Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [75]
After all, new money is needed. The Emperor, defender of Islam, protector of the Holy Word, is waging an expensive war against that flea of an infidel, that idolatrous Jadav Singh. The Nawab and the Emperor understand the English as fellow monotheists, civilized members of the great fraternity of empire builders. Imagine the alternative, business contracts written in sand by monkey-worshiping savages. He therefore directs the English Company to arrange for the immediate settlement of its debts and to increase its bullion investment in Roopconda and so outbid all competitors, namely the Hon. Marquis de Mussy, who is a spirited practitioner of the art of free trade.
Young Tringham and Ali-Oliver-Ortencio ferried this correspondence over hillocks and through jungles, crossed rivers in flimsy barks, waited out highwaymen in hollowed tree trunks and moist caves. (The series of miniatures chronicling the dangerous day-and-night journey is in private collections.) Tringham carried the Chief Factor’s letters to the Nawab in a taffeta-lined leather pouch stamped with a tiny gilt knight spearing a tinier dragon. Instead of flames, the dragon breathed out a curvaceous grace of floral trellises. The Nawab always slipped his responses in silk or brocade cases made especially for the portaging of proclamations. During their journey, while Tringham slept, the dexterous dubash extracted the precious letters from their pouches or cases without fissuring the official seals, copied them on his garments with an invisible unguent, then sold the copy to either the Marquis or to the Compagnie Royale de France for a brace of Madagascar slaves to pleasure his jaded flesh.
Higginbottham wrote more letters, to the new Governor, Thomas Pitt, at Fort St. George, and to the Directors in Leadenhall Street. Each letter was more urgent than the last, but each response seemed cooler, less committed. He could not wait the months necessary for the Directors to receive his complaints and then the many more months for him to receive their response.
These letters took over his life. The factors were demoted unofficially to writers and enrolled in his epistolary campaign. He was an early victim of primitive communications, and to give him credit, his letters to Leadenhall reveal the insights of a man born two hundred years too early. Communications create trade, he argues, not the other way around. He sketched in plans for an overland route to England, or at least to the frontiers of Europe, that could cut two months off the Cape route to England, where horses and camels might be pressed into service, where diplomatic links might guarantee safe passage of documents even through hostile territories. But he was a man born to frustration. An ineffectual, embittered visionary, lacking Cephus Prynne’s sordid force of character.
The India trade, wrote the Directors in response, has achieved on the English market an enviable level of acceptance. In fact, so successful is the integration of India cloth, the double calicoes, the lighter flannels, the new dyes and colors and stripes, that the spinning mills of Norwich have registered their complaints to the King and the House of Lords. The reexport of East India fabric to the West Indies and America has practically closed the traditional mills; the cotton stockings of India are held in such esteem that the English manufacturing may never recover. Tradesmen need only advertise “India silk!” to have their doors assaulted by frantic buyers.
Higginbottham read the reports with mounting excitement. It was unimaginable that rising demand would not be met with augmented supply. This child of free enterprise then learned the bitter lesson of political reality: expanded export from the factories of India was problematic. At the time of imported cloth’s maximum popularity, voluntary curbs were being proposed. Thus, the prudent course, Higginbottham was told by the Fort St. George Council, would be to starve supply to guarantee a bloated price. No further