I

The Colebrooke saga lends itself readily to two established traditions within British historiography, each of which highlights the triumph of liberal ideologies in imperial contexts. First, we can easily narrate Sir Edward's fall from grace at Delhi by integrating his story into received histories of the rise and fall of political corruption in Georgian Britain. His sacking occurred on the cusp of the 1830s, the decade that historians conventionally see marking a turning point away from so-called ‘Old Corruption’, the agglomeration of aristocratic privileges identified by radicals and reformers since the 1770s as a fundamental threat to Britain's historic birthright of liberty. Predicated on denunciation of the undemocratic parliamentary franchise, the critique of Old Corruption also attacked the government's ability to purchase supporters and to gain the acquiescence of political adversaries by distributing patronage and pensions.Footnote ¹⁶ Fiscal and administrative reforms inaugurated by William Pitt in the 1790s, together with legislation that culminated in the expanded franchise of 1832, many historians argue, effectively defanged Old Corruption as a focus of political critique in Britain in the 1830s even as it secured ‘the persistence of élite political power well into the Victorian era’.Footnote ¹⁷ Located within this interpretative paradigm, Colebrooke's removal from Delhi marks a broader nineteenth-century liberal transition away from aristocratic corruption toward a new landscape of democratic and meritocratic politics – a ‘revolution in government’ of which Charles Trevelyan was to become both a key instigator and a key icon.Footnote ¹⁸

Empire was an essential dimension of the nexus of Old Corruption in Britain. From the 1770s, domestic criticism of the British state and its governing elites escalated as imperial wars placed new burdens on un-enfranchised consumers and taxpayers.Footnote ¹⁹ That the East India Company's political structures and economic relations were fundamentally corrupt was a commonplace of eighteenth-century British politics. ‘Scandal was the crucible in which both imperial and capitalist expansion was forged,’ Nicholas Dirks has observed.Footnote ²⁰ Gift-giving by and to Indian princely elites was a vital cog in the wheels of this scandalously corrupt system. The emergence of the British as kingmakers in India as the hegemony of the Mughal empire waned rested both on military victory and on the widespread exchange of diplomatic gifts, douceurs and bribes. Robert Clive's installation of Mir Jafar as nawab of Bengal after the battle of Plassey in 1757 was accomplished by this Indian prince's distribution of presents reputedly valued at over £1.2 million (perhaps £123 million in present-day purchasing power). The notoriety of Clive's subsequent acceptance of a jaghir or land grant from the nawab worth £27,000 per annum (roughly £2.8 million a year today) and Clive's aggressive investment of this Indian fortune in securing votes in both East India Company and parliamentary elections ensured that by the second half of the eighteenth century gifts from Indian princes to East India Company officials epitomised the endemic corruption of politics on the subcontinent and its threat to British liberties at home.Footnote ²¹ In British caricatures, plays, works of fiction and parliamentary debates, orientalised visions of Old Corruption clothed in the fabrics of India signalled both an empire and a gift regime notoriously run rogue.Footnote ²² Parliamentary legislation sought to clamp down on this abuse in 1773 and 1784.Footnote ²³ Within this domestic British political context, Sir Edward Colebrooke's sacking acquires an air of seeming inevitability, standing as the last gasp of an anachronistic system of trans-imperial privilege and corruption destined to give way to modern liberal bureaucracy.

A second historiographical tradition instead interprets the scandal of empire in late Mughal Delhi as a generational shift between so-called ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Anglicist’ British governing elites in India. In this analysis, Colebrooke again figures as an anachronism, out of step with the march of liberal modernity, not only because of his association with Old Corruption at home but because his education in India had made him sympathetic to ‘Oriental’ languages, cultures and princely despotism. Colebrooke was heir to a bankrupt baronet with landed estates in England, Scotland, the Caribbean and North America; his patrimony included sinecures awarded to his male relations for loyal government service, family control of a Tory rotten borough in Surrey and the direct patronage of Warren Hastings – the East India Company governor most notorious for corruption after Clive.Footnote ²⁴ Having left school for the subcontinent aged fifteen, Colebrooke studied Indian languages and imbibed Persianate political cultures, acquiring his diplomatic expertise in negotiations with wealthy princes and magnates at the imperial coalface of Bengal revenue and judicial administration. His antagonist, Charles Trevelyan, had City connections with Colebrooke's family through his mother's family; both men's mothers had brought their husbands Caribbean estates on marriage.Footnote ²⁵ In socio-economic background, the two adversaries arguably shared much in common. But Trevelyan's intellectual formation was of a very different order, reflecting the early nineteenth-century turn from Orientalist to Anglicist sympathies within the East India Company's governing elite. Trevelyan's schooling took him from Charterhouse to the Company's administrative college, Haileybury, where Thomas Malthus inspired a new generation of Indian civil servants during his tenure as professor of history and political economy.Footnote ²⁶ A Whig by disposition, Trevelyan adopted a hard line in debates that saw younger civil servants in India argue for the Anglicisation, and eventual democratisation, of British rule. Among his pet schemes was a plan not only to replace Persian with English as the language of British statecraft in India, but also to Anglicise regional Indian languages by converting their scripts to Roman characters.Footnote ²⁷ It was with pamphlets devoted to schemes such as these that Trevelyan wooed and wed Hannah Macaulay – the sister of the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay – in Calcutta early in the 1830s.Footnote ²⁸ Viewed against this backdrop, Sir Edward Colebrooke's disgrace by Charles Trevelyan figures as a logical consequence of the Anglicist triumph over Orientalists within the East India Company's governing elite – a path-determined outcome predicated on discourse that was predestined by the changing intellectual tides of British imperial thought.Footnote ²⁹

My focus on material culture affords a third vantage point for interpreting Colebrooke and Trevelyan's contest. Without rejecting the significance of either the waning of Old Corruption in Britain or the rise of Anglicist administrative ideologies in India, I suggest that we also attend more carefully to the political histories of material goods deployed in cross-cultural diplomatic contexts. As Mark Knights has argued, the chronology of Old Corruption's decline at home in Britain diverged significantly from its colonial trajectory: ‘corruption in the imperial sphere persisted, and indeed arguably increased in the nineteenth century, with colonialism itself a form of state-sponsored corruption that systematically exploited imperial assets’.Footnote ³⁰ Diplomatic gifting was a vital crucible in which colonial ‘corruption’ persisted and developed. By surfacing, tracing and contextualising narratives of corrupt gifted and purchased shawls, jewels, ceremonial robes, bedsteads and elephants, we can discern new voices within this underlying continuity. Object stories capture the intransigence and agency of interlocutors lost to us when we focus only on dominant British political and intellectual traditions. For the traffic in material goods that formed a central part of Trevelyan's charge of corruption against Colebrooke can only be understood if we take cognisance of the beliefs and behaviours of Indian princes – both male and female – and of the problematic presence on the subcontinent in the late Georgian era of East India Company women. I focus here on only two of the many available strands of material culture politics woven into these histories. First is the exchange of robes of honour at the court of the king of Delhi, and second, Lady Colebrooke's elaboration of a material style of diplomacy – including, but also stretching far beyond, gifted robes of honour – newly accessible to Company women. Neither activity sits entirely comfortably within the narrative of the demise of Old Corruption or the rise of Anglicisation because neither was predicated on ‘liberal’ tenets. Instead, the material politics of Colebrooke's downfall suggest the tenacity of dynastic, family-focused political conflict in the face of liberal imperialism – not least among zealous liberal reformers themselves.

II

Depicted in countless Mughal-era durbar paintings, Indian royal courts were prime sites of diplomatic gift exchange.Footnote ³¹ A precolonial practice with ancient and medieval roots extending across Eurasia from China to Iceland, the gifting of garments conferred at investiture ceremonies (to mark changes of status and to incorporate new diplomatic allies) bound princely donors to subordinate recipients through both the human body and material goods. Given by the prince's hand, taken from the prince's person, placed on or around the head, neck, shoulders, torso, arms and legs of the supplicant, robes of honour simultaneously constrained, distinguished and hierarchically ordered donor and recipient.Footnote ³² In the Mughal empire's iteration of this pervasive, cross-cultural gifting protocol, the simplest version of the robe of honour or khil'at (pl. khila) consisted of three items of clothing: a dastar (turban), a jama (long coat) and a kamarband (long scarf). Five- and seven-item ensembles for higher-status recipients included additional items such as turban ornaments, trousers, shawls and girdles. The use of Chinese silks, velvets, brocades, gold-threaded fabrics and textiles embellished with jewels registered increasingly higher levels of status, which could be further augmented by gifts of jewellery, swords, horses, harnesses, howdahs and elephants.Footnote ³³ In return for receiving ceremonial robes and their associated honour, the supplicant gave the prince a nazr, a financial offering in the coin of the ruler's realm. Peshkash, valuables that included fine textiles, precious stones, horses or elephants, often accompanied nazr payments to princes.Footnote ³⁴ The conferring of khila by the Mughal emperor represented the apex of a pervasive system of honorific exchange that was replicated, with regional distinctions, throughout the Maratha, Rajput, Sikh and Deccani successor states that established an uneasy and partial independence from Delhi – seat of the royal family – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Colonialism complicated the presentation of khila. In Bernard Cohn's influential analysis, the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by a conflict between an ‘indigenous theory of rulership in India’ and British ideologies of rule based instead on contract, which equated princely gifting with corruption.Footnote ³⁵ Yet we should be wary of ‘indigeneity’ as a concept. As Balkrishan Shivram has observed, South Asian robing ceremonies were the product of centuries of syncretic cross-cultural fusion. In precolonial India, Mughal ceremonial ‘reflected an amalgam of Persian, Turkish, Central Asian, Indian, and specifically dynastic traditions’.Footnote ³⁶ Already hybrid, ‘indigenous’ Indian diplomatic gifting was, moreover, integrated into wider circuits of exchange between South Asian and European princes, states and diplomatic representatives that dated from the sixteenth century. Working at the intersection between material culture studies and the ‘new diplomatic history’, Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello have argued that early modern gifts exchanged between Asian and European princes and states ‘were key agents of social cohesion and transcultural systems of value in the emergence of a global political community’.Footnote ³⁷ Serving as ‘social glue’ in an ‘open-ended, fast-evolving system’ of war, invasion and trade, they argue, these ‘global gifts afford us a glimpse into the “commensurability” of shared diplomatic practices across large parts of Eurasia’.Footnote ³⁸

As the East India Company's military treaties with the Mughal emperor and with lesser rajas, sultans and nawabs proliferated, their attendance at royal courts or durbars became increasingly visible. Ornate, conspicuous and conferred in public, gifts received from Indian princes were material signs at once of British subservience and of Company corruption. Efforts to bar Company men from accepting gifts from Indians date from the same period as British reformers’ attempts to bring Old Corruption to heel at home. The Regulating Act of 1773 prohibited Company employees from accepting gifts from Indian princes of the sort made notorious by Robert Clive; Pitt's India Act of 1784 extended these prohibitions further.Footnote ³⁹ From the time of Marquess Cornwallis's governorship of 1786–93, both Company servants and their dependants, whilst allowed to accept Indian gifts at public princely ceremonies, were required to deposit them immediately thereafter in the Company's local toshkhana (or treasury). Here they were available for individuals to purchase at a price set by an auctioneer, cleansed of their taint of corruption through a market transaction, whilst conveniently swelling the Company's coffers.Footnote ⁴⁰

Diplomatic gifting thus straddled a labile and opaque boundary between licit and illicit exchange. Formally prohibited from retaining or profiting privately from gifts offered to them by ‘native’ princes, Company men were nonetheless repeatedly seen, heard and recorded publicly accepting these gifts at the hands of Indian elites. As the British extended their territorial control from Bengal to south India, the Deccan and (in 1803) Delhi and its hinterland, moreover, they initiated their own gift-giving rituals to strengthen their fragile military grip with symbolic power. The Company's highest officials – the governor general, the commander-in-chief and the Residents or diplomatic agents at princely courts such as Delhi – now took to conferring khila on Indian rulers and notables, as a visual and material statement of waxing British power on the subcontinent.Footnote ⁴¹ By the 1800s, high-ranking British officials were thus both givers and receivers of nazr, both donors and recipients of khila. Running directly counter to the intentions of the Regulating Act, Pitt's India Act and Cornwallis's reforms (which had sought to contain and ultimately suppress gifting regimes), the increasing prominence of Company officials as givers of Indian princely presents caused mounting disquiet in the upper reaches of the Company administration.

North India in the early nineteenth century was a hotbed of political intrigue, not only between the East India Company and the Mughal emperor (whom the British insisted on denominating merely the king of Delhi), but also within the royal family, between the emperor and the princes who ruled over the sixty-ish successor states in Delhi's political ambit and between the Company and these many rulers.Footnote ⁴² Akbar II (r. 1806–37), the penultimate Mughal emperor, is conventionally described as a political cipher. ‘The Mughal emperor, recognised by the British as the King of Delhi, retained nominal power, but he was in actuality a British pensioner, eking out a tawdry, tinselled existence in the diminished splendour of the Red Fort,’ Katherine Prior, Lance Brennan and Robin Haines (for example) argue.Footnote ⁴³ William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma have, however, modified this overwhelmingly pessimistic assessment, highlighting the emperor's continued symbolic power, and the use by successive ‘kings’ of Delhi of artistic patronage to shore up their ceremonial status.Footnote ⁴⁴

Scrutiny of the Company's diplomatic correspondence and gift-giving practices in the decades immediately before Sir Edward Colebrooke's appointment as the Delhi Resident further reinforces this image of Akbar II as a man of considerable political ambition and nous. For, notwithstanding their insistent belittlement of him, the acts and claims of the king of Delhi necessarily mattered to the British. As Akbar insistently reminded them, the Company's territorial presence, revenue functions and judicial legitimacy in India ultimately derived from Clive's treaty of 1765 with his ancestor, Emperor Shah Allam II (r. 1760–1806). In return for the right to administer Bengal, the Company had agreed to pay Shah Allam twenty-six lacs of rupees per annum. It suspended this payment in 1772, after the emperor, in the words of one Company memo, had ‘thrown himself into the hands of the Mahrattas’, and thereby ‘withdrawn himself from the Company's protection, and abandoned the Countries assigned to him’.Footnote ⁴⁵ British victories in the Second Anglo-Maratha War had, however, brought the emperor back into the British fold in 1803, with Sir David Ochterlony appointed as the first of the Company's diplomatic Residents at Delhi. In heritage, sociability, cultural attributes and political behaviour, Ochterlony embodied trans-imperial hybridity. English and Welsh on his mother's side, a Scot by his paternal line, he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and served in the Bengal army from 1777. Rumoured to have multiple Indian bibis or concubines, he took as his favourite companion or wife a Hindu dancing girl known to the British (after her conversion to Islam) as Mubaruck ul Nissa Begum.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their country house, north of Delhi, was Mubaruck Bagh (or ‘happy garden’).Footnote ⁴⁷ Here and in Delhi at the official Residency, Ochterlony laid the groundwork for diplomatic conventions and gifting regimes that his successors would elaborate, in dialogue and collusion with, as well as in opposition to, the successive kings of Delhi and rulers of lesser princely states.

The return of the Mughal emperor to British protection saw the Company, the king of Delhi and the plethora of princes who ruled over north Indian successor states elaborate a congeries of mutual but unequal diplomatic ceremonies. The arrival in Delhi of a new Resident or of the British commander-in-chief was, for most of Akbar II's reign, marked by the conferral of a khil'at to the senior British officer – and to many of his subordinates – by the king, seated on the Peacock Throne at his durbar. In return, British military officers and civil officials offered multiple nazrs and peshkash to the Mughal potentate. This ceremony was followed, typically on the next day, by counter-visits from the king and/or his sons to the British Residency. Ochterlony spent lavishly on the palatial structure and furnishing of the Residency, where the Resident in turn conferred gifts upon the male representatives of the royal family.Footnote ⁴⁸ These episodic rituals were augmented throughout the year by visits to the Red Fort on seven annual Muslim festival days, on which the Resident by agreement again presented nazr to the king. Vast processions through the streets of Delhi accompanied these ceremonies. Many rulers of north Indian successor states attended these royal durbars or sent their diplomatic envoys to them; in their own courts, they too elaborated reciprocal ceremonials that enmeshed the British in elaborate gift-giving.Footnote ⁴⁹

The rich visual and material record of these events conveys their scale, splendour and importance, and reflects the time, money and strategic thinking Akbar II expended on projecting his image as a powerful emperor. Elephants and their appurtenances loomed large in these ceremonies, fulfilling multiple symbolic and pragmatic functions.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Sujit Sivasundaram has argued, British understandings of the meaning and use of elephants rested on centuries of Indian precedent. In the Hindu Vedas, elephant ‘anthropomorphism worked alongside religious adoration’, while Mughal royal literature both invested elephants with ‘mystic and divine qualities’ and interpreted the emperor's control over wild elephants ‘as a sign of his ability to bring order to his kingdom and also as proof of divine rule’.Footnote ⁵¹ Elephants were highly valued by the Mughals for their use in warfare, and emperors often exacted them as annual tribute.Footnote ⁵² By the later eighteenth century, themselves now mired in Indian warfare, the British too had come to understand the elephant's importance.Footnote ⁵³ Replete with meaning and utility, the elephant was the perfect gift.Footnote ⁵⁴ The evolution of diplomatic ceremonial in north India heightened their strategic and symbolic value. At festivals and investiture ceremonies, riding atop these magnificently caparisoned beasts ensured that power was visually manifest on a vertical hierarchical axis. Propinquity to the ruler was also coveted as a sign of high status, projecting this power grid onto a horizontal plane. Convention moreover decreed that the procession's senior potentate would be joined in his ornate howdah by subordinate princes or Company officials.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the Mughal court, this process entailed a further show of subordination to the king as the lesser visitor dismounted his own elephant and ascended to join his superior in the latter's howdah. A shortage of howdah ladders not infrequently resulted in an unseemly scrambling at the feet of the monarch's elephant.Footnote ⁵⁶

The indignity of scrambling up onto princely elephants in public, offering nazrs, accepting a khil'at (which was conferred by the king's hand and worn over their European dress) and being subjected to a seemingly endless flow of suspect gifts irked reform-minded Company officials. Akbar II exacerbated this hostility by using these opportunities to insist upon his superior status, to bargain for an increased pension, and to assert his claim to choose his own successor. In royal letters, and through diplomatic envoys and royal ceremonial, he repeatedly proclaimed his paramount power to a succession of increasingly exasperated governor generals, condescendingly denominating them ‘my son’ and conferring titles upon them and their subordinate officers that implied or explicitly asserted a relation of feudal vassalage. Already in 1807 (a year after his succession), engaged in bitter disputes with the governor general on these subjects, the king had flexed his muscles by informing the Company that he would confer khila not only on all the princes in Delhi's hinterland but also upon the British, including the governor general himself. The British clearly understood what was at stake in this assertion: the khil'at for the governor general was ‘a public acknowledgement of vassalage and submission to the throne of Delhi’ and must be refused.Footnote ⁵⁷ The following years saw ongoing hostilities between the king and his Company captors along these lines. The British exiled his favoured third son to Allahabad, infuriated by Akbar's refusal to honour British rules of primogeniture by naming his eldest son as his natural heir.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1819, this rumbling dispute came to a head. Buoyed up by his victories in the Third Anglo-Maratha War, Governor General Hastings refused to honour long-standing British diplomatic epistolary forms. The royal seal with which Akbar II signed diplomatic letters to him, Hastings expostulated, had ‘inscribed on it the humiliating designation of Favee Acber Shah or vassal of the King Acbar’. So offended was Hastings by this received formulation of sovereignty, that he cut off all official communication between the governor general and the king, a relationship that would be resumed at this level only in 1826, by Lord Amherst.Footnote ⁵⁹

Amherst's negotiations to resume diplomatic relations with the king of Delhi in 1826 provide an essential context for Colebrooke's diplomatic behaviour from 1827 to 1829. Planning a tour of the Upper Provinces of north India, Amherst was cognisant of Akbar II's desire to restore official communications with the governor general. Suffering from sharply diminished Company confidence in the aftermath of a disastrous war in Burma, he now took steps to restore communication with the king. Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Delhi Resident, had written to Amherst underlining the king's discontent at the break in diplomatic relations: ‘the King complained lately of the neglect with which he has been treated, particularly in not receiving any communication for the Governor General's intended journey’, he observed. Himself keen to effect a reconciliation, Metcalfe was nonetheless adamant that ‘any thing derogatory’ to British power must be avoided. ‘Any Nuzzur on the part of His Lordship, I suppose to be out of the question,’ he advised.Footnote ⁶⁰ A month later, indeed, Metcalfe urged Amherst to insist on his political parity with the king if any visit were agreed, and proposed informing Akbar II ‘that the Governor General did not intend to visit Delhi, as he could only meet the King on a footing of equality, which might not be agreeable to his Majesty’. Negotiations broke down when the king indeed insisted on inducing ‘some acknowledgement of [his] superiority’ to Amherst.Footnote ⁶¹ When talks resumed a few weeks later, however, both sides made concessions. The king proposed ten points of etiquette for Amherst's visit. Among them, he agreed to forgo payment of nazr by the governor general, to accept a salaam from him ‘in the English fashion by taking off the Hat’, and to permit Amherst to be seated on a chair. In return, he stipulated, Amherst must accept a gift of ‘whatever may be deemed proper … from the Royal neck, some article of Jewellery’, must receive paan from the king – ‘to be given by the Royal Hand’ – and must subsequently invite the king to visit him at the Delhi Residency. Here Akbar expected to receive ‘a suitable Peshkush and reception: not the same as that given by his Majesty to the Governor General’.Footnote ⁶²

Two weeks later, Amherst made major concessions to these demands, accepting the king's restoration of rank, to a status higher than that of the governor general of India. He was now, his secretary reported, ‘fully prepared to admit a superiority of rank on the part of the King of Delhi, as the titular representative of a long established and renowned Dynasty of Emperors; whose accession to the Throne and dignities of his ancestors, has been formally recognized, during many years by the British Government’.Footnote ⁶³ Accepting that ‘At Delhi in his own dominions, the King must rank above all others, and in that sense his Majesty's superiority to his visitor, was admitted beyond questions,’ Amherst still refused to accept a khil'at or to offer a nazr. But he laid essential groundwork for the later Colebrooke scandal by agreeing that the Delhi Resident could accept a khil'at without detracting from the important message that ‘the relation of a sovereign and vassal has ceased to exist, even in name, between his Majesty and the head of the British Government in India’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Having conceded this major point, Amherst then negotiated hard to ensure that he would be carried in a tonjon, not forced to walk, from his elephant to the king's presence, and that the chair on which he would sit would be his own chair of state.Footnote ⁶⁵ Its height, he acknowledged, ‘is scarcely greater than that of a common chair, but as its appearance is rich and handsome … its admission should … be urged’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This uneasy ceasefire saw vassalage displaced from the governor general to the Resident, but left Amherst's body caught between two competing regimes of material politics. In one, the king's hand would drape the governor general's neck with Indian jewellery, signalling political hierarchy through received conventions of royal touch and royal gifting. In the other, Amherst – sitting in European dress on his own ‘throne chair’, of Indian manufacture but British design – would project the hybrid rule of Indian and British elites on the north Indian frontier of Company power. It proved a fragile reconciliation. Before Amherst left Delhi, the king had sent him ‘a paper of demands’, reasserted his authority to confer khila and receive nazzr and peshkash from all subordinates and insisted that the Company had ‘violated its engagements with the royal family’. By February 1829, rejecting established diplomatic protocols, he had bypassed the new governor general, Lord Bentinck, and despatched a letter directly to the king of Great Britain.Footnote ⁶⁷ Bentinck, a proponent of reform and Anglicisation, responded to this challenge by issuing orders to his subordinates prohibiting all exchanges of gifts with Indian princes.Footnote ⁶⁸

III

It was in this context of resumed but fractious royal relations and diplomatic gifting regimes that the Colebrookes arrived in Delhi in 1827, and enthusiastically threw themselves into the material politics of Mughal diplomacy. Lady Colebrooke, like her husband – who was her first cousin once removed – had lived most of her life in India, having been born (out of wedlock) to a Colebrooke military officer in Madras. Sir Edward's son Edward, twenty when the couple arrived in Delhi, had been born to one of the Resident's pre-marital Indian concubines.Footnote ⁶⁹ Neither his illegitimacy nor his mixed heritage marked him out in Delhi's hybrid European community: James Skinner's mother was Rajput, and William Fraser (who presided over Delhi's criminal court) had several children by his Indian companion, Amiban.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like the Residents at other princely courts, Colebrooke daily entertained both his nuclear kin and an extended ‘family’ or household of Company men at his table, enjoying an official allowance of 5,000 rupees per month to do so. His young revenue assistant, Samuel Sneade Brown, having excitedly reported his acceptance of a khil'at from the king of Delhi in May 1828, wrote home to his mother in June to commend Colebrooke's hospitality. ‘I find it rather a pleasant change to dine with Sir Edward every evening after business is over; he is a frank and pleasant old gentleman; I like him much.’ His opinion of Lady Colebrooke was less sanguine. ‘We call his lady the Bore Constrictor,’ he commented, without elaboration.Footnote ⁷¹

Also dining together with the Colebrookes at the Residency table but in mounting distress was Charles Trevelyan, whose sensibilities were outraged by the Colebrooke family's acquisitive behaviours, and by Lady Colebrooke in particular. Among the twenty-nine main charges and seventy-six sub-charges of corruption Trevelyan levelled against Sir Edward in the summer of 1829 were myriad accusations of gifts accepted from Indian princes or their agents, and reputedly retained by the Colebrookes for private profit.Footnote ⁷² The new Resident, Trevelyan claimed in his first charge, had accepted ‘various sums of money in nuzzurs from every native above the lowest rank who has been introduced to him with hardly any exception, none of which he has brought to the public account’.Footnote ⁷³ By denominating these accepted gifts nazrs, Trevelyan effectively named Colebrooke as an Indian prince, corrupt by nature, despotic by culture. His next charges enumerated the Resident's acceptance of (for example) a horse and trappings gifted illicitly by the raja of Bikaner, Colebrooke's subsequent presentation to the raja of three unauthorised khila, his receipt of an elephant from the raja of Ulwur and his presentation to another prince of ‘a large bed on which [his predecessor as Resident] Sir C. Metcalfe used to sleep’.Footnote ⁷⁴ With Metcalfe's bed, Trevelyan signalled the familial and dynastic character of the Colebrookes’ corruption: rooted in the domestic objects of their official home, their material diplomacy refused to register the proper, gendered demarcation between private and public spheres.

Many of the charges Trevelyan laid against Lady Colebrooke highlighted her refusal to remain within a private sphere and her insistence on participating in Sir Edward's diplomatic dealings with Indian princes. At stake was not simply her venality but also her familiarity with and propinquity to material objects – khila, elephants and shawls, for example – endowed with royal meanings and princely power. Lady Colebrooke's collusive diplomatic acts were especially objectionable to Trevelyan: in exercising political power she had adopted and adapted the insistent, material diplomacy that so frustrated British liberal reformers. Again and again Trevelyan described the corrupt payments Lady Colebrooke accepted from Indian rulers as nazrs and specified that they were paid – as were all nazrs – in gold mohurs.Footnote ⁷⁵ Not content to accept these monetary tokens of submission to her, Lady Colebrooke had arrogated to herself the power to confer not only gifts – the double-barrelled gun, for example, she gave to the raja of Patiala – but also khila to north Indian princes.Footnote ⁷⁶ Adding insult to injury, her meetings with Indian rulers in the Delhi Residency were known as durbars – it was with this term that not only Trevelyan but also the senior officials in Calcutta (to whom his streams of accusations flowed) described them.Footnote ⁷⁷ The very elephant upon which one raja had ridden to the Residency on a visit, he claimed, had been extracted from under this dignitary by Lady Colebrooke, as a coerced gift.Footnote ⁷⁸ To Trevelyan, the elephant represented an obvious invasion of the masculine world of diplomacy by a woman who belonged in the private home. Colebrooke's defence of his wife, in sharp contrast, highlighted her right to engage in market transactions in the public sphere. The elephant was in fact a ‘purchase’, not a gift, from the raja, he insisted. Moreover, Lady Colebrooke had ‘never once mounted it; and it was therefore sent among the rest of the public elephants in the public Feel Khana [Company elephant enclosure], where it has been ever since’.Footnote ⁷⁹

The histrionic tone of Trevelyan's charges against Lady Colebrooke was highly sexualised. His accusations dwelt at length upon the ‘native gentlemen’ who gained access to her private chambers and there laid hands on her material goods.Footnote ⁸⁰ Elite Indian men, Trevelyan fumed, were ‘in daily attendance at the residency, and … admitted to the most familiar intercourse with Lady Colebrooke’.Footnote ⁸¹ These claims suggest that her violation of the increasingly rigid sexual norms of late Georgian domestic ideology was an essential component of his case against her husband.Footnote ⁸² Trevelyan's sexualised focus on Lady Colebrooke enraged her husband. Jealousy, coloured by sexual deprivation, had driven the claims of his upstart assistant, Colebrooke suggested. ‘Mr. Trevelyan, who, like the Turk, can bear no brother near the throne … became jealous of Lady Colebrooke,’ he asserted.Footnote ⁸³ As a bachelor whose relations with women were confined to illicit sex coerced from natives, Colebrooke claimed, Trevelyan was poorly placed to interpret Lady Colebrooke's behaviour as the Resident's wife.Footnote ⁸⁴ In sharp contrast, he (as a married man of the world) trusted his wife not only with European men at the Residency but with Indian princes and their subordinates. ‘My permission to the native gentlemen, to visit Lady Colebooke, in her private apartment, is the origin of the rancour, hatred, and malice, which are driving this man to seek the gratification of his revenge by every violence and outrage, by every disgraceful and underhand means, which a fiend could devise, and a scoundrel put in practice,’ he argued.Footnote ⁸⁵ Lady Colebrooke herself vigorously defended her right to inhabit the public sphere, both in her home and in those of the Indian men she visited, and – like her husband – projected sexual dishonour back on her antagonist. When Trevelyan's accusations began to circulate in Delhi, she issued a circular ‘appealing to the public’ in which she observed ‘that liar and villain are the mildest terms which can be applied to such an act of depravity in so young a man’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Antagonism to elite British women's unbridled behaviour – at once politically and sexually corrupt – in the public sphere was well established in British reformers’ critiques of Old Corruption.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is also essential to recognise the extent to which the regional dynamics of princely politics in north India shaped both Lady Colebrooke's actions and the character and force of Trevelyan's invective. Like Trevelyan, Indian princes clearly recognised that Lady Colebrooke's gifts were freighted with political potential. They accordingly actively incorporated this European woman into their diplomatic dealings. When she sent the nawab of Tonk gifts to mark the birth of a grandchild, the nawab specified that the items be brought to him ‘in state’ so that ‘high and low’ would learn of their conferral. According to this princely state's newsletter, dancing girls and music accompanied the presentation of Lady Colebrooke's gift.Footnote ⁸⁸

Reading the sources thrown up by the Colebrooke case provides abundant evidence not only that Lady Colebrooke acted as an unabashed political agent in Delhi, but also that her gender allowed her and Sir Edward to recognise (and take advantage of) the political agency of Indian princely women behind the purdah curtain. Among the elite women in their circle was Farzana, ‘Begum Sombre’, well known for her active, visible roles in north Indian diplomacy and warfare.Footnote ⁸⁹ But the archives of the Colebrooke controversy identify many more Mughal, Maratha and Rajput princely women with whom Sir Edward and his wife engaged in the business of politics. Pre-eminent among them was the rani and ex-regent of Bharatpur, a Rajput princely state. Bharatpur had gained iconic status in the Company imagination in an infamous siege of 1805, when its impregnable fort failed to fall to the otherwise victorious British forces at the end of the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Between 1825 and 1826, a succession crisis afforded the British an opportunity to rectify this anomaly; in victory, they razed the fort and installed a council of regency to rule for the infant raja.Footnote ⁹⁰ Lord Amherst's son was among the military officers who sent looted objects from the Bharatpur palace to the governor general's family in Calcutta in 1826.Footnote ⁹¹ Among Trevelyan's charges in 1829 was the accusation that, on a visit together with her husband to Bharatpur in that year, Lady Colebrooke had gifted a watch to Imrut Koar, the widowed rani ousted in 1828 as the regent – a status she was determined to renegotiate. For Trevelyan, the illicit gift of a watch encapsulated a much wider field of corruption. Lady Colebrooke had also presented the rani's vakil (or diplomatic agent) with two Indian shawls, and the vakil had prepared a formal petition addressed to Lady Colebrooke for restitution of her lost rights as regent.Footnote ⁹² To Trevelyan, Lady Colebrooke's gifting was of a piece with the statement (he alleged) she had repeatedly made at the Residency table, that in return for Indian gifts she would influence her husband on the behalf of Indian princes.Footnote ⁹³ Colebrooke flatly rejected these claims, dismissing the status of the rani's vakil as that of a mere ‘messenger’ and pointedly underlining that unlike the ‘Hindoostanee kept mistresses’ with whom he accused Trevelyan of cohabiting, British wives must be considered as ‘entitled to partake of the privileges attached to the stations of their husbands’.Footnote ⁹⁴

British wives, sisters and daughters of senior Company men were increasingly conspicuous on the subcontinent in this period, residing with them in European settlements and accompanying them on tours of newly conquered territories.Footnote ⁹⁵ Governor General Amherst's wife was at the forefront of this trend in Delhi, entering actively into her husband's plans to restore diplomatic relations with the king in 1827. She visited the king's senior wife and the spouse of his presumed heir in February of that year, presenting them with necklaces and earrings from the Company toshkhana, and receiving jewels in return ‘which were all placed in the Public Stores’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Lady Colebrooke's dealings extended far beyond Lady Amherst's ‘public’ gifts, forcing open discussion of the problematic status of diplomatic wives’ transactions. As a woman, Lady Colebrooke had no formal place in the Company's service. For Trevelyan, her ability to be ‘in constant communication with every official character about the residency’ was on a par with Colebrooke's subversion of authority by depending unduly on his Hindu man of business.Footnote ⁹⁷ Legally, her only binding contract in Delhi was her marriage to her husband. Under the common law principle of coverture, the gifts and money she obtained from Indian princes were not her own, but (if indeed they were licit private property) her husband's. Her lack of standing notwithstanding, Lady Colebrooke had allegedly entered into negotiations with independent Indian states – an action that, even had she been a man and the Resident, was prohibited by Company regulations. In the context of the king of Delhi's refusal to acknowledge British paramount power, Lady Colebrooke's rogue behaviour represented a new political threat to an already unstable, corrupt imperial regime.

IV

What can we conclude from the Colebrooke corruption case if we read it from the perspective of material culture? Taken as a whole, Trevelyan's accusations smack of hysteria: of his twenty-nine main charges against Colebrooke, only twelve were taken seriously by the investigators, and many of even these they dismissed.Footnote ⁹⁸ Trevelyan was avowedly a ‘liberal’ reformer who rejected the corrupt practices of the Company's Orientalist camp. But his one request to Bentinck – as a reward for the success of his campaign against Colebrooke – was patronage to promote his brother within the Company's ranks, their mother's influence at home having failed to meet the family's needs.Footnote ⁹⁹ The governor general, citing Trevelyan's ‘manly conduct’ in rescuing ‘your Country’ from Colebrooke's ‘foul deeds’, happily complied with this request, appointing Trevelyan's brother assistant at Ajmer.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The gender politics of this scandal are also vitally important, for in scrutinising the record of the Colebrookes’ gifting we see both the assertion and the denial of female agency exercised by British and Indian women. Lady Colebrooke's active collusion with Indian ranis and rajas who offered her gifts is evident throughout the records of her husband's prosecution. Charles Trevelyan recognised these gifts as acts of political corruption. This was, however, a charge that her husband and the Company's most senior officials were desperate to deny. Acknowledging that her husband ‘permitted Lady Colebrooke to receive the agents of many … independent states’, the investigations concluded that ‘a corrupt understanding with any of them is not established’. Refusing to intrude on ‘the private conversations of Sir Edward's family’ even when they took place at his public table, they insisted that ‘such conversations, if proved, could establish no corrupt act’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ To accept that Lady Colebrooke was a political agent was to fly in the face of her status as a British wife, a female whose gender and marital condition subsumed her person under her husband's legal aegis and consigned her to a private sphere outside Company politics. The public role of British women in India in the 1820s – their presence at Company dinners attended by Indian men, their willingness to speak out, their proclivity for drink – all came under increasing scrutiny in this period. ‘Asiatic notions of female delicacy and decorum are so vitally assailed in the very public manner in which European ladies display themselves at these parties, that if they knew … that contempt is the least offensive feeling their presence excites, they would refrain from going into the company of natives,’ Major Archer, aide-de-camp to Lord Bentinck's commander-in-chief, expostulated in his memoirs.Footnote ¹⁰² This assessment conveniently effaced the evidence that punctuated his own autobiographical account of north Indian politics in the late 1820s: his memoir records dinners with (and hosted by) Begum Sombre, as well as occasions on which ranis insisted on articulating their claims to Company officials from behind purdah screens.Footnote ¹⁰³ Recovering these lost female voices is enabled if we attend to records that trace their entanglement in the exchange of material things.

Gender was not, however, the only elephant in the room – or rather, in the Residency stables – in late Mughal Delhi. Viewed from the vantage point of material diplomacy, the Colebrookes’ conspicuous and undoubted venality appears not simply as one episode in the extended history of Old Corruption nor as an example of anachronistic, entrenched Orientalist convictions succumbing to the Anglicist challenge. To be sure, both Old Corruption and Anglicising ideology left deep marks on this controversy. But it is also essential to locate the Colebrookes’ behaviours and their reception within specific places, cultures and temporalities on the subcontinent, and thereby to recognise the diplomatic levers being pulled in late Mughal Delhi by Indian princes (including princely women). From his accession in 1806 until his death in 1837, Akbar II fought against British interpretations of his status as merely the king of Delhi, deploying not only artwork but furniture, jewels, elephants, khila and a cornucopia of other Indian goods to assert and reinforce his claims to paramount power. Lesser princes in north India echoed and elaborated these forms of resistance. Diplomacy exercised on the fragile border between licit and illicit gifting established by Company regulations was fraught with many temptations, and with many opportunities for British and Indian agents to develop new diplomatic practices, expectations and norms. The narrative arc traced by parliamentary and Company regulations against gifting by and to Indian princes, from the Regulating Act of 1773 to Bentinck's orders of 1828, marked a trajectory away from material culture politics and toward a monetised bureaucratic order. But the grand narrative of Indian power relations under British rule repeatedly failed to adhere to this teleological arc.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bentinck's successors were to enter enthusiastically into gifting regimes in north India, sealing their relations with Ranjit Singh's Sikh kingdom in the 1830s, for example, through the exchange of elaborate gifts and counter-gifts at his court in Lahore.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the aftermath of the Indian Uprising of 1857, it was to this ceremonial regime of durbar politics that the crown increasingly turned to stabilise its regime.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Far from fading away with the demise of the Company state in 1858, princely politics of this ilk was shored up and reanimated. Scholars such as Ranajit Guha and James C. Scott remind us of the power of the wily forms of resistance exercised by peasant populations under imperial rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Colebrooke corruption case reminds us that these so-called weapons of the weak had their counterparts among imperialised elites. In India, the persistent refusal of ranis, rajas, nawabs and the Mughal emperor himself to adhere to British diplomatic forms made this resistance palpably evident through material objects to the British.

In the twenty-first century, it is easy to dismiss Georgian-era princely politics as an atavistic form of power, incompatible with modern states and their diplomacy. We do so at our peril. Resilient, adaptable, effective and yes – like democracies – vulnerable to corruption, the family- and clan-based politics of the princely state are a postcolonial, no less than a colonial, a Western, no less than an Eastern, problem for contemporary politics and global order.Footnote ¹⁰⁸