To William he wrote a more heartfelt reply: ‘I need not, I am sure my dear Will, say anything to you on the subject of my gratitude to that most worthy nobleman [Lord Wellesley] for his uniform condescension and kindness towards me. You know my heart, and can form a good idea of my feelings on the occasion … ’83
III
From the parapet of the wall that surrounded the British Residency in Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick could look down over the River Musi, a raging torrent during the monsoon, but a gentle, fordable stream in summer. On the far bank of the river rose the great city of Hyderabad: a seven-mile loop of walls, and over the top of its watchtowers, stretching far into the distance, a magnificent panorama of white mosques and palaces, monuments and tombs, domes and minarets, their gilt finials glinting in the summer sunlight.
For one hundred years from the late sixteenth century, thanks at least partly to the profits of the diamond trade, Hyderabad had been one of the richest cities in India; it was certainly the most prosperous town outside the Mughal Empire. Sultan Quli Qutb Shah had planned his new city in 1591 as ‘a metropolis which would be unequalled the world over and a replica of paradise itself’.1 When the French traveller M. de Thevenot passed through in the late 1650s he described how far the Sultan’s plans had succeeded: elegant, clean, opulent and well planned, the still-young city of Hyderabad was filled with grand houses and gardens, and miles of bazaars humming ‘with many rich merchants, bankers and jewellers and a vast number of very skilful artisans’.
Beyond the walls, the scene was equally seductive. The pleasure gardens and the country retreats of the rich extended for miles in every direction; beyond, to the south-west, lay the citadel of Golconda with the swelling hemispheres of the great Qutb Shahi tombs at its base. European merchants flocked there ‘and make great profits … the Kingdom may be said to be the Country of Diamonds’.2 One of these merchants was William Methwold, the English factor at the sultanate’s seaport of Masulipatam. On his first visit to Golconda he was astonished by what he saw, describing it asa citie that for sweetnesse of ayre, conveniencie of water and fertility of soyle, is accounted the best situated in India, not to speake of the Kings Palace, which for bignesse and sumptuousnesse, in the judgement of such as have travelled India exceedeth all belonging to the Mogull or any other Prince … built of stone, and, within, the most eminent places garnished with massie gold in such things as we commonly use iron, as in barres of windowes, bolts and such like, and in all other points fitted to the majesty of so great a King, who in elephants and jewels is accounted one of the richest Princes of India. [The Sultan] married the daughter of the King of Bijapur, and hath beside her three other wives, and at least 1000 concubines: a singular honour and state amongst them being to have many women, and one of the strangest things to them I could relate, and in their opinions lamentable, that his excellent Majesty our Gracious Sovereigne should have three kingdoms and but one wife … 3
After a prolonged rivalry between Golconda and Mughal Delhi, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb finally captured and sacked Hyderabad in 1687, stabling the horses of his cavalry in the Shi’ite mosques and ashur khanas (mourning halls) as a deliberate insult to the city’s Shi’a (and thus, in Aurangzeb’s orthodox Sunni eyes, heretical) establishment.ay After this, the city underwent a temporary eclipse. The focus of the region moved to Aurangzeb’s new Mughal headquarters town at Aurangabad, and for eighty years Hyderabad was left a melancholy shadow of its former glory, with whole quarters of the city deserted and ruined. But on the accession of Nizam Ali Khan in 1762, Hyderabad was again made the capital of the region, and this time of a domain which now embraced a far wider slice of central and southern India than the old Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda had ever done.
Despite the intermittent warfare of the period, the city quickly began to recover its former wealth and splendour. The ruins of the Qutb Shahi palaces and public buildings were renovated and restored, the mosques rebuilt, the gardens replanted and, crucially, the city walls were strengthenedand patched up. By the 1790s Hyderabad, with a population of around a quarter of a million, was once again both a major centre of commerce and the unrivalled centre of the hybrid Indo-Muslim civilisation of the Deccan, the last link in a cultural chain stretching back to the foundation of the first Muslim sultanates in the region in the fourteenth century.
At Hyderabad’s centre stood the great Char Minar, a monumental gateway formed by a quadrant of arches rising to four domed minarets. The Char Minar marked the meeting of the city’s two principal bazaars, where the road from the craggy citadel of Golconda crossed with that coming from the great port of Masulipatam: ‘There are drugs here of all sorts,’ wrote one visitor, ‘every kind of spice, book, paper, ink, pens, gingham, cloth, silk fabrics and yarn of all colours, swords and bows, arrows and quivers, knives and scissors, spoons and forks, thimbles and dice, needles large and small, gems fine and false—in short, all that one may desire.’4
Here merchants and traders from all over the Middle East as well as from France, Holland, England and even China came to buy from the spice bazaar where mountains of cloves, pepper, ginger and cinnamon were all on display, the necks of hessian sacks rolled down to reveal shiny black carob sticks, lumpy ginger stems, aromatic slivers of sandalwood or small hillocks of bright orange turmeric. Other merchants came to Hyderabad to purchase silver and copper, the famous blades of its unrivalled ‘Damascus’ swords, exquisite gold brocades and shatranji (chessboard) carpets.
In the streets crowds of Persians and Arabs in flowing robes joined turbaned Mughals from Delhi and Lucknow, Portuguese horse-traders from Goa and parties of Dutch jewellers up from their base on the coast at Masulipatam. Together they explored the bazaars, testing the delicacies of the city’s famous confectioners or lingering before the fragrant stalls of the perfumers, where the scents and aromatic oils were mixed to suit the season, and their ingredients altered depending on the heat or the degree of humidity.az
Beyond stretched the shops of the filigree-dotted gold and silver merchants,which led in turn into the richest of all the bazaars: that of the jewellers and the diamond mart. The great Golconda diamond mines—from ancient times until the early eighteenth century the world’s sole supplier of these most coveted of all precious stones—were not yet exhausted, and the same seams that had produced the legendary Koh-i-Noor as well as the Hope and the Pitt diamonds were still active enough in 1785 for Nizam Ali Khan to send King George III the newly discovered 101-carat Hastings Diamond as a small diplomatic gift.5 Stones of that size were always rare, even in Hyderabad, but the heavily guarded workshops nevertheless groaned with lesser treasures: gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds, superbly inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers, champlevé scabbards and manuscripts of the Koran, their bindings inlaid with burnished gold and empurpled ebony. There were other more effete fopperies too: bejewelled and enamelled flywhisks, and bazubands (armbands) set with the Nine Auspicious Gems, including yellow topaz and the rarest chrysoberyl cats’ eyes.6
Palaces stretched off down the narrow sidestreets towards Mughalpura, Shah Gunj and Irani Gulli, some magnificent, but most plain on the street frontage, hiding their richly latticed treasures for those admitted within. Many were huge—‘some of them are three times the length of Burlington House’, reported one astonished British traveller7—and contained within them wide expanses of garden, cool and quiet after the bustle of the streets. Throughout ran rippling runnels punctuated by slowly dribbling marble fountains and filled with ‘rows of mango trees, date-palms, coconuts, fig trees, bananas, oranges, citrons, with some yew trees … and very fine circular reservoirs. Around the reservoir are dotted pots of fragrant flowers’.8
Where there are the rich in India, there are always the poor too. The magnificent architecture of Hyderabad’s palaces and mosques created a façade of order and grandeur which hid the thieving, the sickness, the hunger and the pain that lay behind. On his arrival in the c
ity several years earlier William Steuart had been very struck by its extremes of wealth and poverty—something that travellers in the Nizam’s dominions continued to notice right up until the middle of the twentieth century: ‘There is perhaps a stronger contrast of extravagant profusion & of wretchedness at this durbar than anywhere in India,’ Steuart wrote in 1790.
By the former I mean the Nizam’s pomp & state: he has a swareeba of 400 elephants, several thousand of horsemen near his person who receiveupwards of 100 Rs nominal pay who are extremely well mounted & richly caparisoned. His other chiefs also show marks of pomp. But I have to observe that except the chiefs all are wretched & miserable; grain seldom cheeper than 15 seer a rupee & since my arrival never above 12—the poor devils are sadly put to it for a livelihood.9
Leading out from behind the grand bazaars ran a warren of filthy lanes and unswept sidestreets—the preserve of the rats, the pickpockets and the lower sort of prostitute. Even the lane leading to the royal stabling yard was known as ‘Muthri Gulli’—Urinating Lane—and the road that led from the main gate of the palace was ‘fit for horse and carriage traffic only’.10 Along this route sat the beggars, the lepers, the lame, the halt and the blind. Maimed sepoys flanked landless peasants and the mentally ill, ejected from the Sufi shrines as unhealable and beyond the powers even of the city’s renowned exorcists. From the palace to the gates of the Mecca Masjid they sat in lines, crying for alms and raising their bandaged hands in supplication to passing palanquins, out of which, if they were lucky, might be thrown a small shower of silver annas.
For these people, as for the other Hyderabadis, there were the festivals. To one side of the Char Minar was the Maidan-i-Dilkusha, or Heart-Rejoicing Square, where on holidays such as Id and the Prophet’s birthday the ground would be swept clean and bhistis (water-carriers) sprinkle the warm earth with water. After this canopies and awnings would be raised and food provided free to the entire populace. Elaborate displays of fireworks would round off the evening.11
Nearby was the city’s renowned Dar ul-Shifa, or ‘house of healing’, a four-hundred-bed teaching hospital open to all for no charge and famous as one of the most sophisticated centres of yunanibb and ayurvedic medicine. Beside it stood a wide garden, the Bagh i-Muhammed Shahi, specially planted with healing herbs and aromatic plants, as well as with flowers whose purifying and uplifting scent was believed to help the patients recover.12
There were other scents too, as well as the gardens, the whiff of spices from the bazaars and the darker smells emanating from Muthri Gulli. From nearby street stalls came the all-pervading smell of grilling kebabs, and another smell still more specific to Hyderabad: the scent of slowly-cooking biryani: ‘In truth,’ admitted a patriotic Delhi-wallah, abandoning for a moment his metropolitan Mughal hauteur, ‘no better dish is cooked anywhere throughout India.’13
One of General Raymond’s French officers found this smell particularlyirresistible: ‘There are dishes consisting of bread made à la manteque [naan], stew, and the liver of fowls and kids, very well dressed,’ he wrote, ‘[but most renowned of all is the] rice boiled with quantities of butter, fowls and kids, with all sorts of spicery … which we found to be very good, and which refreshed us greatly.’14
In his conversations with Wellesley at the Cape, James’s brother William Kirkpatrick painted a straightforward picture of Anglo-French rivalry in Hyderabad, where the beleaguered Union flag of the Residency fluttered bravely against a rising tide of French Revolutionary tricolore. The reality on the ground was a little different.
It is clear from a variety of sources that by the late 1790s both the French officers of the Corps de Raymond and their counterparts in the British detachments stationed in Hyderabad, as well as the staff of the British Residency, had all, to different extents, begun acclimatising themselves to their Hyderabadi environment and to Hyderabadi ways of living.
By 1797, when William left Hyderabad, his brother James had already begun wearing what Arthur Wellesley described as ‘a Mussulman’s dress of the finest texture’ for all occasions ‘excepting when he was obliged to receive the officers of the [British military] detachment, or upon certain great occasions when the etiquette of the Nizam’s durbar required that the English Resident should appear there in the dress of an Englishman’.15 He smoked a hookah, wore Indian-style ‘mustachios [and] has his hair cropped very short & his fingers dyed with henna’, as one surprised visitor recorded in his diaries. Moreover, James had taken on the Eastern habit of belching appreciatively after meals, which sometimes took visitors to the Residency aback, as did his tendency to ‘make all sorts of other odd noises’, possibly a reference to him clearing his throat (or even nostrils) in the enthusiastic and voluble Indian manner.16 According to the contemporary Hyderabadi historian Ghulam Imam Khan in his Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi:I must mention that the Resident [James Kirkpatrick] had a great liking for this country, and especially for the people of Hyderabad. He was very close to the Prime Minister and a great favourite of the Nizam who used to call him ‘beloved son’. It is said that in contrast to many of the English who are often proud, haughty and snobbish, Kirkpatrick was a very cordial and friendly person. Anyone who had spent a little time with him would be won over by his pleasant manners. In the very first meeting, he would make the other person feel he had known him for years, and take him for an old friend and acquaintance. He was completely fluent in the language and idiom of these parts, and followed many of the customs of the Deccan. Indeed he had spent so much time in the company of the women of Hyderabad that he was very familiar with the style and behaviour of the city and adopted it as his own. Thanks partly to these women he was always very cheerful. 17
Over at the French cantonments on the other side of the Musi, there was a similar situation. Raymond was believed to be a practising Muslim by many of his sepoys, though a few took him to be a Hindu; his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron was also reported to be ‘wanting to turn mussulman’, though it is unclear if he ever did so.18 The doctor of the French corps, Captain Bernard Fanthôme, seems to have specialised in ayurvedic and yunani cures, and had seven Indian bibis, the most senior of whom was a daughter of the Mughal Prince Feroz Shah. Fanthôme, who was known at court as Fulutan Sahib due to his wisdom—‘Fulutan’ is the Persian name for Plato—later became a doctor in the service of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah II, and fathered a dynasty of notable Urdu and Persian poets, including ‘Jargis’, ‘Shaiq’ and ‘Sufi’, most of whom were pious Muslims and whose masnavi were treasured in the royal libraries at Lucknow and Rampur.19 Like Fanthôme, most of the French, and a great many of the British, had married or lived with Hyderabadi women, by whom they had large families and through whom they gained Hyderabadi roots.20 The image conveyed by William Kirkpatrick’s official despatches of two fiercely opposed national camps soon fractures on examination into a more nuanced reality of a pair of isolated European outposts slowly assimilating themselves with their surroundings, while retaining their national rivalries and a few other features of their European origins.
In the British Residency this unlikely amalgam of Mughal and European cultures was particularly striking: one visitor in 1801 wrote that ‘Major Kirkpatrick’s grounds are laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan.’21 The Hindustani part of the compound was defined by the remains of the ancient pleasure garden in which the Residency was built. In its centre was a large Mughal-style baradari bc pavilion which the British had turned into ‘a dining hall and place of public entertainment’, while nearby stood a Mughal-style mahal or sleeping apartment from which led a pair of mature cypress avenues. From this axis ran various runnels, fountains, pools and flowerbeds, all of which had survived from the garden’s earlier incarnation as a pleasure retreat.22
During the sixteenth century, under the rule of Hyderabad’s founders, the Qutb Shahi sultans, the entire bank of the River Musi at this point had been decorated with long lines of elegant Mughal-style gardens and country houses, cascades and c
hattris.bd The remains of this crumbling Arcadia stretched northwards as far as the eye could see, though during the chaos of the early eighteenth century a number of the gardens had been encroached upon by villagers and turned into paddy fields. The whole area was dominated by the vast skeleton of Tana Shah’s pleasure palace. According to Edward Strachey:Near the Residency, within a mile, are the ruins of a palace and garden which were formerly celebrated for their elegance and magnificence. It is now known by the name of Tannee Shah’s garden. Tannee Shah was the last of the Kuttub Shah Kings. It is related of him that after hunting, his tent being pitched at this place, he slept and in a dream he saw a beautiful palace and garden with fountain and aquaduct. When he awoke he gave orders that a similar palace and garden should be begun immediately.23
If the remains of ruined Qutb Shahi Gardens gave the British Residency the ‘Hindustani’ part of its character, a scattering of elegant neo-classical bungalows and stable blocks provided the other, Islington, part of its identity. The most prominent of these buildings was a two-storey house intended for the personal use of the Resident. William Kirkpatrick had had it made during his absence on the Khardla campaign; but, unsupervised, it had been quickly and cheaply built, and though barely four years old was already in a semi-ruinous condition. Within a year James was writing to William seeking his help to get the funds out of Calcutta to renovate it:The upper storey you built to the house at the Residency is now scarcely habitable, as it leaks in all parts so that I am obliged to proof it to prevent it falling in on the lower storey, which itself gives strong symptoms of decay. I have been for these two or three months past patching up what the rains have caused to moulder away, but this patchwork is neither durable, comfortable nor creditable, and as I cannotsuppose that it is wished that my accommodations should be either uncomfortable or uncreditable, it must end in my sending in an estimate.24
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