White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Around 1730, Sayyid Reza, a young Shushtari mujtahidbz left Shushtar to seek his fortune in the Mughal Empire. The road east was a well-worn route: the mosque in Shushtar, one of the oldest in Persia, dating back to AD 868, was constructed in shisham wood brought from India by medieval Shushtari traders. In the centuries following those first trading contacts, generations of Persians had been welcomed to the various Muslim courts of India, where they were honoured as bearers of high culture and inheritors of a sublime literary tradition.ca

  Following in the footsteps of this long succession of émigré Persian scholars, soldiers and confidence tricksters, Sayyid Reza found his way to Delhi. There he took service in the household of the Prime Minister of the Mughal Emperor, another Persian exile named Abul Mansur Khan Khorasani, who later took the title Safdar Jung, and whose magnificent tomb is the last great Mughal monument in Delhi.

  For two decades Sayyid Reza worked in the palaces of the Mughal capital; but as the Empire began to shatter and fragment under a succession of incompetent emperors, and as Delhi slowly descended into chaos, Sayyid Reza decided to return home to Shushtar. Because the land route by Kabul and Kandahar was blocked by fighting, he made the decision to head south to the Deccan, from where he hoped to catch a ship up the Gulf to Persia. But by chance, in Hyderabad, he met Nizam ul-Mulk, the father of Nizam Ali Khan. The Nizam was impressed by Sayyid Reza’s learning and integrity, and persuaded him to stay on in India under his patronage. Sayyid Reza settled in Hyderabad, in Irani Gulli, a small colony of Persian exiles not far from the Char Minar, tucked in behind the narrow lanes of the Burkha Bazaar. There his wife gave birth to a son, Abul Qasim, known to history by his later title, Mir Alam.

  In his old age Sayyid Reza gave up worldly attachments and dedicated his life to prayer and fasting. According to his nephew, the old man ‘refused all public office: however much Nizam ul-Mulk urged him to accept a position in the Hyderabad government, even the post of Chief Judge, he turned the offer down. Some fifteen or sixteen years before his death, the desire for retreat became dominant in his character, and he increasingly cut himself off from other people. He spent his days alone in his prayer room, donned an ascetic’s cloak and spent his life in worship, seeking the True God.’2 He died in 1780, and was buried in the sanctified burial ground of Daira Mir Momin, beside the tomb of the great Shi’a saint Shah Chirag.

  It was during the forty days of mourning for Sayyid Reza that the young Mir Alam met Aristu Jah for the first time. Aristu Jah was already in his fifties and the most powerful official in Hyderabad; Mir Alam was in his late twenties, the penniless but talented son of a respected divine. The Minister had come in person on the third day of mourning to attend the soyem ceremony at the house of Sayyid Reza, and when he took the young man aside and confirmed him in possession of his father’s estates, Mir Alam replied with a fine Persian couplet praising the wisdom of the Minister. Aristu Jah, who had both a discerning eye for talent and a great love of poetry, realised that Mir Alam was a youth of unusual promise, and invited him to attend his durbar. Before long, he had appointed him his Private Secretary, and given him the job of preparing his correspondence and journals.3

  Physically, Mir Alam was a slight youth, and seemed especially so when he stood beside Aristu Jah, whose remarkable height and bulk emphasised his new Secretary’s lean and wiry build. Mir Alam had a serious, intelligent face, with a long, straight nose and a thin, finely waxed moustache. His complexion was strikingly fair, a legacy of his Persian ancestry; but it was his watchful, alert expression that people always remarked upon. It was as if he were constantly vigilant, awake for an opening or an opportunity, and few Europeans who met him failed to come to the conclusion that here was an unusually clever and ambitious young man. James Kirkpatrick was very struck by him on their first meeting, and wrote to Wellesley that ‘as a scholar he stands unrivalled, and as a man of business he would have few equals … his stile is remarkable for its strength and perspicuity, as well as elegance, and his pen is consequently always employed when state papers requiring extraordinary care and attention are called for’.4

  Muslim chroniclers, by contrast, singled out Mir Alam’s qualities of ferasat, which is sometimes translated as intuition but which has far greater resonance in the Persian, referring to that highly developed sensitivity to body language that almost amounts to mind-reading, and which was regarded as an essential quality for a Muslim courtier. It is still an admired feature in the social and political life of the Muslim East.5

  Despite Mir Alam’s intuition, intelligence and abilities, however, there always seemed to be a strange absence of feeling in the man, as if there were a chilling numbness somewhere in his heart. As the Mir grew older and increasingly powerful, this potential for callousness became more marked. James’s Assistant Henry Russell, who later got to know him well, had no doubts about the Mir’s qualities, writing of his ‘extraordinary capabilities’. But he was also under no illusions about his unusual ruthlessness, describing him as ‘utterly deficient in qualities of the heart’, and ‘strangely without emotions … He neither remembers his obligations, nor forgets his adversaries. Though he always craves to be popular and expects gratitude from others, he is devoid of any sympathy or compassion towards his fellow beings, be it individually, or collectively.’6

  Mir Alam was, nevertheless, a generous patron to his friends and family, and when the news of his growing power and success in Hyderabad reached his relations in Shushtar, several of them decided to emigrate from Iran to Hyderabad and seek service there on his staff. Among these was his first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan, the son of Sayyid Reza’s elder sister, who was around twenty years older than Mir Alam. Bâqar Ali was generously received by Mir Alam, made a mansabdar,cb and married to a Hyderabadi beauty named Durdanah Begum, the daughter of one of the city’s most powerful families.7 In due course two children were born of the marriage, a boy, Mahmud Ali Khan, and a girl, Sharaf un-Nissa, the mother of Khair un-Nissa.

  When in 1787 Aristu Jah sent his Secretary on an important embassy to Calcutta, Bâqar Ali accompanied Mir Alam to the Company’s Bengal headquarters along with a large escort of cavalry, seven caparisoned war elephants and seventy camels laden with gifts and supplies. In Calcutta, the embassy was received by Lord Cornwallis, and Mir Alam struck up an enduring friendship with the Governor General, who was impressed by his ‘straightforward good sense and intuitive understanding, as well as by his easy eloquence’. At their parting, Cornwallis presented the Mir with a diamond-encrusted walking stick.8

  Mir Alam and his cousin stayed three years in Calcutta, learning about the English and making a wide variety of contacts among the officials and Orientalists of the city. They became especially friendly with Neil Edmonstone, later to become Wellesley’s Private Secretary and the head of the Company’s Intelligence Service, whom they regarded, somewhat unexpectedly, as ‘a good musician and mathematician’.9 They were particularly impressed by the military arsenals they saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand rifles hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’10 It was a visit that made a profound impression on Mir Alam. After what he had seen, he remained convinced throughout his career that the British were effectively invincible in India, and that the best interests of the Hyderabad state—and of Mir Alam—lay in allying with them as strongly and as closely as possible.

  While Mir Alam and Bâqar Ali were in Calcutta, they heard a rumour that another member of their clan had just arrived from Persia, aboard an English vessel. Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari, another first cousin of Mir Alam, and the son of one of Sayyid Reza’s brothers, had like Bâqar Ali Khan made the journey from Persia with a view to hitching his career to that of Mir Alam; unlike his cousin Bâqar Ali, however, he left a detailed and entertaining account of his Indian travels and impressions, the Tuhfat al-’Alam, or ‘Gift to the World’:

 
‘I had just arrived in India,’ he wrote, and as soon as he heard of this, Mir Alam spent two or three days inquiring of my whereabouts and sought me out. While he was in the city I spent most of my time in his company: his brotherly kindness made up for the dreadfulness of being in India … My cousin had become one of the great amirs of the Deccan, resorted to by petitioners from all over the Arab and Persian world. However pressing this crowd, he never became bad-tempered, and always tried to solve their problems. He is particularly remarkable for his resolution and quick-thinking, which cuts through difficulties like a sword.11

  Shushtari’s Tuhfat al-’Alam is one of the most fascinating texts to survive from the period: a strikingly immediate and graphic account of late-eighteenth-century India as perceived by a disdainful, fastidious and refined émigré intellectual—a sort of eighteenth-century Persian version of V.S. Naipaul. Written in 1802, when Shushtari was under house arrest in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of James Kirkpatrick’s liaison with Khair un-Nissa, and the entire Shushtari clan was in deep disgrace, it gives a highly jaundiced account of India, which Abdul Lateef regards with all the hauteur that high Persian culture was capable of: ‘Since I came to this country, I cannot begin to recount all that has happened to me by way of suffering, deception and diseases, with no one intelligent to talk to … Alas, alas, how could I know that matters would come to this present sorry state—broken and stuck in the hellish climate of Hyderabad!’

  In this spirit he compares his book to ‘the flutterings of a uselessly crying bird in the dark cage of India’, remarking that ‘to survive in Hyderabad you need four things: plenty of gold, endless hypocrisy, boundless envy, and the ability to put up with parvenu idol-worshippers who undermine governments and overthrow old families’. Yet for all its sectarian animosity and intellectual arrogance, the Tuhfat is a perceptive and observant account, which brings the intrigue and faction-ridden world of courtly Hyderabad into sharper focus than any other surviving text.

  It also, more pointedly, provides the best source for how Khair un-Nissa’s wider family felt about her affair with James Kirkpatrick.

  Abdul Lateef’s visit to the subcontinent started badly. On arrival in India, the easily-disgusted Persian recorded his horror at the sights that greeted him at Masulipatam, his first port of call. Welcomed by a group of Iranian Qizilbashcc traders who lived there, he remarks that he was ‘shocked to see men and women naked apart from an exiguous cache-sex mixing in the streets and markets, as well as out in the country, like beasts or insects. I asked my host “What on earth is this?” “Just the locals,” he replied, “They’re all like that!” It was my first step in India, but already I regretted coming and reproached myself.’12

  Calcutta Shushtari liked better. He admired the Company merchants’ beautifully whitewashed villas, some of them ‘painted and coloured like marble’. Appalled by the dirt of Masulipatam, he was especially appreciative of Calcutta’s exceptional cleanliness: ‘Seven hundred pairs of oxen and carts are appointed by the Company to take rubbish daily from streets and markets out of the city and tip it into the river,’ he noted appreciatively.

  Shushtari’s account is throughout surprisingly Anglophile, as he takes an interest in European science and admires the technological achievements of the British: the Tuhfat discusses such diverse subjects as polar exploration, gravity, magnetism, the scientific comparisons then being made between men and monkeys, and even sceptical atheism, which he touches on but prefers not to discuss in detail, regarding it as ‘inappropriate for this book’.13 He is also impressed by the fact that the British at this period were still profoundly respectful to Indian men of learning:They treat the white-beard elders and old-established families, both Muslim and Hindu, courteously and equably, respecting the religious customs of the country and as well the scholars, sayyids, sheikhs and dervishes they come across … More remarkable still is the fact that they themselves take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of both the Muslims and the Hindus, mixing with the people; in Muharram they even enter the tazia-khane mourning-halls though they do not join in the mourning [of the death of Mohammed’s grandson Hussain at the Battle of Kerbala in AD 680]. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.14

  Deferential and enquiring the British might have been, but according to Abdul Lateef they had a lot to learn from the Persians in terms of personal hygiene, as well as in matters of high culture. Shushtari was particularlyhorrified by what the British did to their hair, ‘shaving their beards, twisting their hair into pony-tails, and worst of all, using a white powder to make their hair look white.’ Not content with these enormities, ‘neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state’.15cd

  Shushtari was of the opinion that European women were particularly bizarre, immoral and headstrong creatures: ‘most European women have no body-hair,’ he notes,and even if it does occur, it is wine-coloured, soft and extremely fine … By reason of women going unveiled and the mixed education of boys and girls in one school-house, it is quite the thing to fall in love. I have heard that well-born girls sometimes fall in love with low-born youths and are covered in scandal which neither threats nor punishment can control, so their fathers are obliged to drive them out of the house; the girl follows her whims, and mingles with whom she fancies. The streets and markets of London are full of innumerable such well-bred girls sitting on the pavements. Brothels are advertised, with pictures of prostitutes hung at the door, and the price of one night is written up with all the furnishings required for revelry … 16

  This, believes Shushtari, is largely the fault of the Americans; indeed Abdul Lateef must go down in history as the first Muslim writer to take up cudgels against the United States, which, 180 years ahead of his time, he already regards as the Great Satan:No man [in the West] can prevent his wife from mixing with strange men … but it was only after the conquest of America that the disgraceful habit of allowing women to sit unveiled in public became common in France and then spread to the rest of Europe. Similarly, tobacco, the pox and burning venereal diseases were all unknown in the world five years ago, except in America, and the problem spread to the rest of the world from there.

  India is, however, fully a match even for the horrors of America. There are many things that disgust Shushtari about the subcontinent, but his real venom is reserved for the Muslims of India who have, as he sees it ‘gone native’, and by intermarrying with Hindus—or Muslim converts from Hinduism—assimilated not just their customs but their very un-Islamic morality: ‘They accept water from the hands of Hindus, use the oil they buy from them, eat their cooked foods—whereas they flee from all contact with the English, who at least in appearance are People of the Book and who respect religion and the law.’17

  The only thing that appalls Abdul Lateef Shushtari more than the men in India is the behaviour of the women, Hindu and Muslim alike, who in his eyes have no idea about proper modesty, and take every imaginable liberty. He discusses at some length the case of Muni Begum, who was the effective ruler of the state of Murshidabad in Bengal: ‘she is neither the mother of the present ruler, nor even from a good family, but was a singer kept by Ja’far [Ali Khan, the ruler of Bengal] who became completely infatuated with her and the Supreme Giver opened the doors of good fortune for her’.

  Shushtari’s surprise at the power of women in late Mughal India is very significant. Islam has never been monolithic and has always adapted itself to its social and geographical circumstances. The Hindu attitude to women, to their place in society, to their clothing and to their sexuality has always been radically different from that of Middle Eastern Islam. But over centuries of Hindu—Muslim co-existence in India, much mutual exchange of ideas and customs took place between the two cohabiting cultures, so that while Hinduism took on some Islamic social features—such as the veil worn by upper-caste Rajput women in public—Indian Islam also adapted itself to its Hindu environment, a process accelerated by the frequenc
y with which Indian Muslim rulers tended to marry Hindu brides.

  As this happened the cultural gap between the court culture of Mughal India and Safavid Iran widened ever larger. Women in Iran were more confined and less able to act in the public sphere than in India where, thanks to the influence of Hinduism, notions of purdah, and ideas about the seclusion and protection of women, were always less deeply entrenched and less central to notions of male honour.18 As a result, Muslim women in India have always played a more prominent role in politics than their sisters in the Middle East. Indian society, both Hindu and Muslim, was certainly very patriarchal and hierarchical; yet there are nevertheless several cases of very powerful Indian Muslim queens: Razia Sultana in thirteenth-century Delhi; or Chand Bibi and Dilshad Agha, the two warrior queens of sixteenth-century Bijapur, the first of whom was famous for her horsewomanship, while the latter was renowned for her prowess as an artillerywoman and an archer, personally shooting in the eye from atop her citadel Safdar Khan who had the temerity to attack her kingdom.19ce