The Sabre's Edge

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In his enigmatic memoir Bengal Lancer, Francis Yeats-Brown recounts how the Honourable East India Company received its licence to trade in Bengal. The Mughal overlord, the Emperor Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal, had a daughter, Jehanara - 'modest and beautiful'. One day Jehanara's maid upset an oil lamp in the palace, and in trying to save her the princess scorched herself about the face and hands. Shah Jehan, distraught, sent word for the best physicians in the empire to come to Agra. One Gabriel Broughton, surgeon of the Company's factory at Surat, arrived quickly and, though hampered by the etiquette of purdah (he was only allowed to feel his patient's pulse from behind a curtain), he not only healed Jehanara but also saved her legendary beauty. As reward, he would take nothing for himself, but asked that a charter be given to the Company to trade :in Bengal. 'These are the threads of karma that go to the making of ant-heaps and Empires,' writes Yeats-Brown: ‘a clumsy slave girl, a kind princess, and an altruistic doctor who asked for the charter on which the British built Calcutta.'

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