Nabobs were East India Company officers who carried out private trades in India and amassed huge wealth for themselves. Their lifestyle was the subject of ridicule in popular British media of the time. They were unscrupulous and could do anything for a small profit. One such man was Frederick Wilson. He had secured the right to cut deodar and pine trees from Sudarshan Shah, the King of Tehri Garhwal. With the royal firman under his arm, Wilson denuded hill after hill in Garhwal. The deforestation he caused took well over 100 years to recover from. Of course, at a very young age he had become the richest man in North India.
Shah gave him the logging rights in 1843 for as little as Rs 400. Wilson had sought rights to hunt the musk deer, but that was considered the exclusive property of the king. Scared to offend a Sahib, the king instead gave him timber rights. But such was the king. Earlier in life, when he had been ousted from his kingdom by the Gurkha army and was in dire straits, he had sold the Dun valley to Hyder Jung Hearsey, a Eurasian soldier of fortune, for as little as Rs 3,000! Once the Gurkha forces retreated to Nepal, East India Company retained the fertile parts of Shah’s kingdom and banished him to the upper reaches of Tehri. Hearsey and his descendants for long fought in the courts with East India Company to get the valley back, but in vain.
Wilson transported logs from the higher reaches to his sawmill at Haridwar on the Ganga. This sawmill produced the sleepers that helped build railway lines in faraway Bombay Presidency, canals in United Provinces and fortifications in Punjab. Wilson also sold animal skins and plumes of rare birds. He was not averse to bribery and other forms of persuasion to get an order or forge an alliance. Since no currency was used in Harsil, where Wilson had set himself up and taken not one but two native wives, he minted his own currency — copper coins with a hole at the centre — that could be redeemed at face value at designated shops. They called him the Raja of Harsil.
Little bits on Wilson have come out now and then. (Read Glorious Garhwal, edited by Ganesh Saili.) Then last year, Roli published Robert Hutchison’s The Raja of Harsil. Hutchison has written an account of Wilson’s life like a novel — complete with emotion, drama and sex! Hutchison has written English as it was spoken in India at that time. The text is peppered with words like brandypawnee (brandy and water), Bobbery Bob (baap re baap), bobachee connah (bawarchi khana or cook house) and puckerow (pakro or “catch”). Such hybrids have long vanished from the English lexicon.
There was another side to Wilson. He was a part of Fredrick Young’s degchi brigade — unauthorised agents used as spies in the high passes to counter the growing Russian influence. Wilson went on several sorties. Rani Jindan, the young wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, had a secret rendezvous with a Russian agent in high Tartary. The two had worked out an alliance, but Wilson got hold of the details and East Indian Company was able to scupper the deal. Wilson was used to gather intelligence during the Sikh Wars; his informants monitored conversation between pilgrims who came from the plains to visit the holy shrines in Garhwal.
He died in 1883 at the age of 66. The legend of Pahari Wilson lives on in the mountains of Garhwal.