The Strangler Vine (35 page)

A week later Helen and I were engaged, and I decided to join the regiment going north, so we agreed we would marry quickly so she could travel with me. The courtship had been swift, but we had seen a great deal of each other over the weeks. She had told me that though I had been far from the most eligible of her suitors, I had always been the one she wanted, but having few advantages
save her looks and some good family connections, she had told herself she must marry well. And before I had left for Jubbulpore I had seemed so distracted and serious she had been convinced I was lost to her.

‘I cried for several days,’ she said. ‘And then I picked myself up and accepted Keay.’

I was impressed by her honesty. We both wrote to Keay, who had, after some initial and justified complaint, graciously agreed to stand aside.

Helen was the one subject I had found myself reluctant to discuss with Blake. The loss of his own wife seemed to make the subject awkward, and I had the feeling he would disapprove of the speed of our engagement.

The day before he left, I found Blake walking by the water south of the Hooghly ghats. We stood contemplating the river for some time.

‘You came to tell me something,’ he said.

‘Yes. I am going to marry Helen Larkbridge.’

There was the merest moment of hesitation, but I felt it. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, and as if to make up for that moment of uncertainty, again, ‘Congratulations.’

‘You think it a mistake.’

‘No.’ He paused. ‘But it’s very soon. You could take your time. You do not know each other very well, and she knows very little about India.’ I could tell he was choosing his words with care. ‘And you’ve seen things that have changed you. It may be hard for her to understand.’

‘I do not think I can do without her.’

He sighed. We looked out on to the water.

‘I came here to say goodbye to my wife. Her name was Anwesha. She was Hindoo. She made me promise when she was dying that I would burn them both and scatter their ashes here.’

‘Them?’

‘She died giving birth to our son. He was stillborn. She died a day later. My first thought on waking is of her, and my last before sleeping.’

So now Blake and I stood on the quay, and the tender bobbed in the water. In a carriage at the end of the wharf, Helen waited for me.

Blake was in full European civilian dress, with his frock-coat over his hand, hiding his missing fingers. I wondered whether he would ever wear native clothes again. Several ladies took curious peeks at him. He had got very thin, and his shoulders hunched a little against the warm breeze. I reminded myself how hardy he was.

‘Do you have sufficient funds?’ I said. Along with everything else, Blake had refused to accept the pension the Company had offered him. I did not know how he had paid his passage.

‘The griffin debtor asks me that?’

‘I am, as you know, remarkably liquid these days.’ From my pocket I brought the small black bag which the Rao had presented me, intending to put it in his hand.

‘I am not doing too badly myself, William,’ Blake said, pushing it away. He rummaged about in a pocket and brought out an identical black bag. It clicked satisfyingly.

‘Two big sapphires and a diamond. Enough to pay for my passage, and something for when I get to London. You should know that I wrote to the Rao – I can still get a confidential message from one end of the country to the other – to tell him about Sleeman and Hogwood. I thought he should know.’

I nodded. ‘Collinson will deliver his promise?’ I said.

‘I trust him to.’

The ladies and their children and servants were clambering into the tender; the old gentlemen were following them.

‘Goodbye, Jeremiah, I wish you well. More than well.’

‘Goodbye, William. Take care of yourself. Send my good wishes to Miss Larkbridge.’ He took a breath. ‘Take your time. You don’t need to rush into anything.’ Uncharacteristically, he did not meet my eyes.

‘I have this for you,’ I said.

‘What is it?’

‘Letters from Collinson. Letters of introduction for London.’

‘I don’t want them.’

‘Please, Jeremiah. Take them. He came to see you when you
were sick in Mirzapore and gave them to me. He said he would have work for you in London.’ I held them out.

His face twisted with exasperation. ‘What do I know of London?’ But he took the packet reluctantly and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. I grasped his right hand and shook it vigorously, unwilling to let go.

‘I will never forget you, Jeremiah, as long as I live.’ I looked down, ashamed. ‘Forgive me.’

‘For what?’

‘For staying.’

‘What’s to forgive?’ he said. ‘I spent half my life here. How can I reproach you for wanting to stay?’

‘I hope we might meet again, one day.’

He smiled at me again, both reassuring and mildly irritated.

‘I am quite able to look after myself, William. I did so for many years before I met you.’

He disengaged his hand from mine, then touched me very lightly on the shoulder. He looked out one last time over the familiar crush of human forms and debris of the wharf. Then he began to clamber into the boat, teetering alarmingly and clutching the side. I resisted the urge to dart forward and catch him.

When the tender pulled off, I stayed on the wharf, watching the sailors strain against the oars. I stayed until I could no longer see his features and his head was a tan blob and his body a clean white dab. All about me the natives pressed, rolling barrels, lifting sacks. The smell of dried fish floated up from the ghats, pricking my nostrils. Just before I turned away I thought I saw a spray of white confetti hang in the air for a moment, before it floated down to the water.

Jeremiah Blake and William Avery will return in
The Infidel Stain
(
see page 325
for an early glimpse of the first chapter).

In 1857, twenty years after the fictional events recounted in this book, the Indian mutiny, or Great Rebellion as it’s known in India, broke out. One of its direct causes was the East India Company’s annexation of the large independent state of Oudh the year before. The mutiny’s suppression would be the Company’s last act: the British government decided it was no longer competent to run India, dissolved it, and took over government itself. There are, incidentally, a number of well-attested stories of Britsh officers evading capture during the mutiny by disguising themselves as women.

William Sleeman (1788–1856) was an energetic Victorian with an extraordinary capacity for work. He was the first person in India to find and identify dinosaur fossils; and the first to collect reports of ‘wolf-children’ – the stories that later inspired Rudyard Kipling to invent the character of Mowgli in
The Jungle Book
. He wrote enthusiastically and authoritatively about horticulture, and introduced new farming methods and new crop strains to bring higher yields. He was a brilliant linguist who loved the landscape of India, was deeply curious about its culture and had a genuine – if sentimental and paternalistic – desire to improve the lot of the Indian peasant.

Sleeman’s main claim to fame, however, was the ruthless campaign he led in the late 1820s and 1830s to suppress the Thugs, the roadside bandits who befriended, then strangled, then robbed their victims and dedicated their corpses to the Hindu goddess of death, Kali. His systems – maps, lists of Thugs describing among other things their aliases and distinguishing marks, family trees, and so on – were the precursors of modern policing tools. Although he was already a very effective public administrator, it was Thuggee that made Sleeman’s career: he became Superintendent of a new cross-India department pursuing Thugs and dacoits, and ended his
career as the Resident – the senior Company official – in Oudh, whose takeover by the Company in 1856 he opposed.

Sleeman produced a series of articles and books about the Thugs, describing them as an organized India-wide guild of murderers bound by generations of intermarriage, and detailing their customs, rituals and language. His writings quickly captured the imagination of the British in India, and then the public at home. By the mid-1830s the Thugs had become notorious bywords for the evils of the dark, mysterious East, inspiring simultaneously horror and excitement. In 1839,
Confessions of a Thug
, a now unreadable Gothic novel by Philip Meadows-Taylor, a former soldier in India who claimed to have worked on the Thuggee campaign (in fact his material comes straight out of Sleeman’s writings), became a huge British bestseller. Thugs, or sinister oriental figures like them, went on to appear in other novels, such as Wilkie Collins’s
The Moonstone
. Some think that Charles Dickens intended to introduce them to his unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. In the 1850s, a spate of muggings in London in which the victim was rushed from behind and his hat pushed down over his face spawned a city-wide (and completely unjustified) panic that Thugs had arrived from India.

Since the 1960s, however, Indian and British historians have begun to question the idea that the Thugs, and Sleeman himself, were all that they seemed. Some dispute that the Thugs – as described by Sleeman – ever existed at all. The subject is still hotly debated. It seems likely that ‘Thuggee’ emerged from an amalgam of stories, colonial fears, moral panic and Sleeman’s own dark imaginings. Sleeman himself seems to have seized on the idea after reading reports by a Company magistrate called Thomas Perry from 1815, who had beaten a series of ‘confessions’ from a young bandit called Ghulam Hussein, which became increasingly detailed as the beatings and confessions progressed. Hussein described himself as a ‘Thug’, a word which meant deceiver, trickster or conman in Hindustani. Under pressure to explain an increase in local roadside murders, Perry gradually came up with a picture of a caste-like group of organized criminals called Thugs. But his Thugs never mentioned Kali, or strangling, or a special language, and were more
likely to toss their victims down wells than bury them. What Sleeman does seem to have done – without quite realizing it – was for the first time to collect and write about some of the traditions of peasant, nomadic and criminal culture in India, rather as in Britain writers were for the first time taking an interest in working-class culture.

In traditional histories of the British Empire, Sleeman’s success was put down to his brilliant system of maps, indexes and family trees. In Indian folk memory he comes over as a more brutal, unsubtle figure. Mike Dash’s book about Sleeman’s campaign,
Thug
, quotes bandits arrested by Sleeman speaking anxiously about ‘a machine for torturing Thugs’. Kevin Rusby’s
Children of Kali
, a book about criminality in India, quotes townspeople from Jabalpur (the modern spelling of Jubbulpore) – 150 years after the event – describing how Sleeman strung up the Thugs from trees along the road from Jabalpur to Mirzapur (Mirzapore). My own mother-in-law, who spent many years in Chennai (then Madras) in southern India, spoke of ‘Thuggee’ Sleeman as famously ruthless and famous for using torture to extract confessions.

At the time the British were quick to accept Thuggee at face value. Sleeman’s ‘discovery’ came at a moment when the character of the British occupation of India was undergoing a profound change. Traditionally, Company employees had – while mainly trying to make as much money as they could – been relatively tolerant and respectful of the Indian culture in which they lived. Many had relationships with, and children by, Indian women. Some were actively enthusiastic about India. They studied its languages and literature, admired its traditions, adopted its fashions. British scholars resurrected the dead language of Sanskrit and traced its influence as the root of most European languages.

However, as the Company extended its territory and authority across India through the 1820s and 1830s, less sympathetic, more dismissive attitudes began to take over. New arrivals were increasingly reluctant to mix with Indians and to learn local languages. They were more likely to see local customs and religions as degenerate and even evil, and were quick to emphasize their superiority over
the Indians they governed. The reasons for this were many and complex. Among them was the arrival of more British women in the colony, one effect of which was to make Anglo-Indian relationships increasingly taboo. Another was the arrival of evangelical missionaries and government officials to whom Hinduism represented idolatry. Then there was the need to justify the Company’s increasing authoritarian presence in India. The simplest, or at least most self-serving, explanation was that the Europeans were morally superior to the Indians, who required their civilizing influence. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Company began wars with Burma, took over states such as Coorg and Mysore and insinuated itself into Jaipur, where it was claimed the local rulers were either incapable, unruly or just plain bad. (This strategy would be formalized in the late 1840s by Governor General Dalhousie’s ‘doctrine of lapse’, whereby the Company could take over an independent state if the ruler was ‘manifestly incompetent or died without direct heir’.) The Thugs illustrated precisely why India needed the East India Company and its civilizing influence. Sleeman’s campaign, meanwhile, demonstrated how effective and benevolent Company rule was.

Another powerful idea that Sleeman helped to plant – or certainly to establish – in the British colonial mind was that of hereditary criminality. Once the Thugs were thought to have been suppressed in the mid-1840s, Sleeman and his successors at the Thug and Dacoity Department went in search of other groups who fitted the template, and gradually the idea of ‘criminal castes’ evolved. The subject became a kind of pseudoscience in India, and was so prevalent that by the late nineteenth century English books on the Indian caste system routinely contained sections on hereditary criminal castes: the Pardaso – Muslim vagabonds and robbers; the Lambani – highwaymen who were said to kidnap children; the Rasmusi – ‘hereditary robbers’ who masqueraded as watchmen; and the ‘Beels’ or ‘Bhils’. What these groups had in common was that they were in reality rarely distinct castes as the British liked to think, and – like European gipsies – they were poor and nomadic and therefore easy to scapegoat, and hard to govern and keep tabs on; many of them would now be described as tribal peoples.

Sleeman died in 1856 just before the mutiny, in the midst of a sea voyage back to England where he was going to recuperate from ill health.

Fanny Parkes (1794–1875) lived in India between 1822 and 1845, mostly in Allahabad, halfway between Calcutta and Delhi on the Grand Trunk Road, where her husband was an East India Company ‘civilian’, or civil servant, in charge of ice-making. During the cool season she travelled without her husband, whom it was said went mad in the winter. Unlike many Company wives Fanny embraced India and was enraptured by its beauty and variety. She learnt Hindustani and the sitar. Her diaries, published in 1850 and now available in a shortened edition as
Begums, Thugs and Englishmen
(Eland Books), describe Hindu rituals, the Indian landscape, Thug trials, sailing on the Ganges, and the lives of the high-born women in the
zenanas
(women’s quarters), while bemoaning the status of married women in England and the colonists’ lack of respect for Indian culture. To a twenty-first-century ear they are utterly beguiling.

Henry Derozio (1809–31) was a young radical mixed-race teacher, as described in this book, who after his death remained a profound influence on the movement known as the Bengal Renaissance, the great surge of creativity that took place in Calcutta in the mid-nineteenth century, of whom the best-known figure is the great Indian poet and writer Rabindrath Tagore.

Sir William Macnaghten (1793–1841) was an East India Company civil servant who served in the Secret and Political Department, then became secretary to Governor General Sir William Bentinck, and Chief Political Secretary to his successor, Lord Auckland (1784–1849). He is best known as one of the instigators of the disastrous First Afghan War (1839–41), one of the most shameful and disastrous moments of British rule in India. During 1837 and 1838, Lord Auckland and his entourage – including an army of almost 10,000 soldiers and camp followers – spent seven months travelling up the Great Trunk Road from Calcutta to the northern hill station of
Simla. They travelled through a terrible famine in the Agra region which claimed 800,000 lives, and which, though the Governor General provided some relief, was not helped by the vast procession of hungry mouths marching through it. Along the way, Macnaghten, a confirmed Russophobe, persuaded the Governor General that the ruler of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad, was encouraging the Russians to invade northern India and should be deposed. In fact Macnaghten and his allies vastly exaggerated the danger of Russian interference and deliberately ignored Dost Mohammad’s willingness to negotiate with the British. But though the justifications for the invasion were flimsy to say the least, Auckland sent Macnaghten and the ‘Army of the Indus’ into Afghanistan in late 1838. The campaign was a disaster, and Macnaghten was assassinated by Dost Mohammad’s son in 1841. The Army of the Indus began a chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in early 1842, and only one survivor made it to the British outpost of Jalalabad a few weeks later. Dost Mohammad was reinstalled, ruling Afghanistan until his death in 1863. Auckland was ignominiously sacked and recalled to England in 1843.