Trade and money

What leaps out from these letters is that India for the two brothers was above all a trading resource: nothing but ‘a large warehouse’, was how, many years later, William would describe Surat territory to Jonathan Duncan on 8 May 1795. This was an attitude noted, disapprovingly, by contemporaries such as the author William Macintosh, who decried the young men who, he claimed, ‘generally set out for [India] with ideas of acquiring wealth, which ideas being nourished not only by example but advice and exhortation soon grew up into the dominant passion of the heart and ruling principal of the mind’.¹⁹ This comment was borne out by the contemporary criticism of ‘nabobs’, the nickname given to the wealthy merchants who returned to England to throw their financial and political weight about, after making their fortune in India, like those described in other studies here.²⁰ In reality they were a small minority of the company servants who had headed out to India in the first place, hopeful of such riches – among whom might be numbered William himself.

Money is the letters’ chief subject throughout, not unreasonably, given the precariousness of such lives, where fear of bankruptcy stalked even the successful. Bankruptcy had destroyed Margaret Farmer’s protégé’s father, as it had destroyed some of Sam’s fellow businessmen. (‘I hope the exaggerated accounts of the bankruptcies here have not alarmed you,’ Sam writes on 15 February 1773). Empire builders, bringing civilization to the benighted ‘Hindoo’ in the way recommended by Thomas Macaulay (1800–59) 75 years later, the Farmers were not, any more than they were evangelical zealots out to convert the heathen like many of their other successors. (Most of the rare appeals to the Almighty are to be found in the letters from Margaret Farmer – and are of the most conventional kind). There is no evidence in the family letters that William fell in love with the subcontinent, adopting its mores and its dress, in the manner of the ‘White Mughuls’ described by William Dalrymple,²¹ even if the letters in the letter book give a more nuanced picture of his life in India. Certainly he complains of much – calling some of his Indian contacts ‘thieves and rogues’.

At the same time the more personal letters, particularly the ones to Sir Charles Malet and William Palmer, both of whom had established Indian families, indicate that he wholly accepted their way of life. He asks to be remembered to Palmer’s Indian wife, and ‘He ends this letter ‘Yr faithful and affectionate friend’, indicating the strength of the friendship even though till the time of writing the two had not recently been in touch (17 June 1795). This was more evidence of how deeply embedded he was in Indian life in every respect, not surprisingly given how much of it he spent in the Durbars of Indian Rajahs and negotiating with Hindu and Parsi businessmen – not to mention the year he spent as hostage in the Indian army camp. His letters to his chief business colleague, the Parsi merchant Dady Nasserwanjee always begin ‘Dear Friend Dady’.²² In November 1795, he sends Diwali greetings to another Hindu contact and frequently uses Hindi words in this correspondence, in particular the Hindi word for ‘fate’ whether in relation to his life or theirs. Earlier in his career, according to the letters of April 1776 from his London business colleagues Richardson and Stacey, he had pleaded the cause of another Parsi colleague being fleeced by impecunious English officers. And he also insisted on proper provision for other Indian colleagues and for his ‘loyal’ servant at his departure for England in 1796. But this did not stop his attitudes hardening over time. In Trade and Empire in Western India, Pamela Nightingale quotes Farmer as suggesting, in 1789, that the Company should not leave trade to ‘Crew of Parsees in whose welfare the State has no interest and who on every occasion have plucked the Company without mercy’.²³

Overall, William was what Thomas Macaulay would later call ‘one of the young men who came out as Company servants and for whom banishment is their emancipation’.²⁴ He was one of those who, unlike Macaulay, had become so accustomed to what they saw around them as to regard India as normal if not always to be accepted as it stood. It was a world with which such men had to contend socially and professionally throughout their careers, especially in Bombay where English and Indian lived in much closer contact. One near contemporary, Maria Graham (1785–1842), in her Journal of a Residence in India, published in 1812, complained of being much further from Indian life in Madras and Calcutta, places which William also knew.²⁵ Macaulay, in contrast, retreated thankfully from closer contact with Indian life to a house in Calcutta surrounded by a garden and never ventured into the world beyond without shuddering at the immorality and squalor – ‘a dozen half-naked blacks!’ – described in an early letter home to his sister Margaret.²⁶ The much more pragmatic accounts of William himself, let alone the more lyrical, sometimes even dazzled, accounts in James Forbes’ (1749–1814) Oriental Memoirs of 1813 seem to come from quite different sensibilities, from another world – even if Forbes, in later life did advocate converting the ‘Hindoo’ to Christianity.²⁷

I have a further point to make before detailing William’s career more fully. It is a philosophical rather than historical point that would apply to all communication between London and India at this date, given the distance between them and the length of time between letters and reports being written and their arrival in the hands of the intended recipient – not least because ships of that period were only able to sail at certain seasons of the year, in order to utilize more favourable winds and tides. Time has two different faces. On the one hand there is the linear time that the letter-writer is living through and describing. On the other there are the discrete moments in time, the snapshots, read by the recipient. The writer does not know as he or she writes where the recipient is, even if he or she is still alive. Sam around 1775 complains as he writes that he does not know where to send the letters or whether or when they will reach William, currently – he thinks – somewhere between Calcutta and Madras. The contemporary reader likewise does not know exactly how or where the writer is, six months having passed since the letter was written. This leads to various kinds of redundancy: here on 8 July 1774 is Sam, for instance, sending a millstone for William’s Biscuit Factory after he has closed it, and Sam again, in the same month in 1774, chiding William for not writing to their father, though a letter had been despatched in January 1774. And here he is being asked to send the seeds for William’s garden in a letter that would have arrived after William had left India for good. Finally, late in 1795, Sam asks permission to send his brother a case of claret, just as William was about to leave Surat – permission fortunately was not granted.

I am also conscious of how little those back in England would have known about the real nature of life in India. They would have known about the health problems – William complains in his first letter about having fallen victim to the ‘bloody flux’ (dysentery) – and they would have known about the malaria he suffered from and which probably killed him in the end. But how much they could have known – or comprehended – about his lodging, his environment, the climate and his travels within India, is harder to gauge. He may have been more open in his earlier letters to Sam; he claims he had told him more about the voyage out than he has time to tell his father. But these letters do not survive and those to his father are determinedly upbeat, even if he complains in the 1774 letter, as throughout his career in India, how difficult it is to make money there. But literary William is not: it seems unlikely that, even to Sam, he would have made the detailed, scholarly, almost thrilled descriptions of the country found in the Oriental Memoirs of his near contemporary James Forbes – who mentioned William as an ‘intimate acquaintance’.²⁸ Forbes’s memoirs were not published till the 1813 edition – edited, unfortunately, by a pious daughter and at a time when contemporary accounts of India were beginning to flood out – and published descriptions of life in India through the second half of the eighteenth century were much rarer. Many were related to the captive narratives, discussed by Linda Colley, often by women of dubious reputation – Eliza Fay (c.1755–1816) and Elizabeth Marsh (1735–85), for instance.²⁹ If any of these volumes fell into the hands of the Farmer family, their letters do not say.

The Farmers might have recognized – and been bored by – the stultifying English social life of Bombay, an island only a mile in length and lacking in English women. Sam might have been comfortable with the atmosphere of a place where, according to George Paterson in 1769 ‘trade and the means of getting money is [men’s] principal pursuit’.³⁰ But could they have imagined the heat of a Bombay summer or the fury of the monsoon, or for that matter the prevalence of various kinds of wildlife indoors and out of which later residents such as Mrs Sherwood (1775–1851) complained?³¹ Could they have imagined the ‘execrable material effects’ of climate described by Macaulay?³² Could they have understood that Bombay, with a relatively pleasant climate, as noted by James Forbes among others – the malaria inducing marshes by now mostly drained – was quite possibly rather less noisome and dirty than their own filthy and stinking city? William’s family lived after all above the dye works, a notoriously smelly business and eighteenth-century London was far from being the ‘so clean city’ that surprised Indian visitors to my house in the 1980s. (An older man added; ‘but your people are so dirty’, a statement still more true in the eighteenth century: one of the many complaints made against nabobs when they returned to England was that they had picked up the effete Indian habit of washing daily).³³

William, on the other hand, would have less difficulty in imagining life in England. He made several home visits (the first in 1768) spending two or three years in England between 1780 and 1784, and both his mother and his brother filled him in on life as it went on. Latterly he even tried to import something more of it than European dress – hence the seeds for his ‘English’ garden. His mother’s gossip about the Duchess of Devonshire’s dangerous metal corsets might have seemed very remote from Bombay but at least he could have appreciated the context and maybe been grateful to feel some connection to his family’s world. John Gillis’s distinction between home as the family we live in and home as the family we live by seems apposite here.³⁴ William never created a family in India to live in: the family he grew up in, thousands of miles away, was the one he lived by, as these letters suggest.