As if it weren’t complicated enough already, Parliament stuck its finger into the pie, subjecting the governance of the East India Company’s Indian territories to the oversight of a London-based Board of Control, headed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In practice, great power was wielded by the Governor General, appointed by the East India Company, but subject to removal by the Crown. The man on the spot, the Governor General had the power to implement legislation, wage war, and make treaties. In 1804, that man was Lord Wellesley, older brother of the future Duke of Wellington, and prime mover behind the series of conflicts that consolidated British influence in India.
If Lord Wellesley saw Frenchmen under the bed, he did have some reason for it. Not only was Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 seen as a threat, but French generals throughout India planted liberty trees, led troops into battle under the tricolore, and cooked up elaborate schemes to unite the French forces in India against the British so that the French influence might reign supreme in the East. In 1802, General Perron, in the nominal employ of the Mahratta chieftain, Scindia, went so far as to write Bonaparte for French troops to deploy against the British. He got them, too, a whole boatload of them, although they were sent packing before they reached their destination. General Perron, by the way, is not to be confused with yet another contemporary Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Piron, who was General Raymond’s successor as commander of the French force in Hyderabad in the period just prior to this book. Both Perron and Piron were rabid French nationalists and both get a mention in this book but, I promise, they really were two different people, not just a typo. You can chalk the similarity in their names down to yet another dastardly French plot to sow confusion (or just an accident of birth and geography).
Lord Wellesley used the French threat as part of his rationale for incursions against local rulers, radically expanding the scope of British oversight in India, a policy of which the East Company directors back in London did not approve. For more on Wellesley, Wellington, and the Mahratta Wars, I recommend Jac Weller’s Wellington in India, which lays out the day-to-day military situation, including the fighting in the north alluded to during Penelope’s stay in Calcutta, as well as the tantalizing tale of the treasure of Berar, rumored lost during the siege of Gawilighur and never found.
In addition to the political landscape, the cultural landscape in 1804 was also quite different from that of the Raj to come. Many of the conventions we associate with British India hadn’t come into being yet. For example, the term memsahib, that standard of Victorian literature, only came into use later in the century; sahiba was the correct term in 1804. Fortunately, plenty of travelers’ accounts exist from this transitional period, giving us a contemporary view of what an English lady would have seen, experienced, eaten, and worn. The large traveling camp needed to convey Freddy and Penelope from Masulipatam to Hyderabad was borrowed from the journal of Maria Graham, who traveled across India in 1809, as were details of food, scenery, and culture. A more intimate view is provided by Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, an Englishwoman who married a gentleman of Oudh and wrote about her experiences in a tome lengthily entitled, Observations on the Mus sulmauns of India: Descriptive of Their Manners, Customs, Habits, and Religious Opinions.
Like other British ladies, such as Elizabeth Plowden, who, along with her husband, became close friends with the Nawab of Oudh (Plowden was, in fact, granted her own title by the Nawab), Graham attended nautch dances and other entertainments at the homes of local dignitaries, just as Penelope does in this novel. Unlike the later days of British India, there was a good deal of socialization between Brits and Indians in the eighteenth and very early nineteenth century. During the time of this story, that earlier, easier correspondence was just beginning to break down. For the complicated tale of British interactions with local culture in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century India, I recommend Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 and William Dalrymple’s White Mu ghals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India.
It wasn’t just relations between British and Indians that were complicated; the British had their own internal frictions due to the odd dual-governing structure of Company and Crown. Among other things, there were functionally two British armies operating in India in 1804: the East India Company’s own army and King’s regiments, sent out from England. The King’s regiments looked down on the East India officers, and the East India Company officers resented the King’s regiments, which explains Freddy’s attitude towards Alex, who owes his rank to an East India Company regiment rather than the more prestigious royal army.
As for Freddy and his friends, the Hellfire Club to which Fiske, Freddy, and their cronies belonged was based off a club got up by some of the British residents in Poona in 1813, which combined a little pseu domasonic ritual with a lot of sexual experimentation. There were, however, consequences to amorous dalliance. According to contemporary statistics, as many as one-third of the British garrison were infected with syphilis each year. Treatments were slow, unpleasant, and generally ineffective, the most common of which was applying mercury ointment to sores on the afflicted organ. If unchecked, the disease caused the sufferer to run mad. Throughout the eighteenth century, intercourse with a virgin was commonly believed to provide a quick and easy cure for the disease, one which unscrupulous men, like those in Fiske’s Hellfire Club, did not scruple to apply. For the pastimes and prejudices of British army officers in India, I relied heavily on Lawrence James’s Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India.
While Sir Leamington Fiske, Daniel Cleave, and the rest of the gang are fictional, the narrative is dotted with genuine historical figures who have been dragooned into service for the purpose of my story. Begum Johnson and Begum Sumroo were both formidable figures of their day, one as grand old dame of Calcutta, the other as ruler of her own principality. In Hyderabad, the Resident (James Kirkpatrick), his marriage to a Hyderabadi lady of quality, his self-satisfied assistant Henry Russell, the courtesan Mah Laqa Bai, the Nizam’s female guards, the leprous Prime Minister Mir Alam, and the mad Nizam Sikunder Jah were all taken from the historical record, as were the French commanders Raymond and Piron. The missing guns and the tension between the Residency and the Subsidiary Force were also fact, although, in the real version, the problem was embezzlement rather than spies. For all details regarding the characters, culture, politics, and anything else relating to Hyderabad, I am entirely indebted to William Dalrymple’s brilliant monograph, White Moghals, which chronicles the career of James Kirkpatrick and his controversial marriage to Khair-un-Nissa.
In some cases, rather than directly employing historical figures, I borrowed their characteristics for my fictional folks. Inspiration for Alex’s father, “the Laughing Colonel,” was taken from James Kirkpatrick’s father, a charming philanderer known as “the Handsome Colonel.” Alex’s troubled brother Jack is loosely based off another real character, James Skinner, the product of an English father and a Rajput mother who committed suicide. Barred from service in the English forces by virtue of his birth, Skinner entered the army of Scindia, a Mahratta leader, under the command of Benoit de Boigne and then Pierre Perron (yes, that Perron). In Skinner’s case, his talent was recognized by Lord Lake, who managed to bend some rules and take him on, in a rather roundabout way, as commander of an irregular cavalry regiment known as “Skinner’s Horse” or “the Yellow Boys,” but Skinner was the exception rather than the norm. In researching Jack’s predicament, I relied on Skinner’s memoirs, The Recollections of Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, as well as the sprightly biography by Philip Mason, Skinner’s Horse, both of which provide a vivid picture of the ambivalent position of Anglo-Indian offspring at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The term Anglo-Indian is often a confusing one, since it is used to describe those Englishmen who spent their lives in India as well as those of mixed English and Indian descent. For those in the latter category, a series of laws passed under the Governor-
Generalship of Lord Cornwallis drastically curtailed any chances for advancement. In 1791, anyone without two European parents was banned from civil, military, or naval service in the East India Company. By 1795, they were further barred from serving even as drummers, pipers, or farriers. Those wealthy enough to do so sent their children back to England, where there were no such legal barriers to advancement. Those without the funds were forced to do as Colonel Reid did; to send their sons into the service of local rulers, where the Company’s rules did not apply. The irregular situation created more than a few conflicting loyalties in those affected by Cornwallis’s sanctions. Although Jack Reid is my own invention, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others in his situation who found the rallying cry of liberté, égalité, and fraternité a seductive one.
About the Author
The author of five previous Pink Carnation novels, Lauren Willig received a degree in English history from the Harvard history department and a J.D. from Harvard Law, where she graduated magna cum laude. She lives in New York City.
Lauren Willig, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily
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