White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Although the bungalows provided for the Residency staff were Western in design, they had one very Eastern feature which would perhaps have surprised Lord Wellesley, or at least his masters in London: all had separate zenana wings for the Indian wives and mistresses attached to the staff. James complained to one friend that these were much smaller than necessary for the accommodation of the full zenana apparatus—the enormous entourage of aseels,be eunuchs, handmaids, ayahs and wetnurses which seems to have been the norm at this period: one of Kirkpatrick’s English visitors, for example, turned up to stay with ‘at least a dozen females’, although how many of these were bibis, and how many the bibis’ families and attendants, is unclear.25

  These bibis came from across the Indian social spectrum, and the relationships they formed with the Residency staff varied accordingly. At the most basic level, there was a mechanism in place for procuring common bazaar prostitutes—or possibly the city’s famously refined courtesans—from the city for passing British travellers: when Mountstuart Elphinstone stopped in at the Residency in August 1801 on his way to Pune he wrote in his diary that the ‘whore whom I am going to keep was to have come to be looked at but did not’. (This, incidentally, was probably just as well for the woman in question as Elphinstone was then suffering from a bad attack of clap and spent much of his time rubbing sulphur and mercury into the affected area, though he remarked in his diary that ‘I ereqtate comfortably enough considering.’26bf)

  Other British officials and soldiers in Hyderabad, however, had more serious monogamous relationships with educated women from the upper reaches of Indian society. Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, the commander of the British troops in Hyderabad (and a cousin of Anne Barnard, Lord Wellesley’s host at the Cape), was married to Mooti Begum, the daughter of the Nawab of Masulipatam. It seems to have been a measure of the equality of their marriage that the two agreed to split the upbringing of their five children according to sex: the boys were sent to Madras to be brought up as Christians, eventually to be sent back to East Lothian to join the ranks of the Lowland Scottish gentry, while the only girl from the marriage, Noor Jah Begum, was brought up as a Hyderabadi Muslim and remained in India where she eventually married one of her father’s sepoys, a ‘Cabulee havildarbg named Sadue Beig’.27

  Likewise, William Linnaeus Gardner, who began his freelance career in the Nizam’s army in 1798, was married to Begum Mah Munzel ul-Nissa, the daughter of the Nawab of Cambay, and Gardner seems to have converted to Islam to marry her. The two had met in Surat a year earlier, where the fourteen-year-old Begum had fled to with her mother from a palace coup. Gardner had glimpsed the Princess while he was sitting through the interminable negotiations of a treaty:During the negotiations a parda [curtain] was gently moved aside, and I saw, as I thought, the most beautiful black eyes in the world. It was impossible to think of the Treaty; those bright and piercing glances, those beautiful black eyes completely bewildered me.

  I felt flattered that a creature so lovely as she of those deep black, loving eyes must be should venture to gaze upon me … At the next Durbar, my agitation and anxiety were extreme again to behold the bright eyes that haunted my dreams by night and my thoughts by day. The parda was again gently moved, and my fate was decided.

  I asked for the Princess in marriage; her relations were at first indignant, and positively refused my proposal … however on mature deliberation, the hand of the young Princess was promised. The preparations for the marriage were carried forward: ‘Remember,’ said I, ‘it will be useless to attempt to deceive me, I shall know those eyes again, nor will I marry any other.’

  On the day of the marriage I raised the veil from the countenance of the bride, and in the mirror that was placed between us, beheld the bright eyes that had bewildered me; I smiled—and the young Begum smiled also.28

  It was a happy and long-lasting marriage. Years later, living with his Anglo-Indian family on his wife’s estates at Khassgunge near Agra, with his son James married to a niece of the Mughal Emperor, Gardner wrote to his cousin Edward:At Khassgunge I anticipate very great happiness. I am fond of reading and I am fond of my garden and (there’s no accounting for taste) have more relish in playing with the little brats than for the First Society in the World. The Begum and I, from 22 years constant contact, have smoothed off each other’s asperities and roll on peaceably and contentedly … Man must have a companion, and the older I get the more I am confirmed in this. An old age without something to love, and nourish and nurse you, must be old and uncomfortable. The house is filled with Brats, and the very thinking of them, from blue eyes and fair hair to ebony and wool makes me quite anxious to get back to them again.29

  He added: ‘Few [men] have more occasion to congratulate themselves on their domestic comfort.’30 Eight years later he was able to joke how ‘my having been married some thirty years and never having taken another wife surprises the Musselmans very much, and the ladies all look upon me as a pattern: they do not admire a system of having three or four rivals, however well pleased the gentlemen may be with the custom’.31

  If there appears to have been no shortage of beautiful Muslim Begums in Hyderabad, their European counterparts seem to have been in shorter supply—and to have been something of a mixed blessing. Hyderabad at this period was no place for a demanding, or fashionable, or socially ambitious European woman. Unlike Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, there were no milliners or portrait painters, no dancing or riding masters, no balls, no concerts, no masquerades. Boredom and loneliness led to depression, or dissipation, or that sour, embittered ennui that Kipling depicted in his Mrs Hauksbees and Mrs Reivers a hundred years later: ‘Among the nations of the world, the charms of our fair countrywomen are unrivalled,’ wrote the young Henry Russell, one of James’s Assistants at the Residency, on his arrival at Hyderabad. ‘Unfortunately for us [in this city] we possess but the very dregs … Mrs S____ contaminates the atmosphere which she breathes and pollutes the very earth on which she treads.’32 Her friend Margaret Dalrymple, wife of James Dalrymple’s cousin Samuel, seems to have been little better, and struck Elphinstone as ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.

  Mrs Ure, the wife of the Dr George Ure who had been besieged with William Kirkpatrick at Khardla, was less poisonous than these two—James thought she was ‘perfectly unassuming and more devoid of affectation than almost any woman I ever met with’; but her drawback was her vast and apparently unquenchable appetite.33 Together with her portly husband, she ate up as much as the rest of the Residency staff altogether: ‘The young couple’s consumption of tea and sugar alone is at least double mine,’ wrote Kirkpatrick soon after their marriage, when Mrs Ure first became a regular at the Residency dining table. ‘The khansamanbh tells me a couple of grilled chickens were regularly served up by their direction at their breakfast table. And two fowls boiled down into Mollygotauny soup for their tiffin!! The consequence of which is, as might well have been expected, that the lady was seized with a fever which according to Greene’s and Ure’s account absolutely endangered her life. It has now however left her, and though extremely weak, the khansaman has received directions to provide daily calves’ feet jelly’s until further orders. You may recollect from experience what a costly dish these calves’ feet jelly’s are at Hyderabad … ’ Later Kirkpatrick reported that during her illness, Mrs Ure complained of a lack of appetite but still managed to put away every day ‘poultry, rice, milk, butter, vegetables &c, &c, &c, &c’ as well as ‘two plum cakes, a goose, a turkey and ducks innumerable besides fowls and mutton’.34

  Judging by this list, it would seem that the cooking at the Residency was overwhelmingly European in character; however, the Nizam knew that James personally preferred Indian food, and took to regularly sending him a Hyderabadi speciality made from brinjauls (aubergines), for which he had expressed a particular liking.35 Moreover, despite the European cuisine, the Residency kitchens were run so as not to break any Indian notions of purity, with strict caste rules in operation, p
resumably so as not to put off Indian guests. Years later, when Henry Russell was made Resident, he wrote to his brother that he planned to bring back the regulations that James had put in place: ‘Among other improvements,’ he wrote, ‘pray take great pains to purify every place in the Residency from the pollution of dhains, chamars [i.e. sweepers and untouchables] and other vagabonds of that type. Upon that subject I intend to be quite as particular as Colonel Kirkpatrick was. Your cooks are all that they ought to be; but Rakeem Khan tells me that dhains are still allowed to go where they ought not to go, and to touch what they ought not to touch.’36

  The pastimes of the Residency staff also intriguingly mixed the customs of Georgian England with those of late Mughal India. There was a great deal of obsessive card-playing and gambling, as if the Residency were a gentlemen’s club in St James’s: whist, dunby and ‘Pope Joan’ alternatedwith backgammon and billiards as a way of transferring winnings and debts from one member of the Residency to another, and so filling the long, hot Indian nights. But Georgian pursuits often dovetailed with Mughal ones: after a Saturday morning spent shooting sand grouse (‘The Resident is a capital shot,’ reported Elphinstone37 ), Kirkpatrick would go hunting the black buck with his tame cheetahs: ‘The cheetahs are kept hood winked on a cord,’ wrote Edward Strachey,and when they get near enough to the deer the hood is taken off and they are slipped at the game. They run perhaps two or three hundred yards. If they don’t catch the animal, (which they have singled from the herd) in that time, then they crouch and do not attempt to take another. The first time the cheetah failed but a second attempt had better success; he ran a considerable way after a deer, then sprang on him. When we came up he had the deer’s throat in his mouth & its body between his legs. He gave up his prey more readily than one would expect & it was lain on the cart with him but out of his reach.38

  In the evenings after returning from the hunt, Kirkpatrick would invite troops of Hyderabad’s famous nautch girls to the camp to perform. In matters of Deccani dance and music, many members of the Hyderabad Residency became connoisseurs—so much so that Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, Hyderabad’s most celebrated dancer and courtesan as well as the first major woman poet in Urdu, dedicated her divan to one of Kirkpatrick’s Assistants, Captain John Malcolm. This was a matter of some political delicacy: Mah Laqa Bai was the lover of Mir Alam, and may also have been, at different times, the inamorata of Nizam Ali Khan and possibly Aristu Jah too. How Mir Alam felt about Mah Laqa giving her divan to Malcolm—the dedication took place at a private nautch at Mir Alam’s house—is not recorded.39bi

  An alternative to nautches were the bhands (buffoons or mummers), whom Elphinstone was particularly taken with when they performed after one of James’s hunting expeditions: ‘They played many parts such as a woman trying to force her way into a zenana, a profligate nephew and his uncle, a foolish horseman wheedled out of his money and clothes by singers.’40 Such entertainments alternated with more conventional Georgian fare such as ‘reading Dryden out loud’ and ‘Mrs. Hewitt singing after dinner aires’.

  Kirkpatrick—and no doubt many others on the Residency staff—spent other evenings visiting friends in the old city, though it was necessary to get the express permission of the Minister for members of the Residency to enter the city after sunset. James was especially fond of visiting his friend Tajalli Ali Shah, the Nizam’s court painter, poet and historian, whose grand courtyard house—or deorhi as they are known in Hyderabad—was ‘the coffee house of Hyderabad’ according to James, and the place where everyone came to exchange political gossip.41 With Shah’s help, he collected Hyderabadi miniatures, and attended mehfils and mushairas—poetic symposia. He also regularly attended the Tuesday cockfights at Aristu Jah’s mansion, and visited the Minister at other times to play chess and fly pigeons.

  Under James the Residency also participated in the life and yearly cycle of seasons and festivals of Hyderabad to an extent that it was never to do again. James saw to it that the Residency gave regular donations to the Sufi shrines of the city. He also took parties to join in the festivals: to break the Ramadan fast by eating ’iftar with the Nizam or the Minister, to travel with the durbar up to the Shi’a shrine of Maula Ali during its annual ’urs (festival day), and to present himself, head covered, at the city’s ashur khana during Muharram.

  If, under James Kirkpatrick, the Residency’s participation in the social and cultural life of Hyderabad led to much cross-fertilisation of ideas and the growth of a number of deep friendships between the Residency and the omrahs (nobles) of the court, it also led to some very real political benefits. European ignorance of the complex codes of Mughal etiquette often caused unexpected and diplomatically disastrous offence at Indian courts: in 1750 for example the Hyderabad durbar completely broke off relations with the French after the Nizam received an inadequately deferential letter from the Governor of Pondicherry. The Hyderabad Prime Minister of the time wrote a curt note to the Governor, returning the offending letter and noting: ‘Your letter was not politely written. Even the Sultan of Rumbj writes respectfully [to the Nizam]. How great the difference between you, the master of one seaport and [the Nizam], the Governor of the entire Deccan! Should you not therefore treat him with due deference?’42 James’s increasing absorption into Mughal society meant that he would never make such basic errors of etiquette.

  Likewise his personal knowledge of harem life meant that he avoided the crucial mistake made by many of his contemporaries: of regarding Muslim harems merely as places of pleasure, and so underestimating the power of the Nizam’s women in the Hyderabad political process. In his very first report for Wellesley, James wrote not only about the Nizam and his advisers, but also devoted many pages to analysing the distribution of power within Nizam Ali Khan’s harem:Among the wives and concubines of the Nizam, two dominate the zenana. These are the Bukshee Begum and Tînat un-Nissa Begum, the former of whom has the charge of the privy purse, and control of all Mahl [zenana] disbursements, and the latter the custody of the family jewels which are valued at the lowest at two crores of rupees. They are both advanced in years … and are thought to possess much influence with the Nizam, which they have never been known (it is said) to exert to bad purposes, and they are both much respected. For some years past the Bukshee Begum has entirely refrained from all interference in public matters, employing the whole of her time in acts of charity and devotion. Tînat un-Nissa on the other hand, takes a deep interest in the affairs of the state, and has not failed to avail herself of the share she enjoys in the Nizam’s confidence, and of that weight which her rank in the Mahl gives her at court, where her influence is all pervading.43bk

  James’s writings show that he correctly understood the very precise and intricate hierarchy in the Nizam’s harem, where elderly postmenopausal women, particularly those with adult male princely children, had considerable influence—much more so, perhaps surprisingly, than their younger, more sexually active rivals.44 This knowledge enabled him successfully to predict the outcome of power struggles and succession disputes.bl

  Kirkpatrick’s intimate knowledge of Mughal society also allowed him to participate in Hyderabadi court ritual in a way that earlier Residents had been unqualified to do, and later generations would find impossible. So when the Nizam recovered from an illness, James did not just go and congratulate him as other diplomats of the period might have done. Instead, as he reported to Calcutta:After paying my respects to his Highness and expressing my Joy in his happy Recovery, I passed a Bag containing a thousand Rupees with the usual ceremony thrice round his Highness’s head, and then desired that it might be considered as a Tussaddookh or health-offering on the present Joyful Occasion; a mode of manifesting the interest which the Government I represent takes in his Highness’s welfare, that was highly applauded by all present, and appeared to excite a pleasing emotion even in his Highness himself as far as could be perceived in his low and listless condition.45

  It was a small gesture, but clearly one that was apprec
iated. By wearing Islamic dress, using Mughal styles of address, larding his speeches with the Persian aphorisms of ‘the wise Shaikh Sady’, and accepting and using Persian titles, James Kirkpatrick made himself intelligible in the political lingua franca of the wider Mughal world. Equally important was his willingness to submit to the ritual subordination of Mughal court procedure—the giving of nazrs (symbolic gifts) and the accepting of khilats (symbolic court dress supposedly taken from the Nizam’s own wardrobe) all had profound political significance in Mughal court ritual.

  By mastering the finer points of etiquette of the court and submitting to procedures that some other Residents refused to bow to, James quickly gained a greater degree of trust than any other British Resident of the period, and so was able to reap the diplomatic rewards.

  In the crucial period immediately after William Kirkpatrick left for the Cape, and General Raymond’s rise at court seemed irresistible, these small diplomatic advantages were much needed.

  By 1797 Raymond’s personal income was vast—his estates on their own yielded fifty thousand rupees a year—and according to one observer, ‘in the style of his domestic life he collected around him every luxury and elegance within the reach of a European in India’.46 Indeed Raymond’s corps was so well financed that he was able to outbid the British not only for the services of their best sepoys, but was even able to bribe several senior British officers to defect from the two British battalions stationed in Hyderabad to take up service with the French corps for increased wages. These defections were a great blow to both British morale and British prestige in the city. In August 1797 James reported that three more Englishmen had deserted and that something must quickly be done to stop ‘the growing power and influence of the French here which if not speedily overthrown will be productive of the most serious mischief for us … Surely no one in his senses can doubt that the French will now bend the whole of their own exertions and those of their allies to shake our power in India to the very foundations.’47