White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

James was aware that intelligence leaks were occurring somewhere between Calcutta and Hyderabad, though he did not yet realise his own office was responsible for them. For this reason he took the precaution of writing almost all of his politically sensitive letters in cipher.bp

  Perhaps James might have done well to employ such precautions, for he continued to discover evidence of the lack of security surrounding the Residency’s affairs. He was horrified when Mir Alam’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari, told him of a letter James was about to receive from Calcutta before it actually arrived. More worrying still, William Gardner, then a new recruit in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, managed to discover some of Wellesley’s decisions on details of the new treaty before James did.66 James thought the leaks were occurring in Madras, and wrote angrily to his brother William about the lack of security there, especially when the details of his plans to take on Raymond came quickly to be an open secret in Hyderabad.bq It was not for another year that James realised he had a mole at work in his own staff.67br

  Kirkpatrick was however no innocent in the game of espionage. One of his first jobs in Hyderabad had been to set up his own network of informers. Within the Nizam’s mahal he had spies, probaby burarun: ‘female domestics or slaves of the seraglio who collect a daily budget of [often scandalous] tittle tattle not always of a description to be given to the world’, as another British intelligence officer of the period described them.68 He also bribed the palace sweepers to pass on information and documents from the Nizam’s inner apartments, and his letters are full of references to ‘my information from the interior of the palace’.bs

  But it seems unlikely, judging by his letters, that James would have been prepared to contemplate more devious and Machiavellian methods of conducting his business. So when, on the morning of 25 March 1798, General Raymond was found dead aged only forty-three, in highly suspicious circumstances, all the evidence pointing to the use of some agonising slow-acting toxin or poison, there is every reason to believe that James was as surprised as everyone else.

  Everyone else, that is, except perhaps Aristu Jah, who without blinking announced the confiscation of Raymond’s extensive estates that same evening.

  Raymond was buried in a perfect classical Greek tomb on a hilltop at Malakpet, just outside the city of Hyderabad. It lay immediately above the French cantonments he had founded and supervised. Beside it was raised an obelisk. Both tomb and obelisk were left free of the iconography of any religion; only the same simple monogram which can be found on Raymond’s hookah—a looped and italicised ‘JR’—breaks the purity of its line.bt

  Raymond was succeeded by his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron, a rougher and less sophisticated man than his former commander. Piron lacked Raymond’s great charm, and was less clever at concealing both his feelings and his ambitions. His first action on succeeding Raymond was to send his counterpart in Scindia’s service a republican silver tree and a Cap of Liberty. This, once reported back to Calcutta by British spies in Pune, fed Wellesley’s increasingly paranoiac belief that a worldwide republican conspiracy was afoot, encouraging him to speed up his plans to topple the French party at Hyderabad.69

  Reporting the death of Raymond to Calcutta, James wrote that the French corps remained formidable despite its founder’s death:The officers commanding this numerous and in a comparative view, well disciplined and appointed Body of Infantry, are not only most of them violent Republicans themselves, but have even contrived (I think) to infuse some of their spirit and animosity towards the English in their Men, many hundreds of whom, particularly the Native officers, are old Pondicherry sepoys. The arms commonly used by these French Corps are certainly not of the best, but according to information I have received, there are complete spare sets in store, ready to be issued to them in cases of emergency.70

  In fact the French corps was later discovered to have in store enough equipment to arm twelve thousand more troops—a measure of Raymond’s hopes and ambitions.71 Yet James soon realised that Raymond’s death was going to make his job much easier. He first detected signs of laziness creeping into the routine of the French camp in the middle of the summer. Reviewing his intelligence on the French cantonments six months later, just after the text of his new treaty had finally been agreed by Calcutta, he wrote to William: ‘Things in Piron’s lines go on as usual, and the daily detail of duty continues without any alteration since Piron succeeded to the Command of the Party. During Raymond’s time, however, there was more vigilance for he always kept spies abroad to advise him what was doing, but Piron has not a single Harkarrah [runner or spy] employed.’

  This, wrote James, was just as well, as the news from outside Hyderabad was far from heartening: ‘The report of the day is that the French are triumphant in Europe, have entirely humbled the English, and that Tippoo is prepared for war, having been joined by 12,000 Frenchmen who landed at one of his ports.’

  The reports turned out to be exaggerated; but some French soldiers and sailors had indeed turned up, and Tipu quickly wrote to the French commander in Mauritius asking for more.

  Aristu Jah, meanwhile, was pressing ahead with his own schemes to ease the removal of the French officers from Hyderabad. His plan was to establish two new mercenary regiments under a pair of Irish and American adventurers who had formerly guarded him in his garden prison in Pune. He hoped that in due course, after the treaty with the Company had been signed and the French officers were rounded up, most of the rank and file sepoys of Raymond’s corps could be re-assigned to these two new English-speaking corps.

  One regiment, of five thousand men, was raised by the thirty-six-year-old Michael Finglas, an Irish mercenary ‘possessed of very little talent or education’, according to James, but blessed with what in James’s eyes was the great redeeming quality of not being French. Aristu Jah had lured him to Hyderabad from Pune and given him the singularly inappropriate title of Nawab Khoon Khar Jung, ‘the Falcon’.72bu James approved of the move, and at first regarded Finglas as a good-natured if slightly ineffective figure, only later coming to deprecate what he termed Finglas’s ‘deplorable weakness and infirmity both mental and bodily’.73

  Finglas appointed as his deputy the young William Linnaeus Gardner, now newly married to his Cambay Begum. Gardner had been born in Livingstone Manor in New York State, between the Catskills and the Hudson, a godson of the Swedish botanist and a nephew of the British Admiral Alan Gardner, Baron Uttoxeter. At the age of thirteen he had had to flee the New World after the Patriot victory in the War of Independence, in which his father had fought prominently—and initially very successfully—for the British government. James at first thought William Gardner ‘a young man of honour as well as ability’; but the two men—so similar in many ways, with their Indian wives and shared love of Mughal culture—fell out after Gardner began manoeuvring to replace Finglas as head of the newly formed corps. By November James was writing that Gardner had planned a series of ‘unjustifiable and villainous intrigues with a view to terrifying his chief [Finglas] into a resignation of his Command, [and so] has disorganised the whole Party’.74 By the end of the year Gardner had secretly slipped out of Hyderabad to try his luck elsewhere.75bv

  Aristu Jah’s second regiment was raised by another independent-minded American exile: an intermittently violent and short-tempered Yankee from Newburyport, Massachusetts, named John P. Boyd.76 Boyd raised and trained a corps of 1800 men before being discharged by Aristu Jah in July 1798 due to his ‘refractoriness, disobedience and unreasonableness’. 77 He promptly stormed back to Pune with his corps, where he rejoined the Peshwa’s service.bw

  The freelances and adventurers in Maratha service from which Aristu Jah had plucked Boyd, Finglas and Gardner were, in general, a markedly unmanageable and unreliable lot of ruffians. William Gardner was a rare exception in coming from an educated background: most of his fellows were ne’er-do-wells from the furthest margins of Western society, men like Michael Filoze, ‘a low-bred Neapolitan of worthless character’ who had formerl
y been employed as muleteer in the Apennines; or Louis Bourquoin, a part-time fireworks salesman and former French pastrycook, ‘his skill in culinary matters being superior to his skill in military ones’.78 These adventurers almost all came to India to seek their fortunes, and moved employers and changed sides as they wished; as James put it, ‘Europeans in the native services acquire such a spirit of wandering’ that they were impossible to keep track of. One of the most prominent, the raffish Chevalier Dundrenec, changed sides no fewer than seven times in fifteen years.

  Most freelances adopted Indian ways of living, and several converted to Islam: Colonel Anthony Pohlmann, originally from Hanover, ‘lived in the style of an Indian prince, kept a seraglio, and always travelled on an elephant, attended by a guard of Mughals, all dressed alike in purple robes, and marching in file in the same way as a British Cavalry regiment’. 79bx

  A few of these men became distinguished poets in Urdu—one, whose pen name was Farasu, was the son of a German Jewish soldier of fortune, Gottlieb Koine, by a Mughal Begum; according to a contemporary critic this unlikely poet left behind him a ‘camel load of poetic works’.80 Others continued to write in their native European languages, and their letters give wonderful glimpses of the enviably anarchic and at times almost piratical life they led. As Pohlmann wrote to a freelance friend while trying to decide whether to move on from one prince to another: ‘I believe this part of the country will be given away to some rajahs, and if that takes place I am inclined to volunteer to take [service in] the Cachmeere country, where the best and handsomest ladies are … As soon as I get the order for returning I shall be with you in a jiffy, as the cold nights are setting in and I dare say you join in my opinion that a beautiful Cashmereian woman would not be a bad acquisition. I really think it would be a very agreeable amusement.’81

  It was this wildness, this resolute refusal to play by the rules, that made the mercenaries’ relationship with the Company officials so difficult and complicated. On the one hand they had much in common: they were from the same culture and had both learned to accommodate themselves to another. On the other, a Resident like James lived on his prestige at court, and could not afford to mix too intimately with the deserters, criminals and charlatans who tended to make up the freelance battalions. As James observed rather stiffly at the time to William:I have always and ever shall make it a rule to maintain the consequence and respectability of my station towards all descriptions of men; my invitations to anyone whatever of Finglas’s corps have and shall continue to be very rare indeed; not only because it is what I think I owe to myself as Resident, but to them as servants of this state which I know does not relish any close intercourse between us. I have abundant means without seeing any of them very often, of keeping the party in proper order.82

  As well as adventurers, criminals and runaways, a sizeable minority of the freelances in Finglas’s battalions, as elsewhere, were Anglo-Indians. Since Cornwallis had passed legislation banning Anglo-Indian children of British soldiers from entering the East India Company’s army between 1786 and 1795, increasing numbers of the unemployed sons of Indian mothers and British soldiers too poor to send their children ‘home’ sought out service with one of the Indian princes. The increasingly racist and dismissive attitude of the British to their mixed-race progeny was something that struck the French General Benoît de Boigne, who had been one of the first to recruit adventurers and to train them into formidable fighting units for Scindia. Sending a newly orphaned Anglo-Indian recruit to one of his officers who was then the qiladar (fort keeper) at Agra, de Boigne observed that the boy had no introduction, but ‘appears to have good will and inclination [and] you may try him … I have already sent you many of these young men, sons of European officers which can’t prevent me from observing how few [British] fathers can leave anything to their [Anglo-Indian] children at their death. There are hundreds more at Calcutta who wish to enter into the service, but have no friends to recommend them and no other means to go up [to Agra from Calcutta].’83

  One rather unusual Anglo-Indian who turned up in Hyderabad around this time looking for a commission in Finglas’s regiment was the young William Palmer. He was the Anglo-Indian son of James Kirkpatrick’s opposite number in Pune, General William Palmer, by his beloved Mughal wife Begum Fyze Baksh of Delhi. As fluent in Persian and Urdu as he was in English and French, and educated in both India and England, where he had attended Woolwich Military Academy, William was equally at home in Mughal and English culture, and was able to switch from one to the other as easily as he changed from his jacket to his jama. He was also extremely intelligent, with a flair for entrepreneurial innovation that would later blossom into a banking fortune of almost unparalleled magnitude.

  At the time, with the confrontation with the French corps looming imminently, James hardly took in Palmer’s arrival in Hyderabad, beyond noting that ‘he is dark but clever and cultivated’.84 In due course, however, William Palmer was to play a major role not only in Kirkpatrick’s story, but that of his entire extended family.

  Nizam Ali Khan finally signed the Preliminary Treaty with the East India Company on 1 September 1798. The treaty authorised the Company to provide six thousand regular East India Company troops for the Nizam’s use, in addition to the two battalions already stationed in Hyderabad. The troops were to be under British officers, but available to the Nizam both for internal peacekeeping and tax-collecting work, and for campaigns outside the state in the event of aggression by a third party. In return the Nizam was to pay the Company an annual subsidy of £41,710, and to dismiss the French corps, whose officers—along with the British deserters under them—were all to be transported to Europe as prisoners of war. Exactly how or when this was to be done, however, was not made explicit in the text of the treaty document.

  Following the signing, an uneasy month passed as the new British force of four full-strength battalions—some six thousand troops along with a train of artillery—made its way up the 150 miles from Guntur. This was the nearest Company-controlled town, where Wellesley had ordered them to collect two months earlier in readiness to seize the moment and march to Hyderabad to confront the French.85

  As rumours of the secret treaty began to leak out, Aristu Jah moved Finglas’s two English-officered battalions to camp beside the Residency compound, and so offer some protection in the event of a pre-emptive French attack—a prospect which began to look increasingly likely.

  Despite having obtained the Nizam’s signature on the treaty, James remained unconvinced that the Nizam would actually disband the French forces when the new Company battalions arrived, and began to make contingency plans in case the Corps Français put up resistance. On 26 September he wrote in cipher to William:I am prepared for difficulties being made when things come to a pinch (both by Aristu Jah and others, both from fear and from other motives) not only as to the delivering up to me of the French officers but also to my using any coercion for the purpose of bringing the delicate business to an early and completely successful issue. You may depend on it however that should this prove the case, I will be as firm and inflexible as you could wish me. I have always felt the importance of securing as many of the French officers as possible and for this reason have always thought that it was better to run the risk of resistance by drawing the whole party together at Hyderabad than by dispersing it to run the hazard of both officers and sepoys going off to Tippoo and to Scindeah where they would leave no stone unturned to be revenged on us. 86

  For this reason James got Aristu Jah to concentrate the French troops in their cantonments in Hyderabad, and to avoid sending any out on tax-collecting missions, or any other assignment.

  It was, of course, a risky strategy. If there was serious resistance, concentrating the French forces would make the task of disarming them all the more difficult.

  At this crucial moment, on 6 October 1798, with the British reinforcements just three days’ march from Hyderabad, the extraordinary news arrived in the city of Napoleon B
onaparte’s landing in Egypt, and his subsequent spectacular capture of both Alexandria and Cairo.

  Napoleon was quite clear as to his aims. In a book about Turkish warfare he had scribbled in the margin before 1788 the words, ‘Through Egypt we shall invade India, we shall re-establish the old route through Suez and cause the route by the Cape of Good Hope to be abandoned.’ Nor did he anticipate many problems: ‘the touch of a French sword is all that is needed for the framework of mercantile grandeur to collapse’.87 From Cairo he sent a letter to Tipu, answering the latter’s pleas for help and outlining his plans:You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England. I eagerly embrace this opportunity of testifying to you the desire I have of being informed by you, by the way of Muscat and Mocha, as to your political situation. I could even wish you could send some sort of intelligent person to Suez or Cairo, possessing your confidence, with whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!

  Yours &c &c

  Bonaparte88

  It was exactly the sort of imaginative coup against British interests in the East which Raymond had long been waiting for, and which came just three months too late for him. Nevertheless, it immediately changed the complexion of events in Hyderabad, galvanising the sinking spirit of the French in their cantonments, and creating great anxiety for James and the British. In Pune, too, the French mercenaries in Maratha service prepared themselves to aid their motherland; their new republican commander even sent a detailed invasion plan to Bonaparte. As one of the Pune Frenchmen, the former pastrycook Louis Bourquoin, wrote many years later:Several Frenchmen discussed this expedition and the feasibility of giving it some support … General Bonaparte, following the footsteps of Alexander would have entered India not as a devastating conqueror … but as a liberator. He would have expelled the English forever from India so that not one of them would have remained and by depriving them of the inexhaustible wealth of this vast country would have restored independence, peace, and happiness to Asia, to Europe, and to the whole world. These projects were no idle dreams. All the Princes in India were longing for French intervention, and that formidable enemy of the English, Tipu Sultan, was still alive … 89