In addition, about the dismissal of Mir Alam, they added: ‘The Nizam is master of his servants, and is free to choose and appoint as he wishes. We are happy to rely on his choice. However, if Aristu Jah is appointed, what could be better, on condition that Mir Alam’s life and honour and property are all safe!’
When this letter with its welcome answer reached Hyderabad, Hushmat Jang attended court, and Mir Alam was dismissed from his post as Vakil to the English, and also from the lucrative post of overseeing the newly conquered territories. He was imprisoned in isolation in Rudrur fort without the right to meet anyone else.’116
How seriously can this evidence be taken? Did Aristu Jah really succeed in using Khair un-Nissa not only as a way of disposing of his increasingly dangerous rival Mir Alam, but also as a way of ‘turning’ Kirkpatrick? And what exactly did Kirkpatrick’s promise to ‘strive for the best interests of your government and obey all your orders’ actually entail? Was he really promising to betray his country and become some sort of double-agent—a late-eighteenth-century Philby, Burgess or Maclean? Or was he expressing a more general sympathy with—and affection for—Hyderabad, and saying that in gratitude for Aristu Jah’s intervention he would always be willing to help the Minister whenever he could?
With the evidence available, so long after the event, this question is now almost impossible to answer. Certainly James had always been sympathetic to Hyderabad, and became more so the longer he stayed in the town. He also grew increasingly outraged by what he believed to be the completely unacceptable threats and aggression used by Wellesley to put pressure not only on his Hyderabadi allies, but on several other independent Indian princes, to enter into ever more unequal treaties with the British. James was also appalled by Wellesley’s failure to honour his obligations in those treaties he had signed. It is difficult, however, to know now how much this was due to his own increasingly anti-Imperial political views and his longstanding fondness for Hyderabad, and how much to the fact that Aristu Jah now had a lever with which he could put pressure on James. For, by strenuously denying to the Governor General Mir Alam’s charges that he had raped Khair un-Nissa and murdered her uncle, James had been able to skate over the fact that there was a real basis to the scandal which underlay these stories, and that he had indeed been sleeping with Mir Alam’s teenage cousin. He had not told any blatant lies to the Governor General; but nor had he come completely clean. This was a grey area which left James extremely vulnerable, and open to further manipulation by the wily Minister.
The question as to the reliability of the evidence is easier to answer. On its own perhaps the Gulzar would not necessarily carry much weight, though it is in general an unusually accurate and well-informed record of the period. But the same story is repeated in two other independent Hyderabadi histories—the Tarikh i-Asaf Jahi and the slightly later Tarikh i-Nizam117—as well as in an investigation into the affair commissioned by the Residency after James’s death, which concluded that he had ‘ingratiated himself into the good graces of Aristu Jah, and by promising to stand by him in all his straits he succeeded in the fulfilment of his desires’. 118
Much more importantly, Mir Alam himself clearly believed that Aristu Jah had succeeded in blackmailing James, and that together the two had conspired to ruin him. Certainly he told this story to Arthur Wellesley six months later, in September 1800. The Mir had just been released from imprisonment but was still in deep disgrace, and had been banned from returning to the city of Hyderabad. Arthur Wellesley wrote immediately to his brother the Governor General to pass on what Mir Alam had told him, and his evidence is important as it is the earliest and most direct version of the story which later appears in a much fuller version in the Gulzar.
It is unclear if Arthur Wellesley ever met James; but it is quite apparent in his writings that he actively disliked William Kirkpatrick, whom he did know, and nothing he had heard about James did anything to alter his decided prejudice against both Kirkpatrick brothers. Moreover, he had come to rather admire the efficient, intelligent and unemotional Mir Alam, with whom he had worked closely during the campaign against Tipu. So when Mir Alam and his followers, newly released from captivity and heading into internal exile, fortuitously bumped into the future Duke of Wellington and his regiment in the middle of rural Karnataka in September 1800, Arthur was quite prepared to give the Mir’s version of events the benefit of the doubt.
On 21 September, the day after their chance meeting, Mir Alam laid on a nautch performance for Wellesley and his officers in a garden close to the fort of Koppal, just to the north-west of the ruins of the great Hindu capital of Vijayanagar (modern Hampi). ‘During the noise of the nautch,’ Arthur wrote in a memorandum which he sent Lord Wellesley in an official despatch written a few days later, ‘Meer Allum took the opportunity of entering into conversation with Col W[ellesley—i.e. himself] regarding his exile and disgrace. He began by saying that the fountain of justice no longer flowed towards him; that it was stopped by William Kirkpatrick in Bengal and his brother at Hyderabad, and that he depended solely on Col W for a representation of his case to the Governor-General.’119
Mir Alam then told the whole story to Arthur: how Aristu Jah had long wanted to have him disgraced, but finally succeeded in his object by using Kirkpatrick; how Kirkpatrick had wickedly seduced Khair un-Nissa; how Aristu Jah ‘had known of the affair from its commencement’, and tried to put the family of Ahmed Ali Khan off the idea of their son marrying Khair un-Nissa; how at first no one had dared to tell him—Mir Alam—about the developments; and how he, having at length been informed of the disgraceful behaviour of Kirkpatrick, wrote at once to the Governor General telling him what had happened; but that the Governor General—not knowing Aristu Jah’s close involvement with the affair—
thought the enquiry belonged to the Nizam’s government, and referred it to the Nizam … [whereupon Aristu Jah] reported upon it that there was no ground whatever of complaint; that the whole story was a fabrication … He [Mir Alam] then contended that the whole had been a plan of Azim ul-Omrahs [Aristu Jah’s] to ruin Mir Alam; that he knew that as long as Meer Allum was supported by Kirkpatrick it would be impossible to disgrace him, but that the moment he could deprive him of that support he was undone; that he had availed himself of the passions of Hushmut Jung [Kirkpatrick] to make it impossible that Meer Allum could ever connect himself with him in politics again.120
All the other Hyderabadi accounts that refer to Kirkpatrick’s use of Hyderabadi clothes and customs speak of how much the people of the city were pleased and even flattered by his fondness for their culture, but on this occasion the Mirlaunched into abuse of Kirkpatrick [saying] … that he had long respected the English for their steadiness and their adherence to their own manners and customs in private life, and their respect upon all occasions for the manners and customs of Hindustan, particularly those relating to women … but that Kirkpatrick, by dressing himself in the garb of a native and by the adoption of their manners, had made himself ridiculous, and was detested for his interference with their women. He said that if Col W did not believe him, he begged that he would send an hircarrah [messenger] to Hyderabad and desire him only to bring news of Hushmut Jung … 121
In the context of his dismissal and disgrace, Mir Alam’s claims that James’s crossing of cultures was regarded as ‘ridiculous’ can be taken with a fair pinch of salt, especially as we know from a note by Kirkpatrick—on the back of the only surviving miniature which shows him in Hyderabadi dress—that the clothes he is depicted wearing were actually given to him by Mir Alam so that he could wear them at the marriage of Mir Alam’s son Mir Dauran in November 1799.db But the remark nevertheless provides a fascinating counterpoint to the view of, for example, the historian Ghulam Imam Khan who in his Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi stresses on several occasions that James’s adoption of Hyderabadi manners had made him especially popular in the city. It would be fascinating to know whether Mir Alam’s remarks reflected a widespread view in Hyderabad, or
merely the Mir’s own anger and bitterness at losing his job.122 The remark does certainly highlight the contradictions and limitations to James’s transculturation: he might wear Indian dress, have an Indian lover and embrace Indian customs; but he remained—at least in the eyes of his political enemies—a firangi interloper and the official representative of an alien power.
Mir Alam concluded his tirade by asking Arthur Wellesley to ‘represent his case to the Governor General in order that Kirkpatrick might be removed’ and that he ‘be allowed to return to his house and family’. He also warned that Kirkpatrick was now ‘so completely under the influence of the Minister that it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam’s court than those of his own government’.123 As Wellesley noted in his memo to his brother, ‘if it were true that the Minister had told a falsehood to screen Kirkpatrick from disgrace, he must be a very convenient Resident to the Nizam’s Government’.
The day after the nautch, Arthur Wellesley wrote to his friend Colonel Barry Close: ‘It will be impossible in my opinion to do anything for Mir Alam. The strong desire of Aristoojah to get rid of him is the cause of his removal … [and] Hushmut Jung’s passions have thrown him into the hands of Aristoojah and he could do nothing … ’ He added, in a tone of characteristic understatement, ‘It is a curious story altogether.’124
In the months which followed, Mir Alam, now unprotected by the British, underwent a series of further misfortunes.
Aristu Jah’s spies had confirmed the rumours that the Mir had secretly acquired a set of spectacular gems at the sack of Seringapatam. Now that the Mir was under arrest, the Minister was determined to find where he had hidden them all. He questioned Mir Alam’s son, Mir Dauran, and his brother-in-law, Mustaqim ud-Daula. Both denied all knowledge of the stones. So Aristu Jah sent in a force of soldiers to Mir Alam’s mansion and ransacked it. They also tortured his khansaman or steward. When none of these measures had any effect, they burned the steward’s house down.125
Khair un-Nissa’s grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan had, meanwhile, become deeply unpopular with all his kinsmen, who regarded him as indirectly responsible for Mir Alam’s disgrace. As the story of James’s affair spread, Bâqar Ali was jeered ‘in the streets [and accused of ] having prostituted his grand daughter to the Resident’. At one point ‘abusive papers’ were stuck up around the Char Minar insulting him.126
Sometime in June, Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, now the most senior British soldier in Hyderabad, was out on a hunting expedition with Lieutenant Colonel Bowser a day’s journey from the city, when a message ‘was delivered by a servant of Bauker Aly, requesting us as his oldest and best friends to pay him a visit the next morning in order that he might consult with us on an affair of importance’. Dalrymple loved his shikar (hunting)—his will is full of detailed instructions for the disposal of his beloved ‘Arab horse, the little horse called Mamoola, and all my hounds’—but realised something important was up and immediately turned back to the city.127
James Dalrymple had been a close friend of Bâqar Ali for at least five years, and the two had fought side by side at the capture of Raichur during the rebellion of the Nizam’s son-in-law Dara Jah in 1796.128dc Now, so it seemed to Dalrymple, Bâqar Ali Khan’s friendliness and hospitality had been badly abused, causing his old friend to be almost outcast from his clan. Dalrymple went to see Bâqar Ali first thing the following morning, and found the old man to be in a state of considerable agitation.
Four months earlier, in March, Bâqar Ali had helped Kirkpatrick out of his troubles by writing a signed statement to Wellesley declaring that the claims in the scandalous akhbars were nonsense: that James had neither raped his granddaughter nor murdered his son, that the charges were ‘an absolute falsehood & a mere calumny’, and that towards James he felt nothing but ‘gratitude and obligation’.129 Since then, however, the old man had clearly heard many more of the rumours linking Kirkpatrick with his granddaughter, and he needed Dalrymple to help him put a stop to it all.130 Moreover, Khair un-Nissa was still firmly refusing to marry the son of Ahmed Ali Khan, to whom she continued ‘to testify an unequivocal aversion’.131 Bâqar Ali—so it seems—had been the last to discover about his granddaughter’s ‘partiality’ for Kirkpatrick, and apparently still did not know quite how far the relationship had gone; but he was—albeit belatedly—well aware that there was a great deal of gossip linking the two, as the insults and bill-posters had made plain. Khair un-Nissa’s engagement to the son of Ahmed Ali Khan had still not been formally broken off, but Bâqar realised it was likely to be if there were any more scandals associated with her. Bâqar said he wanted Dalrymple to talk to Kirkpatrick, and tell him firmly to keep away from Khair un-Nissa. His granddaughter, he told Dalrymple,had been demanded in marriage by a Mussulman of great respectability, and he was desirous of concluding that alliance. But the Resident had been using every means in his power to impede the marriage, and had sent repeated messages and communications with that view to the females of his family … [He] expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and he declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city) and stating the fact to the Mussulmen assembled: I will march, said he, at their head to take vengeance on the person of your Resident, and we will see what opposition his escort can make against the indignation and fury of the whole Mussulman body.132
This was looking very bad indeed. Hyderabad was a vital ally and a crucial strategic asset for the British. There was still a French army at large in Egypt, and there was still, in the Marathas, an Indian army on the borders of Hyderabad that was quite capable of joining a disaffected Hyderabad and together turning the British out of India once and for all. Now, so it seemed, Kirkpatrick’s libido was endangering everything, and causing a major anti-British uprising in the Deccan. Faced with this potentially catastrophic turn of events, Dalrymple read the riot act to James: ‘Colonel [Dalrymple] represented to the Resident the fatal consequences not only to his own personal safety but to the public interests which must result in persevering in a conduct so improper.’133 He demanded, in short, that James stop seeing Khair un-Nissa.dd
James was forced to agree to keep his distance from the girl—at least for the time being, at least until the scandal blew over. After all, his own position was far from secure. He had very nearly lost his job over the affair already, and realised that he simply could not afford to ignore the explicit wishes of both Bâqar Ali and Dalrymple. His failure to come completely clean to Lord Wellesley about Khair un-Nissa had left him very vulnerable to gossip, especially from the British military in Hyderabad, over whom he had limited authority; and there was every reason to believe that having excused him once, Wellesley would not take it very kindly if further complaints about James’s womanising were made; still less would he sit back if James’s adventures were to lead to an anti-British rebellion. So James really had no choice: he gave Dalrymple ‘a solemn promise … that he would refrain from all intercourse with Bauker’s family’.
By the mid-summer of 1800, therefore, it appeared that the brief affair between James and Khair un-Nissa, which had already caused so much havoc, was over; or so at least it must have seemed to Kirkpatrick, Dalrymple and Bâqar Ali Khan.
None of them could have guessed that the real trouble was in fact just beginning. For what none of these three men knew, and what the women in Bâqar Ali’s zenana must have been all too aware of, was that Khair un-Nissa was now three months pregnant with James Kirkpatrick’s child.
V
Towards the end of November 1800, James wrote to Calcutta to report that ‘The annual ’urs [festival] to Mawlah Ali is close at hand, and I propose going there and staying in my tents in a few days, for the benefit of fresh air and recreation.’1
It was not just James who planned to leave the city for the ’urs. Great swathes of the population of Hyderabad took the opportunity to break from
their routine for ten days and to set off twenty miles to the north on a short pilgrimage whose attractions mixed the satisfaction of piety with the pleasures of novelty and a change of air. It was at once a pilgrimage and a pageant, a sacred festival and what James described in one letter as a ‘tenting holiday’.2
The festival commemorated a vision of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, granted two hundred years earlier to a senior eunuch in the Qutb Shahi court named Yaqut (‘Ruby’). One night Ruby the Eunuch was asleep when a man in green came to him in a dream, and told him he was being called by Maula Ali,de the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, and the most revered figure in Shi’a devotion. Ruby followed the mysterious figure in green and was led to a place where Maula Ali was seated on the summit of a hill, with his right hand resting upon a rock. Ruby fell down before the figure, but before he could say anything, he awoke. The following morning, Ruby set off from Golconda in his palanquin and went up the hill, where he found the mark of Maula Ali’s hand branded on the stone where it had rested during the night. Ruby ordered the handmark to be hewn out of the stone and placed in a great arch he built on the site.
The rock soon became a popular centre of devotion for Sufis, mystics and ascetics, and after one of the Golconda princesses renounced the world and became a hermit on the hill, the Shi’a Qutb Shahi sultans began leading an annual pilgrimage to the site on the anniversary of Ruby’s vision. After the conquest of Hyderabad by the Sunni Mughals in 1687 the festival went into temporary decline, and it was only after the Nizam’s family began to patronise the ’urs from the 1780s onwards that the pilgrimage again grew to become one of the two great national festivals of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad. The women of the Nizam’s zenana seem to have particularly welcomed the opportunity to escape from the city for a few days, and one of the Nizam’s two most influential wives, Tînat un-Nissa Begum, gave her blessing to the ’urs by building a garden complex not far from the shrine which she named Tînat Nagar; here she and the Nizam stayed for the festival as well as for occasional winter hunting expeditions. 3 Word spread among the townspeople that Maula Ali himself could be seen wandering around the shrine on his birthday, and such was the popularity of the ’urs that rather than being celebrated on a single day as in Qutb Shahi times, the festival gradually became extended: ‘The coming and going of visitors increased constantly, the ’Urs grew accordingly, and all the distinguished citizens of the town came out for rest and recreation and stayed to enjoy the long nights of revelry.’4
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