The Hindu, India
Ankle bells and ghazals
R. V. Smith
DELHI , APRIL 25, 2020 19:09 IST
Several Eurasians took Indian names and learnt music and dance
The elite — the Mughals, Pathans, Rajputs, Europeans — sat fascinated as the dance slowly reached its climax. A pause, and Jamiat smiled graciously. This was the time for the instrumentalists to get into action. Time for music, and time for Jamiat’s ghazal: My beloved is vexed with me and I am worried. It is my ill-luck that my beloved is angry.
Such stories where the order of the day in the mid-19th century. Jamiat was charming, beautiful, and talented. She knew Persian, Hindi, Urdu and English; above all, she was a poetess.
She composed ghazals, dadras, tappas, thumris and songs in Brij Bhasha and occasionally delighted her admirers with a dance recital. Her real name was Janet and she was a Anglo-Indian, married to Major L. B. Armston of the 31st British Regiment.
Jamiat was nicknamed Hoori (fairy of paradise) because of her charms. She had drunk deep of Indian culture and tradition and in her own way contributed greatly to the East-West culture affinity.
There were others too, like Malika, whose work is still preserved in the British Museum. Gohar Jan was the beaute du diable, the best known dancer of her day. They were all Armenian by decent and belonged to Bengal.
Jamiat died at Agra on January 5, 1885, aged 67, and Major Armston built a beautiful monument on her grave in the small secluded cemetery of Agra Fort. The cemetery was originally used for the burial of the British who died during their refuge in the fort in 1857-58. The monument is now a heap of rubble.
The tomb in the cemetery suffered at the hands of vandals more because they were in an out-of-the way place. That may also be one reason why they do not figure in E.A. Blunt’s book List of Inscriptions on Christian Tombs and Tablets of Historical Interest in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, which he compiled in 1911.
Another Tomb which escaped Blunt’s notice was that of Sitara Begum. It is still intact and is among several seemingly Muslim graves in a corner of Delhi Gate of Agra Fort.
Sitara Begum who was a “belle aime” of Lieutenant Shairph, died on December 30, 1804. On one side of her red sandstone monument is an inscription in English on a white marble tablet, on the opposite side was another in Persian, which has been pilfered.
It is likely that Blunt mistook these tombs and others nearby for Muslim monuments because of the names of those whom they commemorate with Persian or Urdu inscriptions. On this basis some writers asserted that Jamiat and Sitara where Muslims.
Apart from what is recorded about them, the fact remains that Eurasians often adopted Indian names like Malika Jan, Ghor Jan, Raqqia Begum (whose brother was Mirza Suleiman Shikoh Gardner).
There are other examples, like Benjamin Montrose, an Urdu poet who wrote under the pen-name of “Muztar”; and Nawab Zafar Yar Khan, son of the redoubtable General Walter Reinhardt Somroo, whose real name was Aloysius Louis Reinhardt.
The inscription on the graves of Jamiat and Begum, which I traced with some difficulty some years ago, prove that they were Christians. For example, the last couple of the Urdu inscription on Janet Armston’s tomb reads: “Jamiat has risen from the world: Succour her on Judgment Day (Go) through your Mother (the Virgin Mother).”
These grand Eurasians are dead and gone. But when the sarangi whines and the wine flows easy, some aged scion of the few remaining families of yore does hark back to the past and Jamiat the Hoori dance again in a cloud of happiness which disappears ere long. Only her name remains on the lips of the supplicant of the hymn of joy.
The writer is a veteran chronicler of Delhi