Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

chatting with kings, and nursing an infant in between: it was not how most Englishwomen spent an evening. But to read Elizabeth’s Lucknow diary is to discover just how ordinary such seemingly extraordinary cultural mixtures were. All the pillars of Lucknow society were her old friends—Asaf ud-Daula, Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and many others—and she was quickly swept up into a whirl of social engagements, across the lines of East and West. Often she brought her children with her, always a sure way of winning Indian hospitality. Asaf ud-Daula doted on them and gave them toys; the emperor’s son, visiting Lucknow, “helped little Chichely to tea asked his name and took a great deal of notice of him.” Zoffany, for his part, “declared he would like to paint them both without any regard he was so taken with them.”³⁸

      In Calcutta, Elizabeth Plowden’s social life had revolved around the city’s Western-style entertainments: plays, masquerades, balls, carriage rides. In Lucknow, she walked into a quite different world. There were days she passed in the company of European friends around town, or in her friends’ country houses nearby. On others, she breakfasted or dined with the nawab and his courtiers. She might steal a few hours between engagements to study Persian or Hindustani with her munshi (teacher). But her greatest passion was for Indian music. Whenever Elizabeth heard appealing Persian or Hindustani airs, she made sure to get copies of them for her substantial collection of sheet music—a process that in itself involved cross-cultural communication on several levels. At the nawab’s one morning,

the Entertainment as usual Notching [dancing] I desired them to sing the song of ’Jo Shamshere Serey Allum Decktey.’ His Excellency told us the Poetry of this song was his own composition. As I had not a correct copy I sent Mirza Golam Hossein to request permission of sending my Monshy to the Nawab’s Ostand [ustaad] for a Copy. The Nawab said he would repeat the words to the Mirza who would write them down if I pleas’d.³⁹

She also learned to sing many Hindustani songs, and entertained her Indian and European friends by performing them, often to the accompaniment of a harpsichord given to her by ClaudeMartin. All told, it was a glorious and relaxing year: of nibbling on “Grapes Pomegranates Oranges dates Pistachio Nuts and other dry fruits” while watching elephant fights and fireworks in the nawab’s perfumed gardens; of seeing a palace at night, lit up for Muharram “with Glass LustresWreathes of Silver and Gold flowers and colour’d Lamps,” as black-clad mourners chanted in memory of the martyred imams; of spending afternoons with friends, sifting through Indian miniatures and the latest prints from Britain, or quiet evenings at home, with a nautch (dance performance) after dinner.⁴⁰

      Obviously there were limits to how deeply Elizabeth ever could—or would want to—immerse herself in Indian society. But in a small and remarkable way, she was invited into it. In June 1788, Asaf ud-Daula presented her with a unique testament to their friendship: a Mughal sanad (deed of grant) awarding her the title of begum (queen or noblewoman).

We have conferred upon Sophia Elizabeth Plowden, who is specially gifted with exceptional devotedness, and rare fidelity, high titles and honourable address: She is the ’Bilkis’ of her age and the Begam among the nobility and the aristocracy, with high distinction and exalted fame among her peers and contemporaries.⁴¹

      European men’s receiving Mughal titles, generally in recognition of military service, was not unheard of, but the granting of such a distinction to a European woman—particularly when her husband was not especially highplaced—was unusual to say the least. It is hard to know what prompted it, but the text remains an intriguing artifact of a city shaped by cultural crossing.

Richard Plowden was also fortunate: he got his money. (Unlike many. Poor Ozias Humphry spent years hounding the nawab for his money, and pestering friends in Britain to help him, to no avail.)⁴² In late 1788, the Plowdens left Lucknow for good, and returned to Britain in 1790, where they set themselves up in style in London’s Devonshire Place. They left warm memories behind. “I never passed More happy day in my Life but when you was in Lucknow,” Claude Martin wrote to Elizabeth in his broken English, eight years after their last meeting:

Those happy days, I never Can forget, your Company Enlivened the place tho there was many other family in the place, your lively and amiable Manner attracted Every body to your home, Your house was My Magnet. I never visited so much, as I did to you, we have had many Good Lady here, but none that I wisited with so real pleasure as I did you.⁴³

      Nor did the Plowdens forget India. Little William and Trevor, along with all their brothers, went on to have careers in India; and there would be Plowdens in India for generations to come.

      A shimmering cosmopolis beyond the frontier, Lucknow offered Europeans and Asians alike terrific chances to make money and spend it, to cross cultural lines, and to become self-made in all senses of the word. They were living out the Lucknow dream—of fame, fortune, and self-fashioning. Even for Elizabeth Plowden, the middle-class wife of a middle-ranking Company soldier, Lucknow was a site of reinvention: she arrived as Mrs. Richard Plowden, and she left a begum, formally ennobled by order of the Mughal emperor. She also left with her music collection, thickened with offerings from European and Indian friends. A full participant in Lucknow’s cosmopolitan high society, Elizabeth Plowden straddled cultural lines to a degree she had not, or could not, in Calcutta. For her male friends in Lucknow, such possibilities were greater still. And for three in particular—Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and the nawab himself—the Lucknow dream became real in the most extravagant, unexpected of ways. It is to them, to further tales of collecting and cultural crossing, that the story now turns.

III. Orientalists?

      You could find yet another sign of Lucknow’s cultural preeminence by visiting the city’s bazaars. Thread your way into the narrow lanes of the chowk—among vendors toting giant trays of sweets, mangoes, and coconut wedges, past the flower stalls laced with garlands of jasmine and marigold—and you would find the Orient for sale. In the spice market, there were cones of magical colored powders and sacks of Persian cashews, East Indian cloves, obscure roots and aromatic barks; in the jewelers’ shops, pearls and Golconda diamonds, emeralds from the New World mines, lapis lazuli from the snowy reaches of Afghanistan. There were kite-makers and metalworkers, potters and tobacconists; cloth merchants selling bolts of fabric woven stiff with gold zari; and stalls where the celebrated Lucknow embroiderers sat bunched over yards of muslin, their intricate designs taking shape under a blur of moving hands. The perfumers could sell you another local favorite, pure attar of roses, or mix any scent you liked from the mysterious essences that lined their shelves.

It was in these bustling bazaars that you might also buy fine art and rare texts. Here, dealers did a lively trade in manuscripts, calligraphy, and paintings old and new. To sift through the paintings on sale would be like looking into fantasy worlds, where skies were celadon, skins were blue, and peacocks sat on parapets in the moonlight. The dealer would turn them over to read the price, marked in a coded script, called raqam, that only he and his colleagues could decipher. Forty rupees, one hundred rupees. Two pounds, five pounds. A mere trifle compared with the finest illuminated manuscripts, licked onto paper with brushes no thicker than a single hair, every page bordered by a network of flowers and birds. Those could cost a thousand pounds.⁴⁴ In the bazaars you could also buy individual specimens from Lucknow’s famous calligraphers, in flowing swirls and scoops of nastaliq script. But a single letter in the hand of the best of them, Hafiz Nur Ullah, would cost you one rupee (two shillings), so the text had better be short.⁴⁵