White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Though they would have disputed the Anglophobe invective, the British in Hyderabad were under no illusions as to how easily Bonaparte’s ends could be achieved. Not only was there no effective British naval unit guarding the Malabar ports, the journey down the Red Sea was an easy one. Indeed, as James wrote to his brother William, it was the very route by which William Linnaeus Gardner had come to Hyderabad only a few months earlier: ‘The more I think of this damned Egyptian Expedition of the French the more uneasy it makes me,’ wrote James.

  I shall not be surprised at the French who will attempt anything to wreak their vengeance, coming down the Red Sea in large boats and landing at Mangalore. They can get thousands of donies [rafts] I understand at Suez and could I am told without any great effort have small gollies [transports] dragged across the isthmus. Captain Gardner who himself came down the Red Sea in a doney tells me that two frigates would block the straits Babelmandel, and that there is moreover an uninhabited island three or four miles in circumference at the mouth of it, strong by nature, and which might be rendered exceedingly so by art. It appears to me to be a material object to us under present circumstances, to get possession of that island with all possible dispatch, and to render it as strong as possible; but the stationing of some ships of war there without a moment’s loss of time appears still more indispensably requisite.90

  Three days later, on 9 October, the new British troops finally marched into Hyderabad. With them came Captain John Malcolm, who was to be James’s new Assistant, and who joined him that night for dinner at the Residency. Malcolm was one of seventeen children of a Scottish farmer. He had attracted Wellesley’s attention with a political essay he had sent to Calcutta, and which Wellesley had judged ‘very promising’. He got on well with James, but the two had very different political views. Malcolm was an enthusiastic and unrepentant supporter of Wellesley’s new ‘Forward Policy’, that believed in expanding British dominion and influence in India wherever and whenever possible. It was an approach James came to be increasingly uneasy with, and as his political views changed so did his relations with Malcolm.91

  News soon arrived of a further mishap which seriously endangered James’s fast-fading hopes of intimidating the French into peacefully laying down their weapons. The British had marched into Hyderabad in two parties, and the first regiment forded the Musi in heavy rain on the evening of the fourteenth. But the following morning when the second regiment came to the river they found that it had risen dramatically overnight. There was no way they could join the first regiment. One was on the Residency bank, the other on that of the city and the French cantonments. At the same time, James learned from his spies that Piron had finally learned the full terms of the treaty, including the clause abolishing his corps.92 If ever he was going to make a pre-emptive move on the British, now would be his moment.

  At this vital juncture, when they were at their most vulnerable, the British forces in Hyderabad found themselves split in two.

  For the next uneasy week the waters of the Musi remained too high for the artillery to be safely transported across it. Yet still the French—apparently paralysed by indecision—made no attempt to attack the divided British force.

  With no sign yet emerging from the palace that the Nizam was ever going to issue the order instructing the French to disarm, James decided to take the initiative and wrote to Aristu Jah, formally asking him to fulfil the terms of the treaty. For several days no reply was received, and no action was taken beyond the Nizam opting to leave Hyderabad and take shelter within the more defensible walls of his fortress of Golconda. On the sixteenth James wrote to his brother: ‘I wait impatiently for an answer to my last letter to the Minister, which I think you will allow is as strong as it could be. If it fails of the success I look for from it, I shall make a point of seeing him immediately, and of not leaving him until I have gained my point.’ By the nineteenth there was still no reply, and James had become convinced that the inaction was deliberate, that the news of Bonaparte’s triumphs in Egypt was leading the Nizam seriously to reconsider his decision to sign the treaty with the Company.

  Knowing that any hesitation could now be fatal, James finally went in person to Golconda on the evening of the nineteenth and gave an ultimatum to an anxious-looking Aristu Jah: if the Nizam hesitated any longer he would have no option but to order an attack on the French cantonments. He also set his spies to work, telling William in cipher: ‘I am employing every engine both to prevent the possibility of stubborn resistance and to render it ineffectual even in case of its being attempted. ’93 To this end he arranged for a small mutiny to take place in the French lines on the morning of the twenty-first, calculating that the chaos it caused would disrupt any attempt at resistance. He had other plans for subterfuge too, writing to William that ‘I shall take good care the night preceding this business that the [French] party be unable either to move one way or the other with its guns as I have provided for the bullock traces [harnesses] being all cut to pieces.’94

  The threat of violence had the effect James calculated it would have. On the following night, 20 October, at about ten o’clock, the Nizam finally issued a formal order to the troops of the French corps that he had dismissed their European officers, and that the troops had thus been released from their obedience to their superiors. If they continued to obey them, wrote the Nizam, they would be shot as traitors.

  What James had not calculated on was the speed with which Piron decided to make terms. That same evening he sent two French officers to the Residency to tell Kirkpatrick that he was ready to surrender, ‘well knowing that, though the general policy might dictate their removal from the Deccan, they [hoped they] would be individually considered to every justice and indulgence that could with propriety be extended to them’.95 With this single proviso, they meekly asked for a British officer to go to the French lines the following morning to take charge of their property. It was at this point that things began to go badly wrong.

  James was unable to get word to his spies in the French camp about the offer to surrender, so that when Malcolm turned up as arranged on the following morning, the twenty-first, expecting to oversee the collection of French arms, he found instead that the mutiny which James had arranged had indeed taken place—but in a form very different to that which James had planned. The sepoys had arrested and imprisoned their superiors just as they were about to leave the camp to surrender, and were now making attempts to defend the cantonments. Worse still, Malcolm was seized by the rebellious sepoys and taken into custody along with Piron and all the other French officers.

  For the rest of that day, James waited to see whether the sepoys would release their captives and surrender. By nightfall there was no sign that they were planning to do so. He came to a decision: the only remaining hope of a peaceful surrender would be for him to seize the initiative and frighten the sepoys into laying down their arms. This decision was confirmed when John Malcolm, accompanied by Piron and several other French officers, turned up at the Residency at midnight, having been sprung from their confinement by a small group of the sepoys, deserters from British regiments who had once, by pure good fortune, served under Malcolm and had remained fond of their former officer.

  Before first light on the twenty-second, the half of the British force on the French side of the Musi surrounded the French cantonments, arranging their guns on the ridge above the French lines, not far from Raymond’s tomb. The other half of the British force, that on the Residency side, brought up their guns to what Malcolm described as ‘a strong post, about four hundred yards in the rear of Monsieur Piron’s camp, between which and him there was the River Moussy, which could only be forded by infantry; the guns could however play from the bank of the river with excellent effect, on the principal [French] magazine, and right of the camp’.96

  When dawn broke, the French corps woke up to find themselves completely surrounded. At nine o’clock James offered the mutineers payment of all money owing to them, and employment in Fi
nglas’s corps if they would now surrender. They had ‘one quarter of an hour to stack their arms and march off to a cowle or protection flag, which was pitched by one of the Nizam’s principal officers, about half a mile to the right of the camp. If they did not comply with the terms of the summons, they were immediately to be attacked.’97 For thirty minutes the sepoys remained undecided. Two thousand cavalry massed under Malcolm on the right flank; five hundred more waited on the right. In the centre were four thousand infantry. There was complete silence. Then, just after 9.30, to James’s great relief, the sepoys finally sent out word that they accepted the terms.

  The British cavalry rode in quickly and took possession of the magazine, storehouses, powder mills, gun foundries and cannon, while the French sepoys fled to the flag under which they were to surrender themselves: ‘at once a glorious and piteous sight’, thought James.98 Within a few hours, the largest French force in India, more than sixteen thousand men strong, was disarmed by a force of less than a third that number. Not a single shot had been fired, or a single life lost.

  James watched the soldiers laying down their arms all afternoon by telescope from the roof of the Residency. That evening, in a state of mixed exhaustion and elation, he wrote to William that ‘I am too much fagged to write you a long letter … ’, but he wanted William to know that the ‘turning adrift of thousands of Raymond’s troops, all of which I saw this evening from the roof of my house with my spy glasses as plain as if I had been on the spot, was the finest sight I ever saw in my life’.

  In a postscript written two hours later, there came even better news: had William heard yet the report that had just arrived from Bombay, ‘of Admiral Nelson’s glorious naval action’? In the Battle of the Nile, Nelson had sunk almost the entire French fleet in Aboukir Bay, wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. It was a quite amazing turn of events. For two weeks it had suddenly looked quite possible that India was going to become a French colony. Now, equally suddenly, that threat was extinguished. As James wrote to Calcutta, it was extraordinary to think that ‘only three days ago things wore a very dismal appearance’.99

  In the weeks that followed, Wellesley wrote to congratulate James, formally appointing him Resident in his brother’s place, and recommending him to London for a ‘mark of Royal Favour’, in other words a baronetcy. Wellesley was delighted—as well he should have been, as the Company granted him £500 a year for twenty years as a reward for what James had done: ‘I am happy to express my entire approbation of the judgement, firmness and discretion you have manifested,’ he wrote to James. In the meantime Wellesley made James an honorary ADC, then an almost unique honour.

  The news of this arrived on Christmas Day 1798, and James wrote back to William, ‘pray make my most grateful acknowledgement to my Noble Patron and Master [Wellesley] for this new mark of approbation he has been pleased to confer on me, and which I assure you I am not a little proud of’.100

  It was about this time, sometime in December 1798, that something of even greater significance to James took place, an event that would in due course utterly change the course of his life, as well as completely undermine his newly forged relationship with Wellesley.

  Two years earlier, while Aristu Jah was still in captivity in Pune and Mir Alam had taken over the management of the Nizam’s British affairs, the Mir had appointed as bakshi or paymaster of the British detachment in Hyderabad an elderly Persian cousin of his. This was Bâqar Ali Khan, titled Akil ud-Daula, the Wisest of the State. The old man was a little deaf and short-sighted, but a good-natured and jovial figure who quickly became popular with the British officers in Hyderabad. William Kirkpatrick and he had become great friends, and before he left Hyderabad William had written a pen portrait of him to a friend in Masulipatam:This gentleman is deservedly a great favourite with all the officers; on which account, as well as because he is a relation of Meer Allum, and a very hearty friend of our nation, I beg you to pay him every attention in your power. You will find him a very jolly conversable man; and if you have any relish for Persian poetry a mighty pleasant companion since he has all the anacreontic tribe at his finger ends. He drinks (under the rose) three glasses of wine after dinner, provided there be no black-visaged lookers on: and among the ladies is a very gallant fellow. In short, though you have visited the Court of Lucknow, I think you will allow when acquainted with him, that his equal is rarely to be met with among the Asiatics.101

  Bâqar Ali Khan had one daughter, a young widow named Sharaf un-Nissa, who had—unusually—returned to the family deorhi with her two teenage daughters after the death of her husband Mehdi Yar Khan.102 Like her father, Sharaf un-Nissa appears to have been very well disposed towards the British, and used to invite the wives of the Company officers to visit her in her zenana. They in turn reported that she was ‘unusually free of the prejudices of her sect’.103

  Although Bâqar Ali was only the maternal grandfather of Sharaf un-Nissa’s two daughters, and so under no legal obligation to be responsible for them, the old man had generously taken upon himself the business of arranging his granddaughters’ marriages: as always an expensive business in India.by By the end of 1798 Bâqar Ali Khan had negotiated marriages for both girls with members of the Hyderabad nobility, and the wedding ceremony of the elder of the two, Nazir un-Nissa, was celebrated sometime in December. James attended the marriage party.

  His own account of it is very brief and gives little away. Indeed he only mentions it to William in an aside when he writes that Bâqar’s wife, Durdanah Begum, had asked for a loan to help meet the expense of the wedding, and that, in view of the family’s loyalty to the British, James had ‘sent the sum requested as a loan, as a marriage portion for the Begum’s granddaughter—say, did I do wrong?’104

  But James almost certainly had other things in his mind when he arrived at the celebrations. For, according to Sharaf un-Nissa, he had already heard about the extraordinary beauty of her newly betrothed younger daughter, Khair un-Nissa, from one of the Company officers’ wives who had met her in her mother’s zenana. Forty years later, as an old woman of eighty, Sharaf un-Nissa remembered that

  my father was the bakshi appointed by the Nizam’s government to attend the English Gentlemen. In consequence of the appointment which he held, several of the English Gentlemen were in the habit of coming to entertainments at his house. On one occasion an entertainmentwas given to Colonel Dallas and about twenty gentlemen and their ladies came to my father’s house. Colonel Dallas’s lady came to the women’s zenana apartments, and visited us ladies. She greatly admired my daughter; and said she reminded her strongly of her own sister. After this on her return to her own house she praised the beauty of my daughter to Hushmut Jung Bahadur [James Kirkpatrick]. After this Colonel Kirkpatrick sought out my daughter. 105

  Only one contemporary picture of Khair un-Nissa survives, and it dates from 1806, a full eight years after the entertainment Bâqar Ali Khan gave for Colonel Dallas. Yet even then, when she was aged about twenty, Khair un-Nissa still looks little more than a child: a graceful, delicate, shy creature, with porcelain skin, an oval face and wide-open, dark brown eyes. Her eyebrows are long and curved, and she has a full, timidly expressive mouth that is about to break into a smile; just below it, there lies the tiny blemish that is the mark of real beauty: a tiny red freckle, slightly off-centre, immediately above the point of her chin. Yet there is a strength amid the look of overwhelming innocence, a wilfulness in the set of the lips and the darkness of the eyes that might be interpreted as defiance in a less serene face.

  A later Hyderabadi source reveals that it was at the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa that Khair un-Nissa first saw James Kirkpatrick, from behind a curtain:Accidentally the Resident and [Bâqar Ali Khan’s younger granddaughter] the Begum [Khair un-Nissa] saw one another and they immediately fell deeply in love … It is related by elderly persons that Mr Kirkpatrick was very handsome and [Khair un-Nissa] was renowned throughout the Deccan for her
beauty and comeliness … on account of differences in religion marriage was out of the question. According to Mohamadan law a Mohamadan man can marry a Christian woman but a Mohamadan woman cannot be given in marriage to a Christian. [Moreover Khair un-Nissa was already engaged to someone else.] When the story of their amours became public, a general sensation took.

  The relations of the Begum were naturally very furious and for a time the life of the lovers was in danger, but their passion for one another was not of a character as could be restrained by fear or disappointment. Every obstacle thrown in their way only seemed to make it stronger & stronger … 106

  IV

  The ancient Persian town of Shushtar lies on the borders of modern-day Iran and Iraq, in the badlands to the far south-west of the country. Flanked on one side by the marshes leading down to the River Tigris and on the other by the dry and rocky Zagros mountains, Shushtar clings to the edge of a narrow plateau, just below the confluence of the Karun River with one of its tributaries.

  The town was of great importance during the classical period. The Roman Emperor Valerian, enslaved by the Persian Emperor Shahpur I after being defeated in AD 260, spent the rest of his life in captivity in Shushtar, labouring at the construction of a colossal dam. The dam still stands; but the region has been in decline since then, and its once-rich agricultural land has long been exhausted. Yet for all its poverty, Shushtar somehow managed to retain its high culture. For generations the town exported its highly educated clan of black-turbaned Sayyids across the Shi’ite world, from Kerbala to Lucknow and Hyderabad. They distinguished themselves by their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, yunani medicine and Shi’a jurisprudence, as well as other more obscure forms of esoteric learning. They were also renowned for their talents as poets and calligraphers.1