Chapter 1: The Opening
Piprahwa Kot, 18 January 1898It was mid-January, most likely one of those days when the sun takes all morning to burn off the mists which cloak the Gangetic plains at that time of year. Logic suggests therefore that it was probably just after lunch when William ('Willie') Claxton Peppe marshalled his party and led them on horseback and in pony traps northwards towards the border. After five and a half miles -- and just half a mile short of the Nepalese frontier -- the party, consisting of perhaps half a dozen Europeans of both sexes, turned off the track and dismounted. Before them rose the largest of a number of knolls known locally as kots, a word derived for the Sanskrit term for a ruler's palace or fortress but which had come to be used locally to describe any unnatural mound. This particular mound Willie Peppe had named the Piprahwa Kot, after the name of the nearest village, which itself took its name from an extensive grove of pipal (ficus religiosa) trees, long regarded as sacred. The kot now swarmed with coolies -- workmen drawn from Peppe's own Birdpore Estate supplemented by Tharus from across the border. Before the forty-five square mile Birdpore Estate had been laid out in the 1840s and 1850s this had all been jungle and swamp, inhabited only by wild animals -- and by the Tharu forest-dwellers, whose immunity from the virulent local form of malaria now made them a valuable asset, even if they disliked manual labour.
William Claxton Peppe of Birdpore Estate, probably photographed in the year of his first marriage in 1884, when he was aged 32. (Courtesy of Neil Peppe)Three generations of settlers, British and Indian, had worked on this land and many had died of fever in the process. Willie's maternal grandfather had been part of the first generation, his father William Peppe senior among the second, joining the Birdpore Estate in 1849 as a manager and marrying Willie's mother a year later. It was William Peppe the elder who had had built Birdpore House, a palatial bungalow with a magnificent covered veranda at the front and a broad sweep of steps that led down to a garden complete with lawns, herbaceous borders and an ornamental fountain. Willie himself belonged to the third generation. He had been born in Birdpore House in 1852 but sent home at six to be educated in Scotland. At twenty-one he had returned to India, taking over the management of the estate sixteen years later when the old man had become too infirm to carryon. He was now forty-five years of age and in his prime, and there was no one within miles who would have dared dispute his authority as the raja or zamindar of Birdpore Estate and all its people, for he was ruler in all but name. It was, after all, the Peppes who had transformed a wilderness into a going concern and in the process given employment, security and a modicum of prosperity to a large labour force and their families. A stern man and a hard task-master Peppe-Sahib might be but he was also a just man who knew the ways of his people and who listened to their concerns.
Work had started on the Piprahwa Kot ten months earlier. Three weeks' of clearing away soil and loose piles of bricks had revealed a massive hemispherical dome some 120 feet in diameter. It appeared to be built entirely of large rectangular slabs of fired bricks, reddish in colour, the accumulated weight of which had caused the entire structure to settle and spread, so that what must originally have stood some fifty feet high or more at the centre was now half that height.
At that point Willie Peppe had suspended all work, partly because the hot season was by then too advanced to think of going on and partly because he needed expert advice.
That advice had been readily available for, by happy coincidence, two leading authorities on Indian archaeology were senior civil servants attached to the provincial division of Gorakhpur within which the Birdpore Estate lay, and a third was actively engaged in an archaeological excavation just a matter of miles away across the border in Nepal. Willie Peppe had chosen to consult the man he knew best: Vincent Arthur Smith of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), then serving as District Judge in the divisional headquarters at Gorakhpur town -- sixty miles by road from Birdpore but brought closer thanks to the new branch line running north to Uska Bazaar.
Smith was the son of the well-known Irish antiquarian and numismatist Dr. Aquilla Smith and had come out to India twenty-six years earlier after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin. Having topped the final examination list for the ICS in 1871, he had been marked out as a man who would go far. He could have had the pick of the provinces but had plumped for service in the North- Western Provinces and Oude, usually referred to as the NWP&O. His first posting as Assistant Commissioner had been to the Basti District, within which lay the Birdpore Grant, and there a year later in 1873 he had met Willie Peppe, newly graduated from Edinburgh University. At that time Smith had been twenty-five years old and Peppe twenty-one.
In the years that followed the two had become good acquaintances rather than close friends. The ICS was an elite service and its members did not fraternise with those they governed. Furthermore, the mercantile and planter community to which the Peppes belonged came low in the caste system that the British in India followed, and whether gentlemen or not, those like William Peppe who were 'country born' of India-domiciled parents came lower still, however grand their estates. It would have helped if the two had shared interests outside their work, but the one was interested only in the 30,000 acres of the Birdpore Estate that he managed as his own fiefdom while the other spent his leisure-time digging into India's past in an almost literal sense.
Early on in his career Smith had made his professional mark with the publication of The Settlement Officer's Manual for the North- Western Provinces, and in the normal course of events would have expected to be running his own Division as a Commissioner by the time he was forty-five and a senior figure within the NWP&O Secretariat by fifty -- instead of which he was now fifty-one and still stuck in the middle ranks.
The reasons for this lack of success were not easy to discern, since Smith was a most able and conscientious servant of the Raj and would afterwards be described by a friend as 'thoroughly Irish, genial, hospitable, and outspoken.' Indeed, it may have been a case of being too outspoken for his own good, to say nothing of spending too much time following his shauq, by which was meant a hobby that grows into an all-consuming passion. Like his father before him, Smith was fascinated by the past, and in India that fascination developed into an all-absorbing interest in every aspect of Indian history. One of the earliest of his predecessors in that same part of India had been Sir William Henry Sleeman, who had achieved fame as the official who had uncovered the murderous cult of thugee and had then gone on to play the leading role in its suppression. Smith now had the opportunity to go over the ground covered by Sleeman half a century earlier, an experience that led to his publishing an edited version of Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. But this interest in India's more recent past soon led to look deeper into India's 'lost' early history prior to the arrival of Islam. 'He early formed the resolution of writing the ancient history of Northern India; declared an Indian contemporary. 'In the midst of heavy official duties, Dr. Smith persisted in his resolution of devoting all his spare hours to his favourite studies.'
At the time of Willie Peppe's initial clearing of the Piprahwa Kot in the spring of 1897 Vincent Smith had been too busy to spare a visit but in October of that same year, while on the way to undertake some archaeological explorations of his own, he had called in at Birdpore to examine the partly exposed knoll. He had without hesitation declared it to be a Buddhist stupa or relic mound, the bricks pointing to an unusually early date, their large size being 'specially characteristic of the Asoka period: He had recommended further excavation and had instructed Peppe on how he should proceed, and when he had got back to his bungalow in Gorakhpur he had written him a letter explaining who Asoka was and why he was so important: 'Asoka of the Ceylonese books, who calls himself Piyadasi in his inscriptions was Emperor of India, with his capital at Patna (Pataliputra) from about BC 259-222. He visited the traditional birthplace of Gautama Buddha in the 21st year of his reign in BC 239.'
Smith's letter had contained much more besides, including references to a Chinese traveller named Huien Tsang and to various stone pillars recently uncovered close by on the Nepali side of the border. However, Willie Peppe had never had much time for history and, besides, he had far more important things to think about: his second wife, Caroline Ella, had just given birth to their third son Lionel at Birdpore.
The Piprahwa stupa after excavation. A photograph from William Peppe's album shows the Piprahwa complex from the south after excavation, with the remains of a small monastic building exposed in the foreground. (Courtesy of Neil Peppe) The Piprahwa stupa after excavation. The better photo was taken in late February 1898, and shows Willie Peppe (in white solar topee and ducks) talking to Dr. Anton Fuhrer, while a surveyor takes measurements. (India Office Library, British Library)It was not until after the Christmas festivities, with a large party of relatives staying over at Birdpore House, that Willie Peppe's thoughts had returned to the uncovered mound at Piprahwa. Excavation recommenced in the New Year of 1898 with the digging of a trench some ten feet wide into and across the mound from north to south. Then a square well had been sunk down into the centre of the kot to a depth of almost twenty feet, cutting through alternating layers of brick and clay mortar. At a depth of ten feet a small soapstone vase had been uncovered, badly smashed and full of clay but also containing 'some beads, crystals, gold ornaments, cut stars etc: The vase and its contents had been put to one side and the digging had gone on -- to uncover the top of 'a circular pipe, filled with clay, and encircled with brickwork: This pipe appeared to mark the central axis of the stupa. At its head it was about two feet in diameter but as they continued to dig down so it began to shrink until finally it was no more than four inches in diameter, by which time they had descended through another eighteen feet of 'solid brickwork set in clay: At this point the central 'pipe' widened to form a small rectangle, which the diggers took to mean they had arrived at the base of the stupa.
On the afternoon of 15 January Peppe had been called from his estate work to be shown the latest discovery: a hole in the brickwork at the bottom of the well scarcely larger than a badger's set. It was cleared to reveal a recess, inside which sat a rectangular stone chest or coffer 'of a very superior hard sandstone ... cut out of one solid piece of rock in a perfect state of preservation with its sides very smoothly cut all but polished: The coffer was about two and a half feet wide and about two feet high.
Peppe had then called for a lamp and by crouching down beside the hole had made out that the coffer extended more than four feet into the darkness. What he also saw was that the lid was cracked into four sections but had not collapsed. 'The chest was perfectly closed: he recorded afterwards. 'Fortunately the deep groove in the lid fitting so perfectly on the flange of the chest prevented the lid from falling in when it was first broken and also when we were removing it.'
Peppe's training as an engineer told him that the coffer and lid together must weigh at least three-quarters of a ton. In fact, the lid alone was afterward found to weigh 408 pounds. He called a halt to the excavation, placed guards over the dig and went home to plan how the coffer might best be removed from its niche and brought to the surface without damaging whatever contents it held.
In the meantime, the coolie force was put to work clearing the surrounding area, revealing brick-built buildings on three sides of the stupa. The largest was laid out beside the stupa's north-east corner: a rectangular building 120 feet by 100, with a central courtyard surrounded by a series of small rooms or cells each ten foot square. 'I have had the walls laid bare but have not dug to any depth; wrote Peppe of the uncovering of what seemed to be a monastery. 'At different parts of this building I have found long nails, some with broad beads, and also bits of earthen pots ... The wood of the lower portion of the [door] frame was found in several of the door ways, looking black and charred and readily crumbling away,' This appeared to suggest that the monastery had been destroyed by fire.
Three days passed before all was ready for the raising of the giant stone coffer and its opening, so that it was on 18 January 1898 that Willie Peppe, manager and senior shareholder of the Birdpore Estate, brought his guests to the Piprahwa Kot to witness the event. Four adults would afterwards put their names to a deposition describing what transpired: two of Willie's cousins -- Allen B. Peppe, manager of the estate of the Maharaja of Chota Nagpur, and George Tosco Peppe, who managed a tea estate in Ranchi -- Mr Judson, assistant manager of the bordering Newra Estate, lying to the east of Birdpore, and a 'Madame' whose name is indecipherable but was probably Alice, wife of George Tosco Peppe. Also present was George Tosco's seventeen-year-old daughter Elfie. Missing from the scene was Willie Peppe's wife Ella; it was now three months since the birth of their son Lionel, but the boy was not doing well and she had felt unable to leave him.
A pulley and hoist had been set up and a wheeled trolley lowered into the well. The lid of the coffer was then carefully removed in its four sections and the coffer itself drawn out to rest on the trolley. The lid was then replaced and both sections winched up to the surface and set down on firm ground. The lid was then again removed.
The stone coffer in situ in the Piprahwa stupa, with its lid off, prior to being lifted out of the shaft. (Courtesy of Neil Peppe)The coffer on its trolley after removal from the stupa. (Courtesy of Neil Peppe)'It so happened that we delayed opening this casket three days after we had unearthed it,' wrote Peppe, 'and our curiosity was raised to the utmost. Our surprise can be imagined when on removing the lid we found an empty chest save for these few miniature vases standing up as they had been placed probably two thousand years ago: With the younger members of the family crowding at his shoulders Willie Peppe reached into the coffer. The reason for his disappoint was that the five little receptacles in the coffer were scarcely larger than jam-jars. But then he must have caught the glint of crystal and gold, for not only was the floor of the coffer strewn with tiny, sparkling objects but the lid of one of the containers had come off and had turned the far corner of the coffer into a mass of twinkling points of light.
Reaching down into the stone chest Willie Peppe closed his fingers round the largest of the receptacles. It was smooth and almost waxy to the touch, and when he lifted it into the light of day he and the others saw that it was made of soapstone and shaped very like a iota, the bulbous-shaped waterpot found in households throughout the Indian sub-continent. There was a murmur of disappointment, as much from the workmen lining both sides of the cut as from the circle of Europeans crowded round the pit.
Peppe dipped into the coffer for a second time and emerged holding another soapstone container. But this was quite different in shape from the first and altogether finer: a perfect sphere divided horizontally across the middle to form a receptacle and a cover, the former set on a disc-shaped base, the latter capped by a slightly smaller disc which provided the base for a second sphere and a third even smaller disc topped by a spike. From top to bottom the object stood no more than seven inches high, a delicate piece of turned steatite stoneware almost the colour of ivory. 'Beautifully turned; was Peppe's first observation, 'and the chisel marks seem quite as fresh as if it had been made a few days ago.'
One of the watching Europeans called for the receptacle to be opened but Willie Peppe shook his head. He was a man used to having his way and no-one challenged him. He turned his attention back to the coffer and this time brought out a third soapstone container, much smaller than the first two and shaped somewhat like a circular pill-box. It was passed without ceremony to Peppe's foreman, who wrapped it in newspaper and placed it beside the two other containers in a box lined with wood-shavings.
'This one's has some damage,' Willie Peppe declared to no one in particular and it was some moments before he straightened up, this time holding a spherical container and lid very similar in shape to the first, but smaller and slightly darker. It had evidently suffered at some time in the past, for it bore a hole the size of a new-born child's fist near the base. Again Peppe made no effort to prise top and base apart and the vessel was packed away with the rest.
'Just one more, at the far end, and it's come apart.'
Peppe now had to reach deep into the coffer. When he straightened up he held in the palm of one hand a shining object quite different from the others. It was a hemispherical lid made entirely of crystal, topped by a delicate handle in the shape of a fish. He held it up to murmurs of admiration and now for the first time his sun-tanned features softened into a smile. 'That's the cover,' he said. 'Now let us see what it covers.'
He ducked back into the coffer and there was a great deal of scrabbling and wriggling before he stood up. Now there was a broad grin on his face and he kept one hand cupped over whatever was in the other until he had straightened himself. He waited until he had the full attention of the entire assembly of Europeans, estate workers and Tharu villagers. 'Dekko!' he exclaimed as he took away his right hand. 'Look at that!'
Cupped in the palm of Willie Peppe's left hand was the base of the crystal container, circular and some two to three inches deep. It was filled to the brim with hundreds of jewels of every shape and hue, many of them beads cut to resemble tiny flowers -- and not only jewels but quantities of gold and silver flowers, each with six or eight petals. So close-heaped was this cache that it was impossible to make out any detail, but it was enough to silence those who were closest to hand and to cause those who stood at the back to shout out that Peppe Sahib had found treasure.
'Will you dig any deeper, Willie?' called out his seventeen-year-old niece Elfie. 'Oh, do go on digging.' But no one took any notice of her.
The five reliquary urns from the Piprahwa stone coffer, as photographed by Dr. Fuhrer in late February 1898. (IOL, BL)Willie Claxton Peppe was viewed by Elfie Peppe as 'rather overbearing' and 'something of a domestic tyrant' but the fact was he liked to do things by the book. He now stayed behind to organise the operation that saw the stone coffer safely hoisted onto a bullock cart and he only left the scene after he was certain that no one would touch the coffer until it had been brought to Birdpore House, the reason being that there were still numerous beads and what looked like fragments of wood scattered about inside. That same evening, after the five urns and their contents had been locked away in a storeroom at Birdpore House, he sat down to write two letters. One was addressed to Vincent Smith at Gorakhpur. The other went to the Archaeological Surveyor to the Government of the NWP&O and Curator of Lucknow Museum, who was at this time conducting his own archaeological excavation inside Nepalese territory no more than fifteen miles away. His name was the Reverend and Doctor of Philosophy Anton Alois Fuhrer.
Fuhrer was a year younger than Willie Peppe, having been born in Germany in 1853. As a student he had studied theology at the University of Wurzburg and after completing his doctorate had been ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood. In about 1878 he was sent out to Bombay as Father Fuhrer to join the teaching staff at St Xavier's College. However, while still in Germany Fuhrer had developed an interest in Oriental studies which had led him to study Sanskrit under a group of leading Orientalists that included Dr. Julius Jolly. In Bombay he found a flourishing circle of Sanskritists that included his former mentor Dr. Jolly but was dominated by another German, the already eminent Professor Johann Georg Buhler, who had been appointed Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Bombay in 1863 at the age of twenty-six and had since then led the way in Sanskrit studies throughout the sub-continent. German scholars had already established themselves as leaders in the field of Indology and many at this time had found employment in various posts in India. Anton Fuhrer now began to take his Sanskrit more seriously and when Professor Buhler left Bombay in 1880 to take up the chair of Sanskrit at the University of Vienna he continued his studies under Buhler's successor Professor Peter Peterson. In 1882 Anton Fuhrer published the first of a number of seemingly learned articles in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. A year later he was credited as the editor of a Sanskrit shastra published in the Bombay Sanskrit Series, initiated by the man whom he always regarded as his prime mentor, Prof. Georg Buhler, with whom Fuhrer remained in close contact throughout his career in India.
However, it seems that Fuhrer and his employers at St Xavier's College were not in accord on matters of theology, and in about 1884 he either resigned or was dismissed and returned to Germany. Then in 1885 had come the Lucknow appointment, apparently as a result of the intervention of the then Lieutenant-Governor of the NWP&O, Sir Alfred Lyall, but almost certainly on the recommendation of Professor Buhler. So Fuhrer had returned to India, no longer as Father Fuhrer but as the Reverend Fuhrer -- and with a wife at his side. He was initially appointed assistant to a Major J. B. Keith, whose only qualification for the post of Archaeological Surveyor to the Government of the NWP&O was an undistinguished career as an artillery officer. However, two years later the Major retired and Fuhrer became not only the province's new Archaeological Surveyor but also Curator of Lucknow Museum, housed in one of a complex of magnificent if decaying palace buildings in the centre of the city known collectively as the Chhutter Manzil. Although the museum was afterwards relocated in a larger building nearby known as the Lal Baradari, or 'Red Pavilion,' in Fuhrer's time it was housed in Gulistan-i-Iram, the 'Rose Garden of Heaven' (today an empty ruin), in the extensive cellars of which it was said that the dissolute King Nassir-ud-Din of Oude was poisoned by his nobles in 1837. Following the uprising of 1857 the entire complex had for months been the scene of the most desperate fighting as the British sought to hold the nearby Residency and then retake Lucknow.
Willie Peppe was just old enough to remember that hot summer of 1857, the year of the Mutiny. He had been five years old when he and his mother, elder sister and infant brother had become refugees, sailing downriver in a hired country-boat through a hostile countryside for a week before joining other fleeing Europeans at Patna and continuing on down the Ganges in a steamer to Calcutta. His father, William Peppe senior, had stayed behind to protect his estate and it had been almost a year before they saw him again. He had lost a finger in one of his numerous skirmishes with the rebels and at one point had been forced to flee his home in his pyjamas and then watch Birdpore House go up in flames. But he had survived and Birdpore House had been rebuilt.
The three children were then taken by their mother to Aberdeenshire, where the Peppes had their roots (although there were those in the family who believed that their unusual surname came from French Huguenot ancestors). Sixteen years passed before the younger Peppes saw their childhood home again. After schooling in Aberdeen Willie took a civil engineering degree at the University of Edinburgh. Then in 1873 he and his younger brother Georgie returned to Birdpore Estate to work for a father they had not seen for more than a decade.
The Birdpore Estate or Grant had been part of a curious experiment begun by the East India Company in the 1830S. Back in 1801 Nawab Saadat Ali Khan of Oude had been forced to cede a large slice of his kingdom to the East India Company to pay off his kingdom's debts. It included a block of land known as the Gorakhpur Tarai.
The word tarai means 'damp country' but it came to be used to describe the territory bordering the foothills of Nepal adjacent to and merging into the great Gangetic plain, a strip of land laced with scores of rivers debouching from the hills onto the plains and all running north to south. The more northerly section of the strip, which the British knew as the Upper or Nepal Tarai, was spoken of by the Nepalis as the char khose jhaari, meaning the forest that was four khos wide, a khos being the furthest distance a cow's mooing might be heard, so thus about two or three miles. This eight- to twelve-mile-wide forest section was largely made up of magnificent sal trees, known locally as sak, and it marked the physical boundary where the foothills of the Himalayas ended and the central Gangetic plain began. According to one of the first Britons to travel through this forest belt, it was the haunt of 'wild beasts, especially elephants and rhinoceroses ... Tigers are not so numerous as might have been expected in a country so uncultivated. Black bears of a great size are more numerous, and are very troublesome. Wild hogs, hog-deer, hares, foxes and jackals, are to be found in abundance.'
As far as the Nawabs of Oude were concerned the Upper Tarai was of little value other than for its timber and they had been content to allow it to be taken over by the hillmen of Gorkha, who after conquering Kathmandu Valley in the late eighteenth century had begun to encroach upon the Indian plains.
South of the great forest of the Upper or Nepal Tarai was the Lower Tarai, a much broader strip of more open country: 'a wasteland covered with long grass or reeds ... intersected by numerous small rivers: But it was a wasteland that could be grazed over by cattle in April and May 'when the periodical hot winds entirely destroyed the herbage of more southern regions.'
Human settlement in both parts of the tarai came at a price. What both the hill rajas of Nepal and the nawabs of the plains knew all too well was that the region was little short of a deathtrap, due what was known locally as the ayul -- 'a poisonous air, which many of them imagine proceeds from the breath of large serpents ... Rational men assign a more natural origin to the Ayul or bad air. They say, that the ground in the forests, in spring, is covered in fallen leaves, which are rotted by the first rains of the hot season, and, by their putrefaction, corrupt the air ... after which the unhealthy season begins, and continues until the cold weather.'
What the locals called ayul the British came to know as tarai fever, a strain of malaria so virulent that permanent human settlement in the tarai was thought well-nigh impossible. The further north you travelled the worse the tarai fever got. 'Throughout the hours of daylight the Tarai is safe enough: wrote a contemporary of Willie Peppe's:
It is the evening that man may not spend in this beautiful park. Sundown in the Tarai has brought to an end more attempted raids into Nepal and has buried more political hopes than has ever been known. The English learned their lesson early, for within forty years of Plassey [1757] a column withered and retreated before the miasma of this paradise. The English had been told of its dangers but they had to learn by experience what all India had known and feared for centuries.
Tarai fever was as lethal to the Gorkhas and the other hill-tribes of Nepal as it was to the British and to the Indian plain-dwellers, and they too learned to keep out, so that for centuries the tarai served as a barrier and a no-man's-land, home only to one group of people: the jungle-dwellers known as the Tharu, who by all accounts had lived there since time immemorial.
Two semi-Hinduised Tharu women photographed by Dr. Fuhrer in the Nepal Tarai in 1897. The clay storage jars in the background were on display only because their mud-and-thatch dwelling had just burnt down. (IOL, BL)According to one of the first Europeans to view them as anthropological specimens, the Tharus 'style themselves ban-rajas, or "forest kings," enjoying the free and easy life of the forests.' After centuries of independence, they were now in the process of becoming rapidly Hinduised,' particularly those who lived in the Lower Tarai. 'The women do the largest part of the sowing, weeding and harvesting,' wrote Dr. Anton Fuhrer of them in 1897--
whilst the men engage in hunting and fishing, which they regard as the proper occupation of their sex. Their villages are from one to two miles distant from each other, and the houses are all made of wood and grass. The outside grass walls of each house are plastered over with red mud; they never use cow-dung for this as is usual with the Indian people outside the jungle and forests. The houses are large, cool and commodious, and generally raised on poles, in order to protect the inmates from damp and malaria ... Every little village is a self-governing community. Disputes are settled by a council of elders. and this is sometimes presided over by a head-man or chaudhari [who] acquires the status of head-man by tacit consent and not by election. The decisions of the councilor the head-man are obeyed unreservedly ... Amongst themselves the Tharus are, for the most part, a peaceful and good-natured race, following without question, as if by a law of nature, the customs and maxims of their ancestors. The honesty of the Tharus is proverbial.
By the civil code known as the Mulki Ain promulgated in 1854 the Rana rulers of Nepal had officially designated the Tharus as low caste Hindus, describing them as 'enslavable alcohol drinkers' and 'a degraded and ignorant people.' Like a number of other groups of low social status in India, they reacted against discrimination by claiming descent from one of the so-called royal clans of the Rajputs, the most popular explanation being that their ancestors had migrated east from their homeland in the Thar desert in the face of Islamic conquest. However, the single fact that they had developed such a high degree of immunity from the local strain of malaria pointed to a much longer residence in the tarai. There were other indicators, too -- the absence of caste divisions, an abhorrence of animal sacrifice but no special respect for cows, a history of persecution by the Hindus, the building of mounds over cremated remains, a fondness for endogamy in several of their clans and a number of significant differences in the way they practised Hinduism -- all of which suggested that the religion of their ancestors had been very different. There was even talk that these ancestors, among whose ruined cities they lived as hunter-gatherers, had once been great kings and had produced not one but two great conquerors of men.
What was also notable about the Tharus was the fear in which they were held by the hillmen to the north and the plain-dwellers of the south:
In the plains Tharuhat or 'the Tharu country' is a synonym for 'witch-land.' Every Tharu woman, after the marriageable age, is supposed by those who live outside the Tharu country to possess the power of the Evil Eye to bewitch and enchant: so that she has the power to turn a stranger into a wild animal or destroy him slowly by consumptive fever. This is one of the reasons why all natives of India outside the Tarai forests dread the Tharus and fear to live among them.
Rural scenes on a decorative frieze from the Bharhut stupa. The Tharu people store their grain and keep their fowls in clay structures similar to those shown here.The reality, of course, was that the ayul had served the Tharus well, ensuring that for generations they remained free to roam the forests as hunter-gatherers, rice-farmers and fisherfolk. But as the nineteenth century wore on the Tharus came under ever-increasing pressure from north and south as large tracts of what they had always regarded as their ancestral lands were expropriated and turned over to cultivation. More pressure came from the growing practice of setting fire to jungle grassland in the spring so that cattle could be driven up from the parched plains to feed on the new grass. This had a damaging effect on the local wildlife on which the Tharus depended for part of their diet, to say nothing of the increased risk to their lives as large numbers of tigers, rhinos and wild buffalo were forced out from their natural habitat.
A significant part of this pressure came from the Gorakhpur Tarai, a rectangular tract of land approximately sixty miles in length and forty wide extending northwards from the town of Gorakhpur to the Nepalese border. The East India Company (EICo) made no effort to exploit this territory until after its border with Nepal had been fought over and secured in 1815. But in an effort to deprive the Nepalese of resources during that same war, the British army commander was authorised to 'remove the class of persons inhabiting the Forest of Bootwal [Butwal, 65 miles due north of Gorakhpur], denominated Taroos [Tharus], together with their families ... for settling them in the district of Gorakhpoor, where it was intended to provide for them by assignments of waste lands: As a result of this enforced resettlement the lands the Tharus had previously occupied within Nepal were abandoned: 'The forest or jungle extended itself on the high lands, and the low lands which produced the rice crops, became covered in high reeds, the habitation of Tigers, Elephants, and other wild animals. In this state it existed for fully twenty years.'
Then in 1834 the Government of the EICo's North-Western Provinces devised a plan 'for bringing the waste lands and forests in the Zillah [portion of a province, afterwards designated a 'division' by the British] of Gorakhpoor into cultivation ... by inviting European and Anglo-Indian capitalists to take leases of fifty years, bringing the land into cultivation: Within a few years more than 650 square miles of land had been leased out, one of the earliest being the Birdpore Grant, which took its name from the originator of the scheme.
The Gorakhpur Grants scheme was a disaster. No one had considered the tarai fever, which decimated both the British grantees and their imported labour forces: 'The periodical rains brought annually malaria and fever; wrote the son of one of this first generation of colonisers, 'and when sickness did not kill outright, it incapacitated some, and induced others to remove away to healthier regions ... No single Grantee escaped the ordeal, all equally suffered, and if a few outlived the dark period of trouble and misfortune, it was simply from having more perseverance.'
Managing the Birdpore Grant as co-proprietors were two brothers: Hugh and John Pirie Gibbon, who tried everything from indigo and sugar-cane to lac manufacture, silk weaving and horse breeding, but with very little success. So damaging was the malaria that in 1843 Hugh Gibbon and his wife Delia decided to take their three children home to Aberdeen, where they left them with his mother before returning to India. Very soon after their return, however, Hugh succumbed to malaria leaving his wife with a new-born son -- who also died. Then in 1848 Hugh's brother John Pirie Gibbon died, leaving the widowed Delia to run the estate on her own. She looked around for a new manager and found him in the person of William Peppe, who had been managing a nearby estate until differences with its owners had led him to quit. Within months the two were married. Their daughter Annie was born a year later in 1850; then Willie in 1852; Sarah, who died in infancy and was buried in their garden at Birdpore, in 1854; and their last child Georgie in 1856.
Under the joint management of William Peppe and his wife's cousin William Gibbon an estate burdened with enormous debts was turned into a going concern, but not before three decades of hard work accompanied by many setbacks. Every year some 500 male labourers were brought in by train from Azimghur, Jaunpur and Chota Nagpur in Bengal. Due to malaria and disease very few returned home but enough survivors settled with their families to provide the core of the estate's labour force. It was also Peppe's good fortune that in the 1840s large numbers of Hindu and Muslim refugees from the ruinously misgoverned Kingdom of Oude migrated east into Birdpore to replace the lost labour -- and that not long afterwards quinine became more widely available as a partial remedy for malaria. Peppe and Gibbon also recognised that it was in their estate's interests that these migrants should be leased plots of land to settle on and cultivate free of rent for three years. They set up dispensaries to make the quinine freely available and began to drain the swamps that, unknown to all, provided the breeding grounds for the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. 'They seemed to stand the climate better than the imported labourers,' wrote William Gibbon of these new settlers:
The Western Grants gradually settled down and became cultivated where the land offered the most advantages. This gradually induced others with families to join in the venture ... The soil was proved well adapted to the cultivation of rice, and profitable to the husbandman ... With tillage and cultivation the climate improved, and although the latter period of the rainy season, with its decaying vegetation still occasions malaria, bringing with it fever and ague, spleen and other disorders, the cultivator has learned the great boon of a timely dose of quinine, dispensed to him by his malik [chief] the Grantee. In time, dispensaries with European medicines were introduced, drainage and other sanitary arrangements attended to, and better communications with the outside world, prospects brightened, and the life of the Grantee became a different existence altogether from what it was at the start.
Over the same period Peppe and Gibbon discovered that with proper irrigation in the form of canals and reservoirs -- known locally as tanks -- Birdpore's rich soil could produce some of the best, if not the best, rice in India, which when transported down river to Patna became better known as Patna rice.
In 1884 William Peppe's eldest son Willie returned from a home leave with his new bride, Rosalie, who never adjusted to the harsh summer environment of Birdpore and died three years later. Over this same period William Peppe senior became increasingly unwell and took to spending more of his time in a handsome cottage he had bought for the family in the hill-station of Mussoorie. The management of the main estate he left in the capable hands of his eldest son Willie, while Georgie, the younger brother, took charge of two smaller holdings nearby.
It was at this juncture -- with Willie Peppe to all intents in charge of the Birdpore Estate - that the Reverend Doctor Anton Alois Fuhrer appeared on the local archaeological scene, having been appointed in 1885 to the post of Curator of the Lucknow Museum and Archaeological Surveyor of the province that since the annexation of Oude by the EICo had been enlarged to become the North-Western Provinces and Oude (NWP&O).
In that same year of 1885 a grim struggle for succession was being fought out north of the border in the Kingdom of Nepal. Here a remarkable pattern of rule had developed under the nominal suzereinty of the royal family of the Shahs, whose ancestor Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha had overthrown the MalIa kings of Kathmandu Valley in 1768 and subsequently created the nation state of Nepal. The kings remained prisoners in their palaces while a succession of ministers drawn from a rival family, the Ranas, ruled in their stead as hereditary prime ministers, styling themselves maharajas and according themselves all the titles and privileges of kingship, including the possession of large numbers of wives and concubines. In 1877 the founder of this Rana dynasty of ruling prime ministers, Prime Minister Maharaja Sir Jung Bahadur Rana, died of cholera while hunting in the tarai and his brothers saw to it that the prime ministership passed not to one of his sons but to one of them, the genial but weak Maharaja Ranudeep Singh Rana, who left the running of the state to his more able younger brother Dhir Shumsher Rana, nominally his Commander-in-Chief.
Unlike his brother, Dhir Shumsher Rana was both a hard-bitten warrior and a statesman. He effectively ruled Nepal in his brother's name and through a series of purges ensured that the succession passed to his own male line. This was formidable, consisting of seventeen legitimate sons and numerous illegitimate ones. The former became notorious as the Satrabhai or 'seventeen brothers.' After the death of their father in 1884 the Satrabhai continued his work to strengthen their position and in 1885 five of them combined to shoot dead their uncle Maharaja Ranudeep Singh Rana and murder all other rival Rana cousins in the line of succession.
According to family legend, it was Khadga Shumsher Rana, the second oldest of the brothers and then aged twenty-four, who played the leading role in this brotherly putsch. Nevertheless, it was his older brother Bir Shumsher Rana who then became Prime Minister and de facto ruler of Nepal, with Khadga Shumsher at his side as his Commander-in-Chief. The other more junior members of the Satrabhai awarded themselves the rank of general and took on various roles as governors and ministers under their eldest brother.
Some of the seventeen Satrabhai and their less legitimate brothers. The young Commander-in-Chief Khadga Jung Bahadur Shumsher Rana is seated in the centre next to the man he hoped to depose, his elder brother Prime Minister Bir Shumsher Rana (bearded and wearing helmet). The smaller brother seated on the other side of Bir Shumsher is their younger brother Chandra Shumsher, who later thwarted Khadga Shumsher's ambitions to rule Nepal from 1901 to 1929. Detail from a photograph taken by the court photographer Chitrakar in about 1887 during a reception for the visiting Chinese Amban of Tibet. (Photo courtesy of Kiran Man Chitrakar)Within two years of gaining power it had become clear to Prime Minister Bir Shumsher Rana that the growing strength of Khadga Shumsher had become a threat to his rule. He summoned his younger brother to his palace and told him bluntly that 'Two lions cannot live in one forest: At this point the stories begin to differ: one version has it that Khadga Shumsher immediately offered to withdraw from Kathmandu Valley in the interests of brotherly unity; the other, recorded by the visiting French Sanskritist Silvain Levi in his journal, that 'four men throw themselves on him, take him by the wrists and the Maharaja announces to his younger brother that by an overflow of affection he creates him governor of Tansen, the district west of Nepal ... And under a strong escort through mountain necks and dells, they lead the Governor to Palpa in spite of himself.'
Whichever version is the more accurate, the facts are that Khadga Shumsher was deprived of his military command, removed from the roll of succession and appointed Governor of the Western Tarai. His elder brother wanted him far enough away to present no military danger yet close enough for him to keep an eye on him, so he exiled him to Palpa, several days' march to the west of Kathmandu. As the 'Palpa Raja,' after the name of the town where he had his summer capital, Khadga Shumsher's new command extended from the lower foothills of the Himalayas in central Nepal to the Indian border opposite the NWP&O and northern Bihar (at that time still part of the province of Bengal).
Although raised in relative poverty, Khadga Shumsher was among the first of the Ranas to benefit from a good English-medium education by being sent to school at what afterwards became Presidency College in Calcutta. The result was that he was well-read and had a good command of written and spoken English. According to an English visitor to Nepal, who knew his brothers better than the man himself, Khadga was 'a man of curious contrasts -- a bully and a keen student of antiquarian research; useless as a leader, he was a capable enough man in carrying out readily and efficiently a scheme thought up by another ... but his impatient vanity was such that there are on record against him no less than four separate attempts to overthrow a Prime Minister of Nepal: Fair assessment or not, the facts are that his banishment to the Western Tarai at the age of twenty-six hit General Khadga Shumsher very hard, for it was a backwater in every sense of the word. In the summer the exile and his family lived in a small palace at Palpa built at 6,000 feet in the lowest of the ranges of the Himalayan foothills; in the winter months they moved down to the town of Batauli (now Butwal) which guarded the main highway into the hills. This was an ancient highway running south from Kathmandu to Gorakhpur and beyond, and one of the few trade links connecting Nepal with the outside world.
Ever since the days of Maharaja Jung Bahadur Rana, the rulers of Nepal had recognised the power of the British Raj in India and the threat it represented to their country's independence. To maintain that independence meant remaining on the best of terms with the British Government of India while at the same time keeping the British at a distance. By the terms of their original peace treaty with Britain in 1815 they had been forced to accept a British Resident in Kathmandu Valley but they kept him on a very tight leash and only in exceptional circumstances, such as a hunting party in the Nepal Tarai, were other Britons allowed to trespass across their borders. To this same end, no effort was made to open up Kathmandu Valley or to develop trade routes by building roads or railways linked to India. As the Satrabhai Ranas strengthened their hold on the government of Nepal in the late 1880s the tarai, with its forests and swamps and mosquitoes, came increasingly to be seen as a defensive shield, used principally as a hunting ground to which the Ranas repaired in the mosquito-free cold weather months from mid-October to mid-March to hunt tiger, rhino, elephant and lesser game.
It now became General Khadga Shumsher Rana's responsibility to organise these cold-weather shikars -- and to exploit the Nepal Tarai's natural resources. British India needed railway sleepers for its fast-growing rail network and the sal timber from the tarai proved ideal for the purpose. When the Tharus declined to cooperate with the destruction of their forests the General brought in immigrants from India, many of them Muslims. Considerable numbers of pahadis or 'hill people' from Nepal also took the gamble of moving down into the unhealthy plains. More ancient forest not required by the Ranas for big-game hunting were cleared, followed by settlement and the planting of crops. Sufficient numbers of these new settlers survived the ayul to transform large swathes of the tarai jungle into open farmland. The losers were the Tharus. They rarely fought back, but they viewed these invaders with hostility, while the settlers for their part regarded the jungle-dwellers as little better than savages. Whereas the Tharu had always built with mud, timber and thatch the newcomers began to build with brick, often using old bricks recovered from the large kots that their clearances of the jungle exposed. These excavations frequently brought to light stone images, some of which were incorporated into new Hindu temples and some destroyed as manifestations of idolatry. Stories of Muslim iconoclasm have frequently been exaggerated -- not least by boastful Muslim historians -- but enough instances have been recorded by neutral observers such as Francis Buchanan and Brian Hodgson to show that idol-breaking and the building of new places of worship over infidel ruins was commonplace in the Gangetic plains as late as the nineteenth century. Yet nineteenth-century progress, in the form of clearing away old ruins or recycling their materials, was at least as damaging as religious intolerance in obliterating the past.
As for General Khadga Shumsher, the accounts of his enemies say that he never stopped plotting his return to Kathmandu and power. Nevertheless, after a decade in exile as the Governor of Palpa he had become not only an expert in shikar but also an authority on the Western Tarai and everything it contained.