“The Delhi princess, to whom the king was betrothed and married by his father, we did not see; she is in disgrace, and confined to her own palace. The old begam talked away to us, but appeared surprised I should admire Tajmahŭl more than the English begam, as she is called,—my country-woman as they styled her!
“Poor thing, I felt ashamed of the circumstance, when I saw her chewing pān with all the gusto of a regular Hindostanee.”
The above letter contains so charming an account of Lucnow, that I cannot refrain from adding an extract from another of the same lady.
“At the residency, on such a day as this, the thermometer is seldom short of 100°!
“Did you ever hear of Colonel Gardner? he is married to a native princess. The other day he paid Lucnow a visit. His son’s wife is sister to the legal queen of our present worthy sovereign of Oude. Colonel Gardner came on a visit to the begam’s father, Mirza Sulimān Sheko, a prince of the house of Delhi, blessed with fifty-two children, twelve sons and forty daughters! Did you ever hear of such enormity? the poor papa is without a rupee, his pension from government of 5000 rupees a month is mortgaged to his numerous creditors. He has quarrelled with his illustrious son-in-law, the king of Oude; and Colonel Gardner has come over with the laudable purpose of removing his family from Oude to Delhi, where they will have a better chance of being provided for.
“Indeed, the other day, seventeen of the daughters were betrothed to seventeen princes of Delhi: this is disposing of one’s daughters by wholesale! is it not? Colonel Gardner, who is a very gentlemanlike person, I hear, of the old school, was educated in France some fifty years ago. He gave a description of his sojourn amongst this small family in the city, in these words,—‘I slept every night with the thermometer at 100°, and surrounded by 500 females!’
“What a situation! I do not know which would be the most overpowering, the extreme heat, or the incessant clack of the forty princesses and their attendants. It reminds me of the old fairy tale of the ‘Ogre’s forty daughters with golden crowns on their heads.’”
On dit, the English begam was the daughter of a half caste and an English officer; her mother afterwards married a native buniyā (shop-keeper). She had a sister; both the girls lived with the mother, and employed themselves in embroidering saddle-cloths for the horses of the rich natives. They were both very plain; nevertheless, one of them sent her picture to his majesty, who, charmed with the portrait, married the lady. She had money in profusion at her command: she made her father-in-law her treasurer, and pensioned her mother and sister.
The Suttee.
A rich buniyā, a corn chandler, whose house was near the gate of our grounds, departed this life; he was an Hindoo. On the 7th of November, the natives in the bazār were making a great noise with their tom-toms, drums, and other discordant musical instruments, rejoicing that his widow had determined to perform suttee, i.e. to burn on his funeral-pile.