Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah by Llewellyn-Jones Rosie

Author:Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie [Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2014-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

5

AT GARDEN REACH

Life in the Bengal palaces, as Wajid ‘Ali Shah recreates the vanished world of Lucknow. He is wildly extravagant and continually in debt, which is made worse by his servants, who fleece him shamelessly. British officials try to rescue him from his own folly. They also try, unsuccessfully, to control the royal estate through policing and improved sanitation.

When the Chief Justice of Calcutta, Sir Lawrence Peel, retired to England in 1855, he settled down on the Isle of Wight and built himself a pleasant house, which he named ‘Garden Reach’. This was a tribute to the area that lay south-west of Calcutta where Peel had lived during the latter years of his Indian career. Wealthy British officials had begun building country or ‘garden’ houses in the 1770s along a two-mile stretch on the southern bank of the Hugli. Although referred to as ‘bungalows’, these were substantial two- or three-storeyed houses, often Palladian in style, with fashionable bow-fronted facades. A decade later, when the artist William Hodges travelled upriver, he wrote in his journal: ‘As the ship approaches Calcutta the river narrows; that which is called the Garden Reach, presents a view of handsome buildings, on a flat surrounded by gardens; these are villas belonging to the opulent inhabitants of Calcutta.’ They were indeed very handsome buildings, and well able to rival the large houses along Chowringhee that gave Calcutta its proud name, ‘City of Palaces’. At Garden Reach there were no constraints on space, so each villa stood in its own large garden compound, with separate buildings for stables, kitchens and servants’ quarters. The area was known locally as Matiya Burj, which means a clay or earthen tower, as an old watchtower of unbaked bricks had stood somewhere here to guard the bend in the river that led up-country.

William Hickey, the Calcutta lawyer more famous for his entertaining memoirs than his career at the Bar, hired a garden house here for the three ‘horridly dusty and disagreeable months of March, April and May’ in 1791.1 It was a ‘very large and commodious residence in Garden Reach, the last in that line, about seven miles and a half from Calcutta, beautifully situated within a few yards of the river, affording us the advantage of water as well as land carriage’. Hickey’s rented house, which he shared with a friend, had nine large apartments, with four smaller ones on the ground floor. There were ‘six very spacious ones above stairs’, two of which had their own private staircase. There was a noble dining room, a similar breakfast room, a spacious sitting or drawing-room and an adjoining billiard room. Such luxury had a price too, and Hickey found his share of the hire, at the end of three months, was over 7,000 rupees. A similar house at Garden Reach was sold for 35,000 rupees a few years later to Lord Wellesley, who intended to set up a college here for junior East India Company staff. Wellesley imagined something along the lines

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