Now that the Corps Français de Raymond had been disarmed in Hyderabad, and the news had come through of the defeat of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, Wellesley began making detailed logistical preparations for a major assault on Tipu’s well-fortified river-island capital of Seringapatam. He wrote personally to Tipu in a vein of deepest sarcasm, breaking the news to him of Nelson’s devastating victory at the Battle of the Nile: ‘Confident from the union and attachment subsisting between us that this intelligence will afford you the deepest satisfaction, I could not deny myself the pleasure of communicating it.’39 Meanwhile he worked late into the night preparing the logistics for Tipu’s destruction.
On 3 February 1799, everything was in place and General Harris, the Commander in Chief, was ordered to mobilise and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’.40 A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his British allies, as had been agreed in the Preliminary Treaty he had signed five months earlier.
Bâqar Ali Khan, as bakshi to the British troops in Hyderabad, had to go with the army and act as liaison between the British and the Hyderabadis. Mir Alam came too, as overall commander of the large contingent of Hyderabad troops, though as his younger brother, Sayyid Zein ul-Abidin Shushtari, was Tipu’s Private Secretary and a senior Mysore courtier,co he must have felt a certain ambivalence about the campaign.41
More ambivalent still must have been the attitude of the (at least) four thousand Hyderabadi infantry soldiers who had formerly been sepoys of Raymond’s corps until they were reassigned to British-officered regiments after the French capitulation. Ironically, they were now under the direct command of James Kirkpatrick’s Assistant Captain John Malcolm, who had played such a major role in their surrender only four months earlier.42
Realising that his situation was now very serious, Tipu wrote a desperate plea to the Nizam warning him that the English ‘intended extirpating all Mussulmans and establishing Hat Wearerscp in their place’, and arguing that the Nizam and he, fellow Muslims, should join together to resist the Company; but it was too late.43
On 19 February, the six East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys under John Malcolm, and over ten thousand Hyderabadi cavalry under the command of Mir Alam, joined up with General Harris’s huge Company army, which had marched up from Vellore. On 5 March, with some thirty thousand sheep, huge stocks of grain and a hundred thousand carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.44 In their wake were at least a hundred thousand camp followers. Wellesley, who had moved south to Madras to see the army off, believed it to be ‘the finest which ever took the field in India’; but it was a huge and unwieldy force, and it trundled towards Seringapatam at the agonisingly slow place of five miles a day, stripping the country bare ‘of every article of subsistence the country can afford’, like some vast cloud of locusts.45
Whatever the new war might mean for Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa was quite clear about the opportunities it presented her in her efforts to outflank her father on the issue of the unsatisfactory marriage which had been arranged for her younger daughter. At Nazir un-Nissa’s wedding, James Kirkpatrick had seen Khair un-Nissa, and they had apparently made a deep impression on each other. Now the women of the zenana seem to have decided that Kirkpatrick was the answer to their problem, and to have persuaded themselves that he was a far more appropriate suitor for the girl than the unpopular son of Ahmed Ali Khan.
With this in mind, according to James, ‘every inducement had been held out to him by the females of the family: the young lady had been shown to him when she was asleep, his portrait had been given to her by her mother, or grandmother, and she had been encouraged in the partiality which she expressed for the original from a view of the portrait, that he had been perpetually importuned with messages from the ladies to visit at the house of the Khan, and on an occasion of his indisposition he had received daily messages from the young lady herself to inquire after his health—[indeed] that occasions were even afforded her of seeing him from behind a curtain, and that latterly she was permitted in that situation to converse with him. In conclusion they were purposely brought together at night in order that the ultimate connection might take place.’ For this to happen, according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Bowser, ‘the ladies of Bauker’s family paid a visit of two days to those of the Resident’.46
About Khair un-Nissa’s motives there is little dispute: James Kirkpatrick certainly believed that the girl had fallen in love with him, and he may have been right: certainly nothing in her behaviour contradicts this view. To his brother William, James later wrote that ‘[among] all the ranks and descriptions of people here, the story of B[âqar Ali Khan]’s grand daughter’s long cherished partiality for me [is] perfectly known’. James’s belief was echoed by Bowser in the Clive Report: he stated under oath that ‘it is said that the lady fell in love with the Resident’.47 James also claimed that Khair un-Nissa had threatened to take poison unless he helped her escape from a ‘hateful marriage’.48
Exactly why Sharaf un-Nissa and her mother, Durdanah Begum, were so keen on the match is, however, a much more difficult question to answer. It could of course have been a mother’s sympathy with her lovelorn daughter, and a wish to save her from unhappiness and possible suicide. But Khair un-Nissa was a descendant of the Prophet, a Sayyida, and so part of a strictly endogamous clan who never married their women to non-Sayyids, and whose prestige and notions of honour depended largely on this stricture being rigorously observed. Moreover, there was no tradition of love marriages in eighteenth-century Indian society— indeed at that period it was a fairly novel concept even among aristocratic families in the West—and yet it is clear that Sharaf un-Nissa not only gave her assent to Khair un-Nissa’s attempt to seduce Kirkpatrick, she and Durdanah Begum went out of their way to help her achieve it; indeed if James is to be believed, the two women more or less pushed the girl into his bed. Why would they do this?
The most likely explanation is that they realised that such a connection would be hugely advantageous to their family. James was not only a powerful British diplomat; since February 1798 he had also been an important Hyderabadi nobleman, with a series of titles given to him by the Nizam—Mutamin ul-Mulk, Hushmat Jung (‘Glorious in Battle’), Nawab Fakhr ud-Dowlah Bahadur—and an elevated place in the Nizam’s durbar.
Other Indian women who had married British Residents at this time had found that marriage brought them prestige, wealth and rank. James’s opposite number at the Maratha court, General William Palmer, for example, was married to a Delhi begum named Fyze Baksh who would later become Khair un-Nissa’s best friend. Fyze’s father was an Iranian immigrant and a captain of cavalry who had moved from Delhi, where Fyze was born, to Lucknow. On her marriage to William Palmer, she was formally adopted by the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam and loaded with titles: the spectacular gilt sanad awarding her the title Sahib Begum survives in the India Office Library, and there can be little doubt that it represented a considerable jump in rank for a woman who was from a respectably aristocratic but hardly imperial background.49
An even more dramatic transformation in status was experienced by General Sir David Ochterlony’s senior bibi, Mubarak Begum. Though Ochterlony is reputed to have had thirteen wives, one of these, a former Brahmin slave girl from Pune who converted to Islam and is referred to in his will as ‘Beebee Mahruttun Moobaruck ul Nissa Begume, alias Begum Ochterlony, the mother of my younger children’,50 took clear precedence over the others.51
‘Generalee Begum’, as she was also known, occasionally appears in contemporary letters, where she is frequently accused of giving herself airs. She offended the British by calling herself ‘Lady Ochterlony’—in one letter it is recorded that ‘Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca’—and also offended the Mugha
ls by awarding herself the title Qudsia Begum, previously that of the Emperor’s mother.52cq Much younger than Ochterlony, she certainly appears to have had the upper hand in her relationship with the old General, and one observer remarked that Ochterlony’s mistress ‘is the mistress now of everyone within the walls’.53
Mubarak Begum ultimately overplayed her hand: after Ochterlony’s death she inherited Mubarak Bagh, the Anglo-Mughal garden tomb he had built in the north of the city, and she used part of her considerable inheritance to build a mosque and a haveli for herself at Hauz Qazi in the old city of Delhi.54 But her profound personal unpopularity, combined with her dancing-girl background, meant that no Mughal gentleman would ever be seen using her structure. It is still, to this day, referred to in the old city as the ‘Rundi-ki-Masjid’, or Prostitute’s Mosque.cr
Mubarak Begum’s extreme social and political ambitions led to her nemesis. But her story is nevertheless a graphic illustration of quite how powerful a woman could become by being the wife or even the senior concubine of a British Resident. Sharaf un-Nissa was a widow whose father was pressuring her to marry her daughter to a man neither mother nor daughter thought suitable. Kirkpatrick clearly represented a very eligible escape route.
Yet there is one further possible explanation for Sharaf un-Nissa’s willingness to indulge her daughter’s wishes. Sharaf un-Nissa’s great friend was Farzand Begum, the daughter-in-law of Aristu Jah, and the moving force in the Prime Minister’s zenana.cs Over and over again in the records, we hear of Sharaf un-Nissa visiting Farzand Begum, and Sharaf un-Nissa later insisted that Farzand Begum had encouraged her to marry Khair un-Nissa to the British Resident.55 Farzand Begum seems to have been involved in encouraging the liaison from the outset, for it was later reported that Aristu Jah had supervised it from its commencement, and in Mughal society the only way he could have done this would have been through the women in his zenana.56 It is also unclear whether Aristu Jah or Farzand Begum offered Sharaf un-Nissa any inducements to make her daughter available to Kirkpatrick; but it is known for sure that following the marriage Sharaf un-Nissa was indeed granted lucrative jagirs (estates) of fifty thousand rupees per annum by the Nizam.57
If this was part of a deal, a quid pro quo for giving Khair un-Nissa to the British Resident, it would follow that the affair between Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa was to some extent planned—or at least manipulated—by Aristu Jah, a tactician of genius who realised how far he could use the relationship for his political advantage. As later events would show, Aristu Jah also clearly hoped that if he played his cards carefully, the relationship might be the weapon he had been looking for to revenge himself on his great rival, Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin once removed, Mir Alam. If this is the correct interpretation—and it was certainly what Mir Alam later believed to be the case58-then it would follow that Khair un-Nissa was made available to Kirkpatrick as what (in the parlance of modern spy novels) is known as a ‘honey trap’.
If this is the case, how should we judge Sharaf un-Nissa’s actions? Was she effectively prostituting her daughter for her own ends and ambitions? However we may regard it today, this is certainly not how the women of the family would have looked at it themselves. Sexuality was a key asset and weapon for women in Mughal India, and subtly finding a way of making the women of a family available to powerful rulers and officials was a recognised means of achieving advancement and preferment at court and in society.59 All Sharaf un-Nissa was doing was adapting this ancient tradition to the new semi-colonial environment—and here lay her problem.
Even with the most Mughalised British official, there were big differences between setting up a marriage alliance with a British Resident, and doing the same with a senior Mughal courtier, as the women would in due course discover. What might be regarded as normal courtly behaviour in a Mughal environment could be misconstrued by Europeans as procurement or pimping; moreover British Residents moved quickly from court to court before, in most cases, returning home to Britain. Alliances that in a Mughal environment would be permanent often became dangerously short-term in a colonial one. At first Sharaf un-Nissa’s strategy to gain influence through marrying her daughter to the British Resident seemed to work. Only time would reveal the scale of the difficulties involved in trying to cross such sensitive cultural frontiers.
In the end, motives are always difficult to establish. But what is certain is that with Bâqar Ali Khan away on campaign with the army, Sharaf un-Nissa was free to follow her own plan to bring her daughter and the British Resident together. She did not hesitate to take full and immediate advantage of that opportunity. According to Mir Alam’s later testimony, it was shortly after he and Bâqar Ali ‘took the field against Tippoo Sultaun [that] Kirkpatrick debauched this girl’.60
It was several months before James admitted to his elder brother that he was sleeping with Khair un-Nissa. Indeed he only did so explicitly long after the scandal had broken and William had written to him repeatedly demanding to know exactly what truth lay behind the ever more outrageous rumours emanating from Hyderabad.
The two brothers had lived closely together in Hyderabad, and each knew that the other was involved in a long-term relationship with at least one Indian woman. Some time after his wife Maria’s return to England, William had re-established his relationship with Dhoolaury Bibi, by whom he had earlier fathered two children, Robert and Cecilia, both of whom were now teenagers and living with the Handsome Colonel in Kent. Dhoolaury Bibi had joined William in Hyderabad when he became Resident, and after William had left to recover his health at the Cape, James had written to his brother assuring him that his mistress was well and happy, and that he was looking after her. After William returned to India, Dhoolaury Bibi followed him to Calcutta, and was still living there, with her son Robert, twelve years later when she received a substantial legacy in William’s will.61 It seems to have been a serious and loving relationship; it was certainly longstanding: as their first child, Robert, was born in 1777, the two appear to have lived together for at least twenty-three years, except for the brief interlude between 1785, when William married Maria Pawson, and 1788, when Maria left India to return to England.
James, meanwhile, was also living with at least one Indian girl, by whom he had had a son. Neither her name nor that of the child has survived, and all that is known of the girl is that she was significantly darker-skinned than Khair un-Nissa, and so was perhaps of Tamil or Telugu origin.62 James seems to have treated the relationship in a rather offhand manner: there are explicit references in the Clive Report—and in some of the Indian sources—to James’s women in the plural,63 and stories of his amorous adventures at this period reached even Arthur Wellesley in Seringapatam three hundred miles away: ‘About three years ago he is supposed to have debauched a young Mogul woman by pretending to be a Persian from Iran,’ the future Duke of Wellington reported to his brother Lord Wellesley, ‘[and it is said] that he has her now in his house.’64 He also reported that Mir Alam had told him that this sort of adventure was far from unusual for Kirkpatrick, and that if he were to come to Hyderabad ‘he would hear enough to make him ashamed that such a man was an Englishman’—much the same sort of thing as had long been said of James’s oversexed father, the Handsome Colonel.65
After Khair un-Nissa appeared on the scene the ‘dark girl’—and any other women then living in the Resident’s zenana—simply disappear from James’s letters, and the ‘dark girl’ is referred to only once, as ‘my old inmate’. 66 It is possible that she had died; certainly she received no legacy or any mention at all in James’s will. James’s apparent indifference to the girl seems to have extended to her child. Even the Handsome Colonel, never one to take the business of parenting too seriously, was a little shocked by James’s apparent lack of interest in his ‘Hindustani boy’, and wrote to admonish him, saying that ‘in his opinion there is no difference in the duty a parent owes to his legitimate and illegitimate children’.67 When the child tragically caught a fever and died in th
e Handsome Colonel’s arms in the summer of 1804, James wrote correctly but a little distantly to his father about ‘that much lamented youth’, saying how ‘the estimation as well as regard in which my departed son was held by all who knew him, and by him in particular [i.e. the Handsome Colonel] who from his superior discernment, as well as opportunities, is so eminently qualified to form a just opinion, is the highest compliment that his memory could receive’.68
This was very different from the sort of deeply felt and emotional language James would use about Khair un-Nissa and his children by her, and perhaps illustrates how far the British brought with them to India a morality that was determined as much by class as by race: there was one way you were expected to behave with a mistress from the lower classes, and quite another set of rules for educated girls from the top drawer of society, irrespective of their skin colour or nationality.69
Certainly, it was precisely Khair un-Nissa’s aristocratic birth and connections that led to James’s reticence on the subject to William. Seducing Mir Alam’s cousin had clear political implications, and initially James responded evasively to William’s questions about the relationship by merely denying that he had any intentions of marrying Khair: it was, he maintained, ‘an absurd report’ that William had heard.70 But William could see that he was not getting straight answers to the questions he was asking, and in letter after letter he kept up the pressure on James: was it true—had he seduced the girl or not? James was eventually forced to respond by giving William a full account of exactly how and where he had first slept with ‘B[âqar]’s granddaughter’, as he refers to her. In this letter he tried to clear himself of the charge of having taken the initiative in ‘debauching’ the girl: on the contrary, he maintains, it was Khair un-Nissa who had come to visit him—bringing her mother and granny along to his zenana, ostensibly as part of a visit to his women: ‘My dearest Will,’ he wrote,When I declared myself to you in my former letter unreservedly with respect to what passed between B’s granddaughter and myself I did so because towards you I have never known what concealment was, though it may admit of a question how far I had right to open myself even to you in the present instance. It being now however at all events too late to recall what has passed, and placing as I do the most implicit reliance on your discretion as well as affection, I shall proceed to answer without even a shadow of reserve the enquiries you are so anxious to have satisfied.
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