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An English noblewoman on the Tiger’s trail
On September 3, 1758, 268 years ago this week, a girl child was born into a titled family of Shropshire, the English county that borders Wales
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On September 3, 1758, 268 years ago this week, a girl child was born into a titled family of Shropshire, the English county that borders Wales. That child, mineral collector and botanist Henrietta Herbert, would grow up to have a very close connection with Mysore, Seringapatam and Bangalore; her extensive journals, written between 1798 and 1801, are among the first written accounts of India by a British woman.
What’s more, a large chunk of her journal entries record a 1,000-mile journey – part scientific expedition, part diplomatic mission – that she undertook across south India in her one-horse bundy, accompanied by her daughters Henrietta (Henry), 13, and Charlotte (Charly),12; their governess, the Italian portraitist, Anna Tonelli; 14 elephants, 100 bullocks, two camels, palanquins, a harp, a pianoforte, and a retinue of 750 servants. But Henrietta’s connection to India was forged well before 1798. In 1761, former Governor of Bengal Robert Clive returned to England and renamed his estate in Ireland, calling it Plassey, ‘the name of the place where we gained our great victory in India to which I owe all my good fortune.’ In 1762, as 1st Baron Clive of Plassey, he returned to India for another stint in Bengal. When he went home for good in 1767, the loot from his military campaigns had made Clive one of the richest men in Europe. In 1771, he bought Henrietta’s childhood home, Oakly Park.
Henrietta’s teenage years were therefore spent in Powis Castle, the Herberts’ ancestral home in Wales. In 1784, the Herbert and Clive families came together in a mutually felicitous alliance when Henrietta married Edward Clive, the eldest son of the 1st Baron Clive – Edward gained the superior title of Earl of Powis, while the Herbert family was able to repay its very considerable debts. Appointed Governor of Madras in 1798, Edward arrived with his family to take charge of Fort St George, where, in 1744, his father had begun his India innings as a lowly clerk in the East India Company (EIC). For an aristocratic woman, Henrietta had unusual hobbies. It isn’t clear when her interest in collecting, studying and cataloguing rocks and minerals began, but India proved to be a treasure- trove. At first, with the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War between Tipu Sultan and the EIC raging, she was restricted to humid Madras, where she spent her time learning Farsi and Hindustani. But once Tipu fell on May 4, 1799, the peninsula, and especially the cool, lush Mysore plateau, lay open to her explorations. Leaving her husband to his official duties, she set off with her crew on March 4, 1800.
Over the next seven months, Lady Clive travelled through Vellore, Bangalore, Mysore, Coimbatoor, Trichinopoly, Tanjore, Tranquebar and Pondicherry, adding to her rock collection and making extensive notes on the landscape, plants, minerals, wildlife, art and culture. Tipu, of course, was an object of fascination – Henrietta reports blood stains, still unfaded, on the walls of the Water Gate in Seringapatam where Tipu fell, remarking, ‘it is a very extraordinary event certainly, that five months ago… the army passed the frontiers of Tipu’s country… [now] … he is dead, his country divided … and the English position secure forever…’
On her part, Anna Tonelli turned out great numbers of sketches, but her most exceptional one remains Tipu Sultan Enthroned, a portrait of Tipu on his octagonal Tiger Throne with its eight jewel- encrusted gold tiger head finials. Henrietta’s precocious daughter Charly, who would go on to become the governess of Princess (later Queen) Victoria, also mentions the throne in her own journal; her entry for May 10th , 1799, records the death of Tipu six days earlier, and adds, awestruck – “His throne is said to be worth 3 lac of pagodas; which in English money is £120,000!’
When the throne was dismantled, one of the gorgeously worked tiger head finials was gifted to Lady Clive; it is now part of the Clive Museum collection displayed at Powis Castle.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
