Company, Crown, Cargo

I'm a diwan. دیوان.In Persian that's a register. A book of accounts.It's also a book of poems. Hafiz (source) had one.For a long time, I was the second kind.

Twelfth of August, seventeen sixty-five. Allahabad (source).The Emperor of Hindustan, Shah Alam (source), on a throne they've improvised —an English armchair, set on top of Clive (source)'s dining table.And from up there he signs me over:the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa,to a trading company from a street in London.Leadenhall Street (source). A shop, with an army.

Not a conquest. A transfer.Nobody burns the capital. Nobody changes the flag.Same clerks. Same villages. Same land tax.It just goes in a different column.Same year, London tries a stamp tax on America (source), and America riots.Nobody asks Bengal.

دیوان — diwan — a book of poems.دیوان — diwan — a book of accounts.Same word. Different hand.Balance carried forward.

Entries, backdated.Plassey (source), seventeen fifty-seven. One day. A general bought. A nawab gone.Clive's share: two hundred and thirty-four thousand pounds.When Parliament asks, he says, I stand astonished at my own moderation (source).Eighteen-oh-three: two hundred and sixty thousand men (source) under arms.Twice the size of the British army. Owned by shareholders.

And the weavers. Dhaka muslin (source) so fine, they said, it went through a ring.Company agents at the door with contracts: this price, this much, this date, or else.

Meanwhile, Lancashire (source). Machines.Indian cloth taxed at the English border like a crime.English cloth let into India like a guest.Eighteen forty. A man from the government tells Parliament:Dhaka's down from a hundred and fifty thousand to thirty or forty,and the jungle's coming into the town. He calls it the Manchester of India (source).Manchester's the reason.

دیوان — diwan — a book of poems.دیوان — diwan — a book of accounts.Same word. Different hand.Balance carried forward.

Seventeen seventy (source). The rain fails.Company men are buying up the rice, they say. The Company is still collecting.Bengal calls it ছিয়াত্তরের মন্বন্তর — the famine of seventy-six. Their calendar, not mine.Afterwards the Governor (source) writes to London:we have lost at least one third of the inhabitants.A third of Bengal.And then, same letter, a line I'll keep for ever:the net collections of seventeen seventy-one exceeded even those of seventeen sixty-eight.Fewer people. More tax.He even explains how. The revenue, he writes,was violently kept up.

دیوان — diwan — a book of poems.دیوان — diwan — a book of accounts.Same word. Different hand.Balance carried forward.

My name got everywhere.In Italy I'm dogana (source). Customs. In France, douane.In a London drawing room I'm a divan (source). Something to lie on.And one word went back to England with them, straight out of Hindustani.लूट. Loot. (source)Look it up.

(Hoye!)

ਸ਼ੇਰ-ਏ-ਪੰਜਾਬ! شیرِ پنجاب!Forty years, and they never crossed his river. (Hoye!)Dhol in the street and gold on the temple —one eye open, and it's on all of us.

My father lost an eye to smallpox as a boy.Took Lahore (source) at eighteen. Maharaja by Baisakhi, eighteen-oh-one.Couldn't read a word. Didn't need to. Everybody read him.

Our name came first, though. Anandpur (source), sixteen ninety-nine.The tenth Guru gives everyone who joins one surname — ਸਿੰਘ, lion, for the men,ਕੌਰ, princess, for the women —so nobody can tell your caste from what you're called.Nobody gave it to them. They took it. All at once, on purpose.

His foreign minister's a Muslim, Fakir Azizuddin (source).A British officer asks which eye the Maharaja's missing.He says: my master is the sun, and the sun has one eye —it shines so bright I've never dared to look for the other.

He covers the Harmandir (source) in gold. Now they call it the Golden Temple.Sends gold for the domes in Varanasi (source) — the temple Aurangzeb pulled down,the one a queen called Ahilyabai (source) put back.And yes, his soldiers stabled horses in the Badshahi Mosque (source). Nobody's clean.

ਸ਼ੇਰ-ਏ-ਪੰਜਾਬ! شیرِ پنجاب!Forty years, and they never crossed his river. (Hoye!)Dhol in the street and gold on the temple —one eye open, and it's on all of us.

Then he dies. June, eighteen thirty-nine. And it all comes loose.His son, poisoned, some say. At that funeral an archway falls on the grandson.A regent. Another king, shot. Four rulers in four years, and then me —five years old on a throne, my mother holding the palace together with her teeth.

The army crosses the Sutlej. The Company's waiting.Sobraon (source). The river full of our men. And the treaty after:the Doab between the Beas and the Sutlej — Jullundur (source) — ceded.Kashmir sold to a Dogra (source) for seventy-five lakh rupees. Just sold.

Round two. Chillianwala (source), and the Company bleeds. Then Gujrat.Twenty-ninth of March, eighteen forty-nine. I'm ten.They put a treaty in front of me. Article three:the gem called the Koh-i-Noor (source) shall be surrendered to the Queen of England.I sign it.My mother escapes (source) their fort dressed as a servant and gets to Nepal.

ਸ਼ੇਰ-ਏ-ਪੰਜਾਬ. شیرِ پنجاب.Forty years, and they never crossed his river.Then they crossed it.One eye open, and it's on all of us.

Fourteen, they baptise me. Fifteen, they ship me to England.The Queen likes me. Everyone says so. She has my portrait painted.One afternoon at the palace she hands me the Koh-i-Noor to look at.They've recut it. The crowds at the Great Exhibition (source) found it dull,so they ground it down, a hundred and eighty-six carats to a hundred and five.I walk to the window with it and turn it in the light.Then I give it back to her. What else do you do.

A house in Suffolk (source). Pheasant shoots. Best shot in England, they say.My mother, thirteen years on, nearly blind, finally in my arms in Calcutta.She dies in Kensington.At forty-seven I try to go home. They arrest me at Aden (source).I take amrit there, a Sikh again, stuck in a port.I die in a Paris hotel.

Elveden (source). A churchyard in Suffolk.The last Maharaja of the Punjab.And the stone's in a crown in the Tower (source).A hundred and five carats.It used to be a hundred and eighty-six.

The pipes you're hearing were made in Sialkot (source).The British army brought them to the Punjab.Now the Punjab makes them, and ships them to Scotland.

Eighteen fifty-seven. A new rifle, the Enfield (source), made in a factory just north of London (source).The cartridge comes greased, you bite it open,and the word in the barracks is the grease is cow and pig.The Hindu won't. The Muslim won't.And in May at Meerut (source), the whole Bengal army goes up.

And the Punjab? The Punjab fights for the British.Eight years after the Company took it, Punjab marches on Delhi for them,because the Bengal regiments were the ones who beat the Sikhs.Revenge is a recruiter.Delhi falls (source). The last Mughal (source) gets put on a boat to Rangoon,and the poem they give him says:not even two yards of earth in the street he loved. دو گز زمین.Then the Crown takes over and turns loyalty into a theory.Martial races (source). Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans, Gurkhas, Jats.Born to fight.Bengalis left off the list.

Who's the martial race? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who carries the Enfield? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who goes over the top in France? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Fall in. (Fall in!)Who's the martial race? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who carries the Enfield? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who goes over the top in France? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Fall in. (Fall in!)

Nineteen fourteen. The King needs men.A million and a quarter sign up, and about half the fighting men are Punjab.October, Ypres. Khudadad Khan, Punjabi Muslim, the last man alive at his machine gun,the first Indian to win the Victoria Cross (source).The letters home (source) go through a censor in France, so the men learn code.A wedding is a battle. Black pepper is us. Red pepper is them.So when a man writes home that the black pepper's running out,his mother knows.The wounded go to Brighton, to a pleasure palace with onion domes (source).The Hindus and Sikhs who die are burned on the Downs (source). The Muslims are buried at Woking (source).Seventy-four thousand don't come home.

Who's the martial race? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who carries the Enfield? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who goes over the top in France? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Fall in. (Fall in!)Who's the martial race? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who carries the Enfield? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who goes over the top in France? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Fall in. (Fall in!)

Nineteen nineteen. The war's won.The thank-you arrives: the Rowlatt Act (source).Arrest without warrant. Prison without trial.For the people who just won it.Thirteenth of April. Baisakhi. Amritsar.The festival they crowned the Lion on. The day the Khalsa was born.Villagers in town for the temple, a few hundred yards away,wander into a walled garden with narrow gates.Jallianwala Bagh (source).Fifteen, twenty thousand people.General Dyer (source) brings fifty rifles and gives no warning.Every one of those rifles is the Indian Army's. Enfields.Ten minutes. Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds.He stops when the ammunition runs low.The plaque says a hundred and twenty came out of the well (source).The government says three hundred and seventy-nine dead.Others say a thousand.In London a newspaper raises (source) twenty-six thousand pounds.

Who's the martial race? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who carries the Enfield? (ਪੰਜਾਬ!)Who's in the garden on Baisakhi?

Thirteenth of March, nineteen forty. Caxton Hall, London.A Punjabi who was in Amritsar that yearshoots the man who governed Punjab (source) and stood by the general.When they ask his name, he gives it as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad (source).A Hindu name. A Muslim name. A Sikh name.And Azad. Free.They hang him at Pentonville.

(Gari la moshi!)

Eighteen thirty-four. Britain abolishes slavery (source), and the sugar still needs cutting.So the planters send for India. A paper: five years, a wage, a passage home, maybe.The villagers can't say agreement. It comes out girmit.And the people who sign it get called girmitiya —named after the form.

Mauritius first (source). Then Guiana — a future Prime Minister's father (source) ships the first four hundred.Trinidad. Natal. Fiji. Over a million (source) across the kala pani, the black water,and cross it, they say, and your caste is gone.Some of them thought that was the good news.

Weight, wage, place of origin —weight, wage, place of origin —six hundred and sixty miles of metre gauge.Who was holding the pen?

Eighteen ninety-six. Mombasa. Mile zero (source).A railway to Lake Victoria through country nobody's surveyed.In Parliament they call it the lunatic line (source).Thirty thousand men off the boats from Karachi, mostly Punjab, some Gujarat,laying metre gauge into the thornbush, a mile at a time.

Tsavo (source), eighteen ninety-eight. Men named Singh. Lion.And for nine months, real lions come into the camp at night.Twenty-eight dead, or a hundred and thirty-five, depending who's telling it.Two thousand four hundred and ninety three dead by the end.Nearly four men for every mile.Halfway up, a swamp the Maasai called the place of cool water becomes a depot,and the depot becomes Nairobi (source).

Weight, wage, place of origin —weight, wage, place of origin —six hundred and sixty miles of metre gauge.Who was holding the pen?

Kisumu (source). December, nineteen-oh-one. The line hits the lake.Six thousand seven hundred and twenty-four decide to stay.They open shops by the stations — duka, from dukaan —and Swahili takes the words: pesa for money, gari for the cart,and the train becomes gari la moshi. The smoke cart.

And at every station, in a pressed white shirt, a clerk.Stationmaster. Accounts. Customs. Post and telegraph.Catholic. English-educated. Portuguese surnames. Goan (source).The Punjabis laid the line.The Goans wrote down what it cost.

Weight, wage, place of origin —weight, wage, place of origin —six hundred and sixty miles of metre gauge.Who was holding the pen?

Seventy years on, their grandchildren are running the dukas and the post offices,and a general in Kampala (source) says he's had a dream.Ninety days.