‘The Golden Calm’: Traces of an empire, MM Kaye, the Metcalfes, and a city before the storm

There’s a particular kind of book I seem to gravitate towards: too big for an ordinary shelf, too niche-bound for a reprint, and somehow always out of stock everywhere except a single slightly wonky copy on the internet. The sort of thing that feels less like a title and more like a rumour.

That’s how I first met The Golden Calm: An English Lady’s Life in Moghul Delhi. Not as a stout hardcover in a bookshop but as a citation in someone’s bibliography, a throwaway reference in a footnote. A curious note that made me dig more, and when I did, it turned out to be peak out-of-print madness – an enormous coffee-table volume from 1980, published off the back of MM Kaye’s blockbuster success with The Far Pavilions, and now available only in a handful of libraries, second-hand dealers, and the odd digital scan if you’re lucky.

Which is a shame, because it’s exactly the kind of book that changes the way you see a city you thought you knew. Long before the siege and fall of Delhi, before Mutiny novels turned the city into shorthand for catastrophe, The Golden Calm captured that long, glittering, complacent pause before the storm.

If you’ve read Kaye at all, it’s probably for the deliciously chunky historical novel: The Far Pavilions, Shadow of the Moon, those sweeping Raj epics with doomed love stories and a great deal of marching. The Golden Calm is different. Here, Kaye isn’t inventing; she’s curating.

The material for The Golden Calm came to her almost ready-made. In the 1840s, Sir Thomas Metcalfe – posted as the East India Company’s Resident in Delhi, responsible for managing the Company’s relationship with the pensioned Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar – decided to make his teenage daughter a book.

Emily was in England at the time, at school. Her father, missing her, set out to show her the city she’d left behind. The result was an album he titled Reminiscences of Imperial Delhi, now usually referred to simply as “the Delhi Book”: hand-written descriptions of Delhi’s monuments, festivals and court life, each one accompanied by a painting commissioned from Delhi artists.

This book became Kaye’s primary source, and using it, what she assembled – from family archives, old diaries, and this one astonishing picture album – is a forgotten window into 19th-century Delhi. Open it now, and you get not one voice but three, all layered over each other like tracing paper: Emily Bayley, a young woman remembering her Delhi girlhood; her father, Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British Resident at the Mughal court; and Kaye herself, writing in the late 1970s, looking back on them both through the haze of her own Raj upbringing.

Put together, they form an oddly beautiful, deeply uneasy time-capsule of a city on the brink.

A Delhi made of watercolours and prose

It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary the Delhi Book is. Metcalfe wasn’t just scribbling; he was producing, at his desk in Shahjahanabad, a sort of private deluxe guidebook. Panoramas of the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, the Ridge; interiors of havelis; processions on Eid with elephants, palanquins and ranks of soldiers; a view of his own country house, Dilkusha, made out of a Mughal tomb near the Qutb and remade as a pleasure villa. Text and image together, framed in an unmistakably Victorian voice, but with the eye – and the brushwork – of Delhi’s own painters.

Decades later, when Emily was an old woman in England, she began dictating her memories of Delhi in the 1840s and early 1850s: the years she spent at Metcalfe House, her visits to the Mughal court, balls and dinner parties, illnesses, marriages, the easy crossing-back-and-forth between British and Indian worlds that, for her, defined the “golden calm” of pre-Mutiny Delhi.

By the time MM Kaye got involved in the 1970s, both documents – Emily’s reminiscences and Thomas’s album – were still in the family, along with a small pile of letters and papers. Kaye took all of this and stitched it together into one narrative, with her own voice running in and out: explaining context, flagging up historical details, occasionally stepping in with memories from her own childhood in India that eerily echo Emily’s.

The result is not a straightforward memoir or a facsimile of a historical document; it’s something more layered. You have a middle-aged Emily, around 1902, talking about 1848 as if it were yesterday; her father’s carefully composed 1840s view of the city; and Kaye, a 20th-century “child of the Raj”.

The pleasure of reading The Golden Calm lies partly in watching these three periods talk to each other on the page.

Kaye borrowed her title from a phrase she uses early on to describe Delhi in the two decades before 1857. In north India, the 1830s and 1840s were hardly peaceful: the Anglo-Sikh wars, campaigns on the Afghan frontier, and the Company edging into new territories. But inside the walls of Shahjahanabad, she argues, there was a sense of relative stability – at least for the small set of people living between Metcalfe House and the Red Fort. And her memories bear this out. Her Delhi is full of small, domestic detail: music in the evenings, rides out to the Ridge, picnics in gardens, calling on Indian friends and being called on in return. There are mentions of poets and of the emperor Zafar (always “the King”), of the etiquette of being presented at court, and of how important it was to have the right carriage for the right occasion.

What’s striking, reading this now, is how confidently cosmopolitan the city appears in her eyes. For Emily, Delhi is not a forbidding “native” city beyond the civil lines; it is home. She moves, quite literally, between a British world and a Mughal one, and takes the permeability of that boundary for granted. The Resident’s daughter attends mushairas and durbars; she also worries about her dresses, the weather, and who is marrying whom.

From our own vantage point, of course, the phrase “golden calm” has jagged edges. We know that the calm rested on an increasingly unequal political arrangement; we know, too, what is coming. Part of the book’s power – as with so many 19th-century texts about Delhi – lies in that double vision. When Thomas commissions a painting of Zafar’s Eid procession, he is thinking of a charming scene to send to his daughter. We can’t help seeing it as a record of a court that is about to be destroyed.

The book never forgets the Britishness of its gaze: this is Delhi as curated for Emily and her descendants, not as Delhiites would have described themselves. But it is also a reminder that the lives lived in that in-between space – half-adopted, half-imperious, steeped in Hindustani and in British prejudices at once – are part of the city’s story, and not just a footnote.

A book object

One of the reasons The Golden Calm resists being reduced to a paragraph in a history book is that it is so intensely physical.

In its original form, it’s an object as much as a text: oversized pages, colour plates on thick paper, a six-panel fold-out of the Eid procession that you have to physically unfurl. Even on screen, you feel the book wanting to be handled.

That materiality matters. Metcalfe’s Delhi Book was always a one-off, an album made to be leafed through by family members. Kaye’s project, in part, democratises that experience. It lets readers sit, as she imagines Emily doing, with the book open across their laps. It’s no accident that so much of her commentary invites you to look closely: at the way Mazhar Ali Khan (one of the Delhi artists Metcalfe employed) paints the light on the sandstone, at the exact placing of a pavilion, at the names of the tradesmen populating the streets.

There’s something almost indecent about this, if you’re a modern reader from Delhi. The album lists and lavishes attention on places that, for us, are shorthand: the Qutb, the Fort, the Ridge, the Jumma Masjid. It also names and celebrates spaces that were essentially acts of appropriation: Dilkusha, for example, Metcalfe’s “country house”, was a Mughal tomb that he stripped and turned into a villa, surrounding it with lawns and follies for British picnic parties. In the paintings, it glows – a fairy-tale estate under blue Delhi skies.

Seen now, those images are a lesson in how beautifully the empire documents itself. And yet, without them, we would have fewer visual records of a particular moment of Delhi’s life. That is part of what makes a book like this – and the project of “unearthing” it – so complicated: it preserves what it helped chip away.

The family story behind it all adds another twist. After Emily’s death in 1911, the Delhi Book vanishes into drawers and cupboards; it re-emerges in the mid-20th century almost by accident, when a Metcalfe descendant realises what he’s inherited and decides it ought to be made public. By the time Kaye’s volume appeared in 1980, the album had become an artefact.

Nostalgia, unease, and Delhi as palimpsest

Why go to the trouble of hunting this down today, apart from the obvious thrill of possessing (or borrowing) something rare?

Part of the answer, for me, lies in what the book does to your mental map of Delhi. If you live in or have visited the city, you carry around a certain sense of its layers: Old Delhi versus New Delhi, the colonial capital plonked down beside Shahjahanabad, the post-Partition refugee colonies, the ever-expanding sprawl. The Golden Calm inserts another ghost-layer into that map: the Delhi of the 1840s as imagined by people who believed, with varying degrees of self-deception, that their world could go on indefinitely.

Another part of the answer is that The Golden Calm sits interestingly beside the other 19th-century Delhi memoirs we have. Harriet Tytler’s account of the siege, for instance, gives us Delhi in extremis: shells, flies, heat, laundry done in a bell of arms while guns thunder outside. Emily’s Delhi is the same city under entirely different light. Between them, and with books like Zafar’s own poems and Ghalib’s letters, you begin to see the 1857 story not as a single violent tear in the fabric, but as a long slow unravelling in which many kinds of people were invested.

There is, of course, the question of nostalgia. Kaye is unabashedly nostalgic; she is clear about her affection for the Raj world she grew up in, and it colours her editing. Emily, too, is writing across decades, remembering Delhi from the vantage point of an old age spent elsewhere. The “golden” quality of those years is as much about hindsight – knowing that they ended in disaster – as it is about any objective calm.

In other words, it’s an excellent book to argue with.

Like most of the books I’ve written about in this column, The Golden Calm lives an odd half-life now. The original Delhi Book has been conserved, catalogued, and used in exhibitions and scholarly histories. Kaye’s big, generous, slightly eccentric volume – the thing that first invited general readers into that world – has quietly slipped out of the picture.

If you do manage to track it down, what you get is not a masterpiece of literature in any conventional sense. The prose can be ornate, the commentary occasionally indulgent. But it offers something rarer: a chance to sit in that “golden calm” for a moment, aware of the catastrophe that is about to arrive, and to feel the unease of knowing whose calm this really was.