellery. Alarmed that adventurous young women were fleecing an honoured guest, ministers of state, anxious to maintain good relations, authorised reimbursement.

When Jang first arrived in Paris on the way home to Nepal, the French

rather mocked him for standing off from female company, but his usual habit was soon restored. Jang and his brothers adored the girls at the ballet; after the performance they would nip back-stage to spread some jewellery around. Jang especially wanted to meet a dancer named on the programme as Mme Fanny Cerito, better known in London as Lola Montez and in the narrow lanes of Simla as Eliza James. She had not long been forced out of Bavaria, during Europe’s tumultuous summer of revolutions in 1848, after the people of Munich besieged her house, fed up with her fleecing Ludwig, their ‘old, adulterous, idiot sovereign’. Now she was dancing again, although she had little skill at it. Her charms lay elsewhere. Having grown up in India she could converse freely with Jang in Hindustani. Neither could believe their luck. The newspaper L’Illustration reported how ‘there will long be talk of those two splendid diamond bracelets, offered, as they say, from hand to hand by the great Indian prince.’

Among the very best experiences, for the Kunwar boys, was the

shopping. They had never seen so much stuff in their lives and they wanted to take home as much as they could manage: jewels from New Burlington Street; guns and rifles from James Purdey & Sons in Mayfair; pianos from Broadwoods, just as good as the one recently supplied to Chopin. Violins. Flutes. Billiard tables. Wolf hounds. An eighteen-foot chandelier. ‘The Nepalese Princes,’ said The Times,

continue to form one of the most brilliant cynosures of the day. They are, certainly, going through London in style: while, as for diamonds, the brilliant eruption appears to take new forms and still more glittering features every time they appear in public.

Jang and his brothers delighted in clothes. They ordered suits from Savile Row, which they liked to wear as ineffectual disguises at the more risqué venues they visited. But they were also free, in ways that Englishmen were not, to flaunt their wealth in outlandish clothes. At one party, the Edinburgh News reported, Jang wore

a superb oriental costume consisting of a robe or tunic of rich blue cloth or velvet, trimmed with gold lace. His cap, which fitted closely, was of white silk and glittered with pearls and diamonds, loops of emerald coloured stones hanging in front, while a long feather of the Bird of Paradise waved in the air.

The chronicler, however, looked on with distaste at the mixture and familiarity of different classes at the parties the Nepalis attended.

‘Some officials and their wives danced,’ he recorded, ‘some walked about and others remained seated. They paid no attention to differences of rank, ignoring all questions of precedence. Such was the entertainment.’

Most important of all, for Jang’s future as ruler of Nepal, were his encounters with Queen Victoria and her ministers. Victoria, aged thirty to Jang’s thirty-three, had given birth to Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, shortly before the Nepali ambassador’s arrival. So, for the first few days of his visit, he had to make do with her confidante and adviser, the Duke of Wellington, who was now eighty-one. The Iron Duke was very much the Nepali ruler’s kind of man: direct, authoritarian, a soldier, not an intellectual and an isolationist in terms of foreign policy. When Wellington died two years later, Jang ordered an eighty-three-gun salute to be fired from Kathmandu’s Tundhikel parade ground: one shot for each year of his life.

When Queen Victoria had sufficiently recovered, she received Jang at an

official audience with her family and government officials in attendance. He was as impressed with Victoria as he had been by Wellington. Monarchs, for Jang, had been exclusively querulous, hot-tempered, inconsistent, venal and mad. Queen Victoria was an astonishing contrast. He sat beside her in her drawing room surrounded by her seven children and marvelled that this slight woman should be ruler of such a vast empire. She rewarded him with the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, which caused gossip in Kathmandu, where the court assumed that Order of the Bath meant a level of intimacy.

Jang’s visits to London and Paris had profound repercussions for his own

country. Nepal soon had a modern legal system, the Muluki Ain, or ‘law of the country’, based on the Napoleonic Code, covering in 1,400 pages the administration of the state, revenue collection, criminal and civil law. Unlike the old religious-based system, which had allowed execution or bodily mutilation for a wide range of offenses, the Muluki Ain limited corporal punishment. Yet it was Britain’s industrial might that impressed Jang the most. When he returned to Kathmandu, he was a changed man. He found his home provincial and dull, his subjects narrow and ill educated. ‘Why should I attempt to tell these poor ignorant people what I have seen? It is as ridiculous to suppose that they would believe it as it is hopeless to attempt to make them understand it.’

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After his return to Nepal, Jang fought a brief war against Tibet, winning new trade concessions from Lhasa, then stepped down as prime minister in favour of his brother, having the king declare him a maharaja. Retirement did not suit him. When his brother died a year later, Jang took up the reins once more, in time for the Indian rebellion. He tightened his family’s grip on power, marrying his children into the king’s family, including his daughter to the crown prince. The future of his dynasty seemed secure, but Jang was now outwitting opponents he deemed backward and unworthy. The hallmark of his family’s rule was indifference to the people they governed. In 1950, when the Ranas finally lost power, the level of public education and health care was pitiful, while the sons of Nepal’s elite were being educated in English public schools or their Indian equivalent. In the mid 1960s, when Jang’s regime was still fresh in the memory and the artless palaces he built still dominated the city, the Newari scholar Kamal P Malla wrote how the Ranas

refused to communicate with the rest of society except for money and cheap labour. They turned their backs on the traditional Nepalese arts, crafts and architecture. There is not a single building which shows the regime’s patronage of the homespun style. A Rana palace is not only a depressive monument to Western mimicry: it is also convincing evidence of a collective schizophrenia. After all, the Ranas were the rulers; they ought to feel different from the ruled; they must live differently in dream-castles inaccessible to the vulgar herd. But is not all mimicry vulgar particularly the mimicry of a culture only imperfectly understood?

When northern India ignited in rebellion in May 1857, Jang Bahadur had put his entire military at the disposal of the British. And when the governor general hesitated over Jang’s offer, he had recruited as advocate Brian Houghton Hodgson, who travelled that autumn to Calcutta to lobby Lord Canning. ‘I urged the great value, negative and positive,’ Hodgson wrote after their meeting, ‘of the proffered aid of Nepal for putting down the Mutiny.’ Hodgson was well aware of the suspicion Calcutta felt towards the Nepali maharaja but if Jang

were fairly trusted and put into the hands of a representative of his Lordship having tact, experience and a liking for the Gurkhas, good faith would be kept with us, some useful military service done for us, and above all in importance at such a moment, the spectacle exhibited of the Hindu State par excellence in alliance and co-operation with us.

Historians have pored over the reasons for Jang’s offer, but it was not done out of loyalty to Queen Victoria. Material advantage and adventure seem the likeliest explanations: boredom and greed. Hodgson advised Canning to offer Jang territory in the western terai that Nepal had lost at the Treaty of Sagauli, the conclusion of its war with the East India Company, in 1816. Canning reflected and agreed, appointing Hodgson’s friend Sir George MacGregor as Jang’s British attaché. In March of 1858, Jang marched at the head of an army seventeen thousand strong to help Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell in the relief of Lucknow, telling the general that ‘had he not visited England he would now have been fighting against us instead of with us’. Apart from the land on the terai, Jang’s service to the British earned him four thousand cartloads of loot from Lucknow, ten thousand modern British rifles, the promise of military training, as well as a substantial financial pay-off and honours from the British crown.

A few weeks after Lucknow, in the summer of 1858, Brian Houghton

Hodgson left India forever. Aged fifty-seven, he would live another thirty-six years, dying at his home in Dover Street, London, in 1894. Jang Bahadur spent his later years living in the ersatz European splendour of his palace in the Kathmandu district of Thapathali. He was determined to visit Europe for a second time but the British were at first reluctant; later, in 1874 and with a visit finally arranged, he got as far as Bombay only to fall from his horse, forcing his return home. In 1876 he entertained the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, with a fortnight’s tiger hunting on the terai. But despite his fascination with European power, or perhaps because of it, Jang did his best to keep the British out, resolutely refusing them recruitment of Gurkhas inside Nepal and stymieing trade between India and Tibet. Almost exactly a year after the royal visit, in February 1877, Jang Bahadur died, aged fifty-nine, of cholera.

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