When young Thomas Twining walked through Delhi in 1794, no one looked at him twice. The bazar he passed through was busy with men in white robes and turbans, coloured shawls tied at the waist, all carrying arms of some sort – a wicked blade or a scimitar, or sometimes a black shield. “All the inhabitants I met in this crowded bazar,” he wrote in his memoirs, “were perfectly-behaved and civil, not displaying more than that certain degree of curiosity which is not, perhaps, unpleasing to a stranger.
” The men simply acknowledged the presence of the pale firangi with a discreet salaam, stepping aside to make room for him as he passed by. No longer were there horrified villagers running away at the sight of these “white devils”, nor curious mobs as there had been a few decades before. Hindustan had changed considerably in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The sense of dislocation must have been pronounced by the time Twining arrived in Lucknow in 1796. He was immediately swept up into the giddy social scene enjoyed by the British residents there and was moved to remark that “the style in which this remote colony lived was surprising, it far exceeding even the expense and luxuriousness of Calcutta”. This intimate little band of Europeans spent these winter evenings sitting by a crackling fire, alternately dining at each other’s homes.
They had organised a large band of musicians for their entertainment at these numerous soirees. “I had singular pleas.