Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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traditional yunani medicine. While he was away on business trips, he sent his children a regular stream of small gifts, sweetmeats, and paternal instructions. “My dear son,” he wrote to his eldest boy, Anthony,
it is necessary that you go for horse riding and for strolls in the garden to enjoy the greenery and the beautiful flowers. You should visit Captain Martin two to three times a day without fail. Sit with him for some time and introduce yourself to whoever comes there so that you get used to interacting with people. It is not proper to stay indoors for long. This is a must.62
It is plain from this letter that Polier wanted his son to become familiar with European society and learn to move in it; he may well have hoped to send Anthony into the East India Company army, a common career choice at the time for officers’ half-Indian sons. And yet, of course, it was not in English that Polier and his son corresponded, but in Persian, their family language.
Looked at full on, Antoine Polier’s two faces blend into an extraordinary hybrid: the image of a man who had managed to make it in both European and Mughal society at the same time. As a collector and patron of Indian art—a practice valued in both cultures—he scored a double coup. Some would argue that imperial collecting of any kind is fundamentally an acquisition of power. Maybe so. But with Polier, as with Robert Clive and many of Polier’s Lucknow peers, this was power of a very personal kind. A Swiss-born foreigner in Indian service, Polier was not an “imperialist” like Governor Warren Hastings. It was specifically because he was excluded from the East India Company hierarchy that he needed to find a different way in, other routes to fame and fortune. Orientalism wove Polier into an elite group of Europeans in India, and underscored his position among them as a man of property, learning, and talent. Yet if Polier was an Orientalist, he was an Oriental, too. For as a collector and patron, he was also acting out the role of the Mughal nobleman that he was. From the moment he left Company Bengal in 1773, Polier lodged his career, his affections, his money, and his interests in Mughal India. He worked for Indian rulers, started an Indo-Persian family, acquired a title and a jagir, and adopted the way of life of a member of the Mughal elite. Collecting was a sport of princes in Mughal India, too, and Polier cemented his status in Lucknow by indulging in it.
None of this meant that he renounced his European friends, gave up his political allegiances and desire for promotion, or abandoned the idea of returning to Europe. (How, why, and with what consequences he left Lucknow behind is for the next chapter to tell.) But as long as Polier lived in Lucknow, capital of cultural crossing, he could keep up both personæ. And he was by no means the only, or even the most conspicuous, collector to reinvent himself in Lucknow, to cross the lines. For while Polier and others were delving into the world of Mughal cultivation, Claude Martin and Asaf ud-Daula were managing between them to make Lucknow a center of European connoisseurship as well.
One day in the hot early weeks of May 1760, Claude Martin gave up. He abandoned his post in the bodyguard of the Comte de Lally, France’s commander in chief in India, climbed onto his horse, and trotted out of the French settlement of Pondicherry. It was the height of the Seven Years War. All around the town the East India Company army under Colonel Eyre Coote lay encamped, besieging the French into submission. As far as Martin was concerned, the time had come. He crossed the hedge of prickly pears that bounded the settlement and surrendered himself into the hands of a nearby British detachment.63
Colonel Coote was used to defections like these. (The East India Company army was hardly immune from defections itself.) Since he had routed Lally at the battle of Wandewash in January, the situation of the French in South India had grown desperate. While Coote and his men ringed Pondicherry to the west, Admiral Pococke brought seven warships into the waters to the east, completing a blockade around the settlement. Inside the city walls circumstances were still worse. No provisions, no money, no defenses, no ships, and no morale: all that the starving, defeatist French population had, and all that united them, was passionate hatred for Lally, who would later be tried and beheaded in France for his troubles. So many French soldiers deserted during those terrible months of 1760 that Coote decided to create a “Free French Company” in the (already multinational) Madras army to contain them. It was to this regiment that Coote attached Martin, who brought his new masters eight years’ experience soldiering and some technical skills as an engineer. In 1763, the young Frenchman was formally commissioned ensign in the East India Company army. There was no going back. From that day on, Martin was a Frenchman by birth but a Briton by choice.
When Martin stumbled out of the cactus hedge and into the Company army, he knew that he was moving still farther from the medieval streets of Lyon’s Presqu’île, where he was born—away from his family’s vinegar business and a good bourgeois life. This, he knew, was a step not just away from France but away from the French. Yet not even Martin could have predicted that his path with the British would take him to Lucknow, to a fortune of almost half a million pounds, and to a future as one of the eighteenth century’s greatest collectors. Where Polier had made himself an Orientalist and an Oriental, Martin took advantage of Lucknow’s opportunities—to make money, among other things—to reinvent himself as a Briton, a gentleman, and a European connoisseur.
After many years in North India, fighting and working as a surveyor under James Rennell, Claude Martin arrived in Lucknow in 1776 to take up a new job as superintendent of the nawab’s arsenal. His appointment was due to the Company’s increased military presence in Awadh; the arsenal would be casting guns for the Company’s own troops. It also hinted at the Company’s rather ambivalent position toward continental Europeans: having forced Asaf to dismiss his father’s “French” advisers, here it was inserting its own Frenchborn agent instead. Martin, at any rate, a keen opportunist, had lobbied hard for the posting and welcomed the chance to get rich off the concessions and soft money that abounded in Awadh.
Martin had no more compunctions than anybody else about milking the nawab for favors. But he owed his tremendous fortune primarily to a natural talent for business, and relentless energy in exercising it. He drew rent on more than a dozen properties in Lucknow, including the Company residency, and various estates around Awadh. He also earned a hefty interest income by lending money to various Europeans, to say nothing of the profligate nawab. Martin invested some of his money in Company stocks and bonds; mostly, though, he pursued an export business, which ranged from small ventures in sugar, shawls, and lapis lazuli, to a sustained private trade in piece goods and indigo. From 1791, Martin manufactured and exported the blue dye himself, at his Najafgarh estate.64
In 1800Martin’s net worth was over £400,000 (40 lakhs of rupees), which made him about as rich as the great nabobs of the 1770s, and quite possibly the richest European then in India. Like a latter-day Robert Clive, he plowed his money into land, houses, and political influence. His estates stretched over a vast reach of northeastern India, from Lucknow to Cawnpore, Benares, Chandernagore, and Calcutta. At Najafgarh (which he bought from Polier in 1786), Martin was a gentleman farmer, tending his indigo fields and growing roses for attar. In Lucknow, he based himself in a lavish house of his own design, the Farhat Baksh, which ingeniously channeled water from the River Gomti to cool its rooms. This was only one of many buildings Martin designed in and around Lucknow. During the last years of his life, he built his own equivalent of Claremont: the sprawling mansion of Constantia, on the outskirts of the city. Also like Clive, Martin recognized that he needed to protect his fortune with friends in high places. On the one hand, he made sure to cultivate connections with Warren Hastings and a range of top East India Company officials. On the other, he stayed close to the nawab Asaf ud-Daula, who had the power to grant him lucrative concessions, just as Martin was able to supply the nawab in turn with ready cash. Theirs was a marriage of convenience: they did not especially like each other, but they knew they would be worse off alone.
Unlike Clive, Martin does not