Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [48]
I am aware, as I write this three hundred years later, of the greatness of Henry Hedges. His accounts (in four thick volumes) are the core of nearly any serious study of South India in the early British times—but what it must have felt like, to have been a twenty-five-year-old Salem woman, discovering them for the first time, digging them out of folded silks in the drawers of those hand-carved dressers, along with the folios of the bright, unappreciated court paintings of the Mughal masters?
Henry Hedges was a man of the New Science and of the Old Humanism. How, or why, he chose to ship out to India as a Company man he never explained—perhaps he saw it as the Peace Corps of his day (although his collection of furnishings indicates he was no mendicant-scholar). He was shrewd, curious, brilliant and passionate, a man of that extraordinary time, and slightly unbalanced.
Hannah had never seen such possessions (they are housed today in the Victoria and Albert, and in several Continental museums). Most factors lived frugally, within their Company means, hoarding their Indian wealth for an early retirement. Theirs was a conversion society, calculating every purchase, every expenditure, every sale in local tars and pagodas, against “real” money, bullion, in the real home country. In Henry Hedges we have an early appearance of a Sir William Jones or a Sir Richard Burton, a true eccentric English expatriate.
That the acquisitor suffered in Fort St. Sebastian is incontrovertible. While going through Henry Hedges’ ledgers of household accounts, Hannah came across a startling line. I am sick, I must die. Hannah doesn’t appear to have recognized this as a line from Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in Time of Plague.” Nor did she see it as part of Hedges’ indictment of Company society, its studied ignorance of the people it traded with. Hedges was a pedant—he served without extra pay as Company translator merely for the practice it offered him—and he must have been, like Burton, insufferable. His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the “Zentoos,” meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity. He felt he had known the last generation of noble practitioners of the ancient Vedic rites.
Hannah cited these ruminations as proof of his breakdown, which, in a sense, they were. One more Englishman snared by the Company and destroyed by the tropics.
In the small circle of Englishmen and Englishwomen within which Hannah’s social life was confined, she saw many variations of Henry Hedges’ ailment and many strategies for its management. The most effective cure was to fabricate a fantasy England, in which life had been idyllic and would be again on retirement. Even the young recruits of nineteen and twenty wore their Englishness as indelibly as a criminal in Salem or London had worn the branded letters of his sin: E for English, Extraordinary, Ethical.
The fort was Little England. The Fort St. George Council’s penal code encouraged straight and narrow living. Uncleanness, lying, cheating, drunkenness, swearing, missing morning or evening prayers, using seditious words, mutinying, dueling, all were punishable with whippings, mountings of the “wooden horse,” confinement and fines. When caught. When admitted. When they spoke to their servants and mistresses, to shopkeepers and clients, they spoke as though theirs were the bell-toned sweetly patriotic voice of a homogenous sovereign nation. Hannah with her stories of wigwam burnings in Hopewell Swamp discomfited