Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [37]
The Company factors and their wives imported all the impractical trappings of English society, knowing full well that everyday cotton clothes and plain, serviceable furniture were locally and cheaply available. For after all, appearances in the tropics were the first line of demarcation that separated an Englishman from a heathen, and to appear unclean or even unpresentable before one’s inferiors merely encouraged the little monkeys, who were, after all, clever and imitative, to strut and mince like popinjays and in general puff up their prices to match their newfound arrogance.
To be accused of dirtiness would be to stand guilty as a buffoon and an amateur. One separated oneself from Them primarily by staying clean and upright: starched, dignified, sober, righteous and faithful. The alternatives were acknowledged to exist, especially among young men outside the ennobling sight of English (or, failing that, French or Portuguese) women, but the occasional misstep was not to be confused with the gleeful wallow of the Hindus and, only slightly above them, the Muslims. It was proven that the most profitable factories—trading posts—were those that enforced the rules of order and cleanliness. And Mr. Cephus Prynne’s St. Sebastian factory was the most profitable on the Coromandel Coast.
Perhaps, beguiled by the fecundity, the can’t-miss promise of preexistent riches like gold and jewels, the British in India felt no compulsion to search long and hard, as they had in the New World, for ideal harbors and salubrious settings. They had not come to India in order to breed and colonize, or even to convert. They were here to plunder, to enrich themselves (under the guise of a Royal Charter) and pay their fees to the ruling nawabs.
Competing European empires set up their chain of waterfront forts within hailing distance of one another. In Hannah’s New England world, French forts even five hundred miles away had been considered too threatening. This commercial competition was something new, a kind of proto-Common Market. In India, the future didn’t matter. If they stayed too long they’d be dead and planted in this septic soil; if they devoted themselves single-mindedly to making money, they’d be rich and retired with a safe Tory seat in the Home Counties.
The locals were fisherfolk and boatmen, mostly Hindu with Muslim overlords. Everyone on the Coromandel, Gabriel had tried to explain to Hannah on those endless dark nights at sea, belonged to a caste if he was Hindu, a right-hand or left-hand caste, and everyone was either Shia or Sunni if he was Muslim. They all spoke different languages, they owed fidelity to different masters, they worshiped different gods, and their ancesters had come from different countries.
It had been inconceivable to a Puritan soul like Hannah’s. Not just pagans and Muhammadans, but different gods and different ways of worshiping the same gods. Even putting a plural ending on the sacred word God: it became her secret blasphemy. Gods. It all went back to her earliest years in the forests.
2
GABRIEL LEGGE decided to join the Honourable East India Company at a time of its greatest upheaval. The Royal Charter guaranteeing a monopoly had been granted by James II in 1686. With the Glorious Revolution two years later, the Protestant William had abrogated it. And so for the decade of the 1690s the East India Company was, to use our term, effectively deregulated. Import values as registered in London sagged from eight hundred thousand