Begam Samru: Fading Portrait in a Gilded Frame

By John Lall

A fascinating re-creation of the life and times of the dazzling nautch girl who became the celebrated Begam Samru after her marriage to a foreign military adventurer, General Reinhardt. She shared his dangers and tortuous intrigues in the turbulent ‘time of troubles’ in the eighteenth century. When he died she took over his jagir, converted to Christianity and steered a perilous course with uncanny skill through the Moghul empire’s last days and the evergrowing power of the British. The life story of this extraordinary Christian princess has no parallel in the transition from chaos to order in Hindustan two hundred years ago. Her memory lives on in the splendid cathedral she built at Sardhana near Meerut which continues to draw thousands of visitors from far and near.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9788174368935

Book preview

Prologue

In 1760 the small qasba of Kutana, about 80 kilometers north of Delhi, was like any other largely Muslim qasba in the western Doab between the two great rivers of Hindustan, the Ganga and Jamuna. This was the scene of a familiar human tragedy. A younger concubine became the target of her stepson’s venom after the death of her husband. The generally reliable official gazetteer gives his name as Asad Khan, and the weight of evidence is that he was a Saiyid of Arabian origin. The family had seen better days, and possibly also had claims to noble birth.

That was the limit of official interest. Speculation about the origins of the concubine was never resolved. Many of them were dancing girls, in those days an accepted if not altogether honoured profession, and refuge in many cases for women of gentle birth. The young widow’s harassment proved insupportable; she was driven into making for the old capital with her daughter, then a child of ten. Shahjahanabad was the usual destination of those in want, where, also, those seeking to revive broken fortunes, musicians, dancers, poets and beggars turned their footsteps, as if to a fabled paradise. Shahjahanabad was left with little besides name and many legends, amidst the crumbling ruins of a glorious past. Taqi Mir’s lament for the city is drenched with tragedy:

Why do you ask my native place,

O dweller of the East,

Making mock of me for the poor plight I am in?

Delhi, which was once the jewel of the world,

Where dwelt only the loved ones of fate,

Which has now been ruined by the hand of Time,

I am a desolate resident of that storm tossed place.

(Tr. Ahmad Ali, Twilight in Delhi)

For the mother and child, too, it was a time for weeping. Yet, it was also a journey homeward, for it was from Delhi that the woman had been taken away to Kutana in the full flower of her youthful charm. Mashallah: the mehfil she had left could once again become a refuge, and more than that a place of delight where her child could be nurtured in the traditional arts of singing and dancing, of manners and conversation. Taunted by some on the way for her lingering beauty, helped and befriended by others, they clung to any rabba or tanga that squeezed them in. Thus, after ten days on the way, they arrived at a bustling sarai against the walls of the massive Kashmiri darwaza where, in the past, invading armies had been brought to a halt.

Such help as the two were given, however, came too late for the ailing woman. Drained by an old fever, she collapsed as she struggled towards that refuge for the pious, the Jama Masjid. The child’s cries attracted a lady in a passing palanquin, and the occupant was immediately struck by her expressive face. The lady was none other than the tawaif from Chauri Bazaar, where the sick woman had performed years before. She took an instant decision. With proper training the young girl could take the place of her mother. There was just time enough for the janaza to be laid in the dust from which all things come. A pleasing tale perhaps, never denied by the recording pen of history.

Farzana, for that was the girl’s name, grew into a young beauty with flashing eyes, a pearly complexion and lively wit. She became one of the most sought after girls of the kotha in Chauri Bazaar. The street of pleasure lay in the shadow of the towering Jama Masjid, built a century earlier by the Emperor Shah Jahan. As Ghalib put it, ‘Masjid ke saya kharabaat chahiye.’¹

Mehfil, a performance of song and dance for an appreciative audience, had become a highly evolved art form in the Muslim capitals of Hindustan. Chauri Bazaar’s kothas had their regular patrons – the flashy young bankas who swaggered in of an evening, and the more sophisticated fanciers, older perhaps and wiser, such as Ahmad Ali portrayed in his classic, Twilight in Delhi. For the traditional grandees, no matter how broken down in fortune, mehfils were arranged in their own havelis.

When chance brought Farzana to Delhi in 1760, the times were out of joint. Few people knew what the morrow would bring. The invader’s sword that ruthlessly struck down resistance could be bought off by the wealthy. Delhi had recovered from the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah’s raids in the bleak winter of 1756-57, while his merciless slaughter of the leaders of the Maratha confederacy at Panipat two years later was yet to be.

Farzana grew up in the seclusion of the tawaif’s kotha. Sometimes the indulgent old lady took her out on shopping expeditions for betels and spiced tobacco in the katras where the best of these were available. Even more welcome were the copper coins she gave the young girl. With these jingling in the brocade purse dangling from her waist, she made sallies for her favourite pishta barfies at the Moghul halwai’s display in Chandni Chowk. Ringing in her ears was the old lady’s warning not to venture too far lest men should cast a lascivious eye on her blooming beauty. From high up on the steps leading skyward to the Jama Masjid, Farzana scanned Shah Jahan’s Lal Qila, wondering how it came to pass that an emperor so surrounded by majesty could have been imprisoned in Agra fort by his own son. That was almost forgotten memory, but Alamgir II’s assassination in 1759 was a fresh wound. The more Farzana got to know Shahjahanabad, the more the old city became the very air she breathed, whose stones she knew and graces she loved. All the while her voice gained depth and her feet stamped to intricate Kathak steps with delicate precision as the tabalchi’s flying fingers beat out the talas.

Years passed in apprenticeship, learning and performing for the kotha’s patrons. Sometimes the tawaif, Khanum Jan, arranged a mehfil at the haveli of one of Delhi’s grandees. With the newly crowned emperor, Shah Alam, in faraway Bihar, the Moghul nobles, if they had time for anything at all, spent it in intrigues to outwit their rivals. Thus, when a strange visitor arrived in the gloom of evening to take place in the tawaif’s baithak, Farzana flashed a quick glance at the heavily cloaked and reclusive figure. Khanum Jan’s harkaras had already picked up talk of a feringhi general in the city, one of the first to find his way to the old Moghul capital.

Khanum Jan was immediately on her feet to greet the visitor. ‘Somra Sahib!’, she greeted him, raising her hand to her forehead in practised taslim. News of General Reinhardt, commonly known as Samru, had been brought by word of mouth from Awadh and beyond. For the Moghuls he was part legendary hero, part monster. It was known that he had given grave offence to the ladies of Shuja-ud-Daula’s harem, forcing them to be rid of his threatening presence by parting with bulging leather pouches of treasure. For Khanum Jan, however, he was a patron who, though stingy with his loot, was a commander of thousands of trained sipahis. But Khanum Jan was dedicated to the traditions of her profession. Whatever people may have had to say about him, good or bad, she produced the best her kotha could offer. Her young star, Farzana, was one of the nautch girls called for the mehfil.

A day or two passed. Farzana knew nothing of the subdued conversation the foreigner had with her benefactress, or of the gold mohurs he had pressed into her hand. Farzana, no child now, had a will of her own; but by the time the general arrived the following day, she accepted the new life this strange chance had thrust upon her. Kismet, the will of Allah, had deprived her of a home, a mother and a settled life in a familiar qasba. It had also given her a kindly benefactress and the thrill of life in the city where she seemed fated to live as long as she could please. Some day, however, her steps would falter, though anything so remote had not entered her head. And now, suddenly, she was being wrenched away to the harem of a gloomy, grey-haired foreigner, who spoke Urdu with a heavy accent, interspersed with a smattering of Persian. If this was her destiny, who was she to resist? But if we know her at all by hindsight, this was her own decision. She might have become the favourite of some minor Moghul noble, given to dalliance. This was certainly no worse. Wife, concubine or Lolita, she became the companion of an ill-favoured, saturnine Austrian from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a general with four battalions and a handful of cannons at his beck and call. Totally unpredictably, a window of undreamt possibilities opened to her. Perhaps, by joining him, she could maximise her life chances amidst the uncertainties of ‘the time of troubles’. If she failed to please he might send her back, but that was one thing which she was determined would not happen.

The day she left, seated in a curtained palanquin – anything less would have diminished the general’s importance – was to be etched forever in her memory. She never spoke about it; to have done so would have unraveled the secret of her unhappy years in Kutana and the zest with which she fulfilled her role in the tawaif’s kotha. It was there, in the back streets of Delhi, that Farzana, the abandoned waif, blossomed into the favoured nautch girl; from there the dazzling young performer was snatched away to become, in one swift transformation, Samru ki Begam, the wife of a foreign general. His death thirteen years later created a major crisis. Swiftly she moved to claim his rich jaidad in the Doab as his heiress, gaining it from Shah Alam himself. Titled Zebun Nissa, ‘ornament of her sex’, by a grateful emperor for saving his life by an act of audacious bravery, she was honoured by her last friend and ally, the British East India Company, as Her Highness Begam Samru of Sardhana. But her true memorial was the affection of the poor and neglected who rallied to her in thousands, and a legend that will survive as long as the women of India prove equal, to the supreme test of keeping faith, as they have so often done throughout history.

NOTES:

1

Gardi ka Waqt

Delhiwallas, even more so than the people of Hindustan, called the age in which they lived in the second half of the eighteenth century gardi ka waqt, or the ‘time of troubles’. This was the Delhi in which the young Farzana grew to maturity. In later life also, first with Somra Sahib, and after his death in 1778 on her own, she was scarcely ever more than fifty kos from the traditional darul sultanat. Her entire life spanning over eighty-six years was inextricably interwoven with the declining fortunes of the Moghul dynasty until the British conquest of Delhi in 1803. Thereafter she became dependent on the favours of the East India Company until her death in 1836.

The true significance of the Begam’s life and achievements will be missed without an understanding of the conditions of the time. This background must therefore be filled with a few broad strokes, steering clear of the abounding shoals of inessential detail. Contemporary history, however irksome a discipline, demands a brief obeisance.

The eighteenth century witnessed the progressive replacement of indigenous imperial rule by foreign colonial dependency. It was marked by a few significant trends. The first and most obvious was the decline of Moghul imperial power. The second was the emergence of the Indian states as independent centres of authority, and the third the gradual rise of foreign dominance. This in turn was initially characterized by a struggle for ascendancy between the French and British, with the French winning the early rounds, and the British triumphing over them after the Treaty of Paris that brought the Seven Years War to an end in 1763. A fourth factor, which in a sense was fortuitous and unpredictable, was two invasions from the north. The first was by Nadir Shah of Persia in 1739. He sacked Delhi before he left, taking with him the fabulous Peacock Throne fashioned by Shah Jahan’s jewellers for their emperor. The Moghul empire was left badly mauled though not destroyed. In 1761, Ahmad Shah Abdali of Afghanistan defeated the Maratha confederacy at the historic field of Panipat so decisively that the hardy horsemen of the Western Ghats lost control of Hindustan as a unified force. These two mortal blows virtually destroyed hopes of an indigenous resurgence, thus clearing the way for eventual foreign domination.

The protracted agony of Moghul decline was marked by the individual incompetence of the dynasty and infighting among the Moghul nobility. After the austerity of Aurangzeb’s reign, ending with his death in 1707, things rapidly fell apart. It has been pointed out that while the first six emperors spanned nearly the first two centuries of Moghul rule, as many as ten puppets wore the imperial sarpech before the third battle of Panipat in 1761.

The dynasty’s capacity for governance was frittered away in unbridled self-indulgence, chronic indecision and weak-kneed submission to manipulation by factions of their own nobility. Of Rafi-uz-shan, one of Bahadur Shah’s four sons, it is said he had the heart of a courtesan, spending his time in self-adornment and, ‘holding a mirror and comb in hand, like a pretty woman, he adores his own curls’.¹ It is a dismal record, remembered only for the sheer corruption of power.

To understand how the dynasty survived despite this internal weakness is to understand the power of fiction. None of the feuding factions had the authority to break out on their own, and much less the power. The emperor’s sanad alone gave them legitimacy. If any of the successors of the old subedars could have claimed legitimacy on their own, none of them were better placed than Asaf Jah, viceroy of the distant subah of the Deccan. First appointed by Farrucksiyar in 1715, the founder, Asaf Jah I, laid it down in his will that his successors should scrupulously respect the emperor as the suzerain. ‘Do not make yourself a sinner in this respect,’ he enjoined them. He always referred to the Deccan as ‘hukumat’ or government of a ‘riyasat’ or country. As V.K. Bawa points out,² he never spoke of it as a separate kingdom or sultanat. Close on a hundred years later, the dynasty’s respect for the imperial name had not diminished. The third Nizam refused the title of ‘King’ offered to him by the governor general, Lord Francis Edward Hastings (1812-23), who was anxious to emphasize that British power was not dependent on the Moghul Emperor’s sanction for its authority.

In practical terms, imperial power became virtually non-existent after the Second Maratha War (1803-1805) and the occupation of Delhi by Lord Gerard Lake in 1803. Thereafter the emperor, Shah Alam, and his two successors were referred to by the diminished title of King of Delhi by the new British masters of Hindustan. Until this complete turn around in the power situation took place, the East India Company itself was scrupulous about maintaining the emperor’s legal authority. Mahadji Sindhia, though virtually supreme in Hindustan in the last twenty years of Shah Alam’s long reign (1760-1806), safeguarded his own position in the Maratha hierarchy by taking the utmost care to obtain Moghul confirmation for his territorial gains culminating in his appointment as deputy regent of the empire.³ The sanad he obtained from the emperor in 1784 conferred the office of Vakil-ul-Mutluq on the Peshwa, with himself as deputy. At one stroke the formal supremacy of the emperor was recognized as well as Sindhia’s allegiance to the Peshwa.

In her comparatively diminutive sphere, Begam Samru, after her husband’s death in 1778, linked her fortunes very firmly to the emperor’s titular authority. She also had a strong sense of genuine loyalty, and devotion to the imperial person which made practical sense in her case. This attachment remained her sheet anchor throughout her struggle for survival through the worst of ‘gardi ka waqt’. However much the Moghul nobility exploited the emperor’s weakness for their own purposes, in the last resort they too, sought the emperor’s sanads for the offices and honours they held. Despite the rapid decline of imperial authority in real terms, it was this mystique which