This story would not be complete without also including those servants of empire who, acting often out of the worthiest of motives, were nothing short of iconoclasts and vandals. The damage wrought on India’s fortresses by British cannon was surpassed by that caused by British officers in their search for suitable barracks. And there were engineers whose appetite for in-fill for their dams and railway embankments resulted in some of the most tragic archaeological depredations. Even the zoologists were sometimes sportsmen who could see no contradiction in studying India’s wildlife and contributing towards its gradual extinction.
But none of this need detract from the achievement. (The vandals were eventually stopped; even the government was brought to some awareness of its responsibilities.) The products of British scholarship deserve to stand alongside those more commonly cited legacies of the raj – the railways, the judiciary and civil service, democracy. In any large library, India requires a quite disproportionate length of shelf space (in the London Library nearly five times that of China). To work, or just to walk, along those groaning shelves is a stimulating experience. Take away the travelogues and memoirs, the political commentaries and the official papers, and the shelves are still crammed – 200-odd volumes on archaeology, a similar number on the work of the surveyors, nearly fifty concerned purely with ancient inscriptions. Here surely is an aspect of the raj of which an Englishman can be proud without reservation, a unique salute by a conquering power to an older, nobler and more enduring civilization.
CHAPTER ONE This Wonderful Country
On 1 September 1783 the Crocodile, five months out of Portsmouth, struck sail and anchored off Madras. On board Sir William and Lady Jones eyed with concern the wall of spray where the rollers of the Indian Ocean crashed onto the offshore reefs. With the other passengers – the ladies in voluminous, rustling gowns and the men all cocked hats and swords, silk stockings and buckled shoes – they trooped into wooden cages and were lowered over the side. Below, an armada of canoes and catamarans manoeuvred for custom; duckings were commonplace, drownings not unusual.
The first glimpse of India, in the shape of the boatmen, was also less than reassuring. They ‘wear no sort of covering but a small piece of rag, not entirely hiding their members’, wrote William Hickey, ‘a very awkward exhibition this for modest girls on their first arrival.’ The brown bodies glistened with the spray and rippled with each stroke of the paddle. And – an early lesson in the nature of British rule in India—these stalwarts had the fine ladies and gentlemen entirely in their power: safely through the foaming breakers, each passenger had to embrace one of those hard brown torsoes for a piggyback through the shallows.
Arriving in Madras was not a dignified business. But on the beach, a parade of well-dressed gentlemen and handsome carriages awaited the new arrivals. Behind, the city shone in the sunshine, white and neoclassical amidst the waving palms, ‘rather resembling the images that float in the imagination after reading The Arabian Nights’. This at last was India, home for months or years to come, a place where a gentleman could live like a lord and simultaneously amass a fortune.
Sir William Jones was no exception. His first priority was to attain financial independence, or to be precise, a clear £30,000. On the strength of his appointment to the post of Supreme Court judge in Calcutta, he had been knighted and had married. His salary, he calculated, would enable him and Anna Maria to save the £30,000 within six years. Then back to England, to his books and his friends.
But he was already more predisposed towards the East than most new arrivals. His professional qualifications as a jurist were unique. Edward Gibbon, then writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described Jones as ‘the only lawyer equally conversant with the year-books of Westminster, the commentaries of Ulpian, the Attic pleadings of Isaeus, and the sentences of Arabian and Persian cadhis [judges]’. On board the Crocodile, Jones had continued his studies in Persian law. He needed to make a small fortune, but he also expected to administer justice to the people of Bengal according to their own laws, and indeed, to study and clarify these.
Elsewhere Gibbon described Jones as more than a lawyer; he was ‘a genius’. And it was for his other attainments, considerable by any standards, spectacular by those of British India, that he was already best known. The son of an eminent mathematician, he was a keen student of mathematics, astronomy and the sciences – and yet first achieved distinction as a classical scholar. Greek and Latin literature were his passions; he modelled his letters on Cicero, his speeches on Demosthenes, and spattered both with classical allusions. At Oxford he turned to modern languages and then Persian and Arabic. His first published works were typical: a Persian grammar and a translation from Persian into French. He was also a much acclaimed poet, was intensely interested in music, and had the bottomless memory so vital to any polymath; aged eleven, it is said, he amazed his schoolfellows by supplying them with the entire text of The Tempest out of his head.
But oriental literature was now his leading interest. Whilst in India he intended to collect manuscripts; he was even prepared to invest some of the £30,000 in them. As the Crocodile had sped across the Arabian Sea, with India ahead and Persia to port, he had been overcome with a flush of intense excitement. Culturally speaking, what a vast and unexplored field lay about him; what untold riches were hidden there; and what a glorious achievement if he could lead men in their systematic discovery.
After a couple of days in Madras, the Joneses were back on board ‘the sweet little Crocodile’ and heading for Calcutta. Madras, once the pride of the British settlements in India, had already been eclipsed. Calcutta, founded less than 100 years before, was now the great attraction. Through Clive’s treaty with the Moghul emperor in 1765, the whole of Bengal, stretching from Benares to Burma, had been ceded to the East India Company. Commercial priorities were giving way to administrative and fiscal necessities. Casually, precariously, but inexorably, British dominion in India was being created. Jones himself described Bengal as ‘this wonderful country which fortune has thrown into Britain’s lap while she was asleep’. Administrative responsibility meant collecting revenue, developing communications, regulating trade and administering justice; hence the judiciary and the Supreme Court, not to mention the network of civil and military officials. From being a trading settlement for seventy years, Calcutta had suddenly become a colonial metropolis.
It is hard now to imagine the city as the gay and elegant capital of the East. Few places can have gained quite such an opposite reputation in the space of a couple of centuries – like Regency Bath turning into the Bronx. Contemporary paintings by the likes of Thomas Daniell show spacious Palladian mansions, wide thoroughfares and stately gardens bordered by the blue waters of the Hughli river – no crowds, no dust; it even looks cooler. As the Crocodile sailed upriver the Joneses passed their future home on Garden Reach – a nine-mile stretch of ‘elegant mansions’. ‘They are all white, their roofs invariably flat and surrounded by colonnades, and their fronts relieved by lofty columns supporting deep verandahs.’ Each, according to a gossipy contemporary, ‘surrounded by groves and lawns, which descend to the water’s edge, and present a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners’. Then came the fort, also on the eastern bank and ‘so well kept and everything in such excellent order that it is quite a curiosity to see it – all the slopes, banks and ramparts are covered with the richest verdure, which completes the enchantment of the scene’. Finally, the city itself, flanking the fort with government offices and the homes of the military. ‘As you come up past Fort William and the Esplanade, it has a beautiful appearance. Esplanade Row, as it is called, seems to be composed of palaces.’ Indeed, Calcutta was known as ‘the City of Palaces’.
It was also, in Clive’s view, ‘one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious