White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  A line of lamps was lit on either side of the road all the way from the Char Minar to Koh e-Sharif, the shrine of Maula Ali. Haloed in dust, much of the population of the city, and indeed of the surrounding towns and villages, of whatever faith, would set off on foot, on bullock cart, in palanquins and on elephant-back to a lush green stretch of country enclosed in a bend in the Musi, and bounded by a group of three smooth volcanic hills, one large, two slightly smaller. By 1800 the festival lasted from Ali’s birthday, on the thirteenth of Rajab,df to the anniversary of the vision on the seventeenth, and many of the people, from stallholders to great omrahs, stayed in the area for as long as ten days.5 Amid the smell of sweat and spices, elephant dung and the wafts of hot cooking from the roadside stalls, the highest officials of the Deccan rubbed shoulders with trinket-sellers and stable boys, soldiers and sepoys, diamond merchants, senior courtiers and, in particular, the courtesans.

  For in that strange link between piety and prostitution that existed all over India at this period—both among the devadasisdg of the great Hindu temples and the Muslim courtesans who used to pick up their clients in the great Sufi shrinesdh—this was a festival especially associated with the tawaif, the cultivated and urbane dancing girls who were such a central feature of late Mughal society. Across India at this most libertine moment in the country’s recent history, such festivals, with their music and high spirits and unrestricted mixing of men and women, had become notoriously convenient occasions to meet lovers. One young Hyderabadi of the period described the scene at an ’urs as follows:Chandeliers of all kinds are hung [inside the shrine], and the artisans come and give the lamps the shape of trees which when lighted put to shame even the cypresses. When the place is fully lighted, it dazzles like sunlight and over-shadows the moon … Hand in hand lovers roam the streets [around the shrine], while the debauched and drunken, unmindful of the kotwal [police] revel in all kinds of perversities. There are beautiful faces as far as the eye can see. Whores and winsome lads entice more and more people to this atmosphere of lasciviousness. Nobles can be seen in every nook and corner [of the shrine] while the singers, qawals and beggars outnumber even the flies and the mosquitoes. In short both the nobles and plebeians quench the thirst of their lust there.6

  The link between the tawaifs and the Maula Ali festival was especially strong due to the influence of the greatest of all the tawaifs of the Deccan, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Her mother, Raj Kanwar Bai, who was also a celebrated courtesan, was six months into her pregnancy when, in the spring of 1764, she went on a pious outing to the shrine with James’s friend, the Nizam’s court historian and painter, Tajalli Ali Shah. Just as they were approaching the Koh e-Sharif, Raj Kanwar Bai began bleeding and appeared to be suffering a miscarriage. Tajalli Shah took her straight up to the shrine, where they bought some sacred threads to tie around Raj Kanwar’s waist and ate the prasaddi given to them by the pirzadas (officials). Raj Kanwar Bai miraculously recovered and Mah Laqa was born a beautiful and healthy child three months later.7

  In gratitude, the family became prominent donors to the shrine, and due to their influence and prestige the Nizam and his family began attending the ’urs of Maula Ali. Mah Laqa’s uncle, the assassinated Prime Minister Rukn ud-Daula,dj was buried just below the shrine, and in 1800, the year James first attended the ’urs, Mah Laqa herself had just begun building a magnificent garden tomb at its base, where she laid her mother and where, in due course, she too would be buried, under a Persian inscription that described her as a ‘cypress of the garden of grace and rose tree of the grove of coquetry’.8

  Other tawaifs, and the musicians who worked with them, donated guest houses for the pilgrims, mosques, ceremonial arches and naqqar khanas (drum houses), as well as pools and fountains and pleasure gardens in the countryside nearby. According to Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘There are on the upper slopes of the Koh e-Sharif, many buildings commissioned by the courtesans. This is where they congregate during the ’urs. There they serve delicious foods, have fireworks and illuminations, adding to all these pleasures the delights of musical raags.’ During the ’urs, in these illuminated gardens the tawaifs would give dance displays far into the night, as well as—presumably—providing all the other services that made them so sought-after among the Hyderabadi nobility.9

  As well as being a popular excuse for a holiday, the festival played an important political role, by allowing the Nizams to reach out across the sectarian divide in the Hyderabadi aristocracy, a divide that split the nobles of the kingdom straight down the middle. The old Qutb Shahi élite, as well as the other old Deccani families from towns such as Aurangabad and Bidar, had been almost entirely Shi’a. Their numbers had been augmented by the large numbers of new Shi’a Persian immigrants welcomed to Hyderabad by a succession of Shi’a Ministers including Aristu Jah and Mir Alam.10 The Nizams were however themselves solidly Sunni, as were the nobles of the élite Paigah clan and most of the Mughal soldiers and courtiers who had emigrated from Delhi to join them in the Deccan.dk The two groups regarded each other with suspicion, and as James’s Assistant Henry Russell later wrote, ‘a considerable degree of jealousy subsists between the two sects, and they seldom intermarry’.11 Yet despite its Shi’a inspiration, the festival of Maula Ali was celebrated by both Sunni and Shi’a with equal enthusiasm; moreover the popular devotion to holy relics which formed the centrepiece of the festival was also accessible to Hyderabad’s Hindus, both high and low; indeed, as today, Hindus often outnumbered Muslims at a shrine which in any other country might have become a centre for exclusively Shi’a sectarian devotion.

  Indeed the people of Hyderabad—of whatever sect or religion—were proud of their festival, and the Deccani historian Munshi Khader Khan Bidri boasted patriotically in his Tarikh i-Asaf Jahi that ‘during the ’urs the place was so crowded that wise and elderly people were of the opinion that no place in Delhi, or indeed anywhere else in India had such a vast crowd on any occasion’.12 They certainly did not like it when Middle Eastern Shi’as hinted that Najaf and Karbala and any of the other shrines in Iraq associated with the historic Ali were in any way more authentic or powerful than the Hyderabadis’ own home-grown Shi’ite holy site. In this context Mir Alam used to tell a story about a Shi’ite Mongol Hazara from Afghanistan, who had

  recently arrived from Iran, and came to my house just as I was preparing to go to the Koh-e Sharif to give an ex-voto picnic. I invited the Mongol to join me on this pious visit. He answered: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve already visited Najaf [the premier Shi’ite pilgrimage site in Iraq] many times, so I hardly feel any need to visit your little shrine here!’

  At last I persuaded him to mount the bullock-cart in the middle of my household and took him with me to the Koh-e Sharif. When we halted, as he was coming down off the bullock cart, and unused to such transport, he slipped his leg in between the supports of the cart and a sudden movement of the bullocks made the wheels turn and snapped his shin-bone. He screamed and wailed and then fainted, so I was forced to throw him back in the middle of the cart and proceed to the top of the mountain, while sending servants to fetch a surgeon. The Mongol, coming to, shouted: ‘I never have and never will give up my leg to a surgeon, never, ever! Just as He (Praise Be Upon Him) broke my leg upon this hilltop, so He will mend it!’

  So the Mongol spent the whole night, without medicaments or surgery, weeping and tossing on his bedding, crying out: ‘Ya Maula! Ya Maula’ ‘O my Lord ’Ali, O my Lord ’Ali!’ At last, in the last watch of the night before morning, sleep overtook him. He dreamed he saw His Holiness of Manifest Wonders [i.e. Maula Ali] graciously appearing and approaching him. As He laid His hand on the Mongol’s broken leg, He cried: ‘Arise and walk!’

  The Mongol awoke and no longer felt any pain; he stretched out his leg, and drew it up and stretched it again, sat up, stood, walked, came back to sit again, and saw no trace of any fracture. So he prostrated himself in grateful prayer, and called out by name each of his dependants to show th
em his miraculously healed leg. He entered the shrine and recited the Fatihadl and circled the holy rock-print seven times.

  As long as he remained in Hyderabad, this Mongol never failed to visit the shrine each Thursday, convinced that this sacred place was quite especially acceptable to Maula ’Ali.13

  The ’urs could not have been better-timed for James. He badly need a break, for it had been a terrible few months—the worst since he became Resident—and his nerves were frayed and his health in tatters; indeed he worried at times that he was approaching the point of total physical breakdown.

  For weeks now he had been forced to work from his bed; at other times his letters were written from ‘a warm bath’ into which he had been ordered by George Ure, the Residency quack, who thought this the best cure for the crippling headaches to which James was increasingly prone.14 On occasion his symptoms seemed closer to dysentery, and at one particularly embarrassing moment he was forced to take his own thunderbox tent into the Nizam’s palace as he was suffering from a ‘very bad bowel and stomach disorder—or rather I think a complication of all the disorders the human frame is subject to. I got very well through my visit to the Minister, though I had such a looseness in me as obliged me to take a necessary tent with me to the durbar.’15

  Both in his public and his private life, the pressure was now on. The jashn party James had thrown to celebrate the marriage of Sikander Jah to Aristu Jah’s granddaughter had gone well, clearing the air after the unpleasantness of the Mysore Partition Treaty, and for a while he was able to report that ‘I am grown a prodigious favourite and Pett’ of the Minister. 16 But Calcutta had been pressing him to force a further treaty of alliance on the Nizam, by which the size of the British military mission in Hyderabad (known as the Subsidiary Force) would be increased, so providing a strong protection for the Nizam against any potential invasion—but only in return for some very large land concessions by the Nizam to the Company.

  This of course suited the Company, which still retained ultimate control of the troops lent to the Nizam—and which indeed could use them to gently pressurise Hyderabad if ever the Nizam should prove less pliable than usual—while gaining a profitable way of financing its own forces. The benefits of the deal were less obvious to the Hyderabadi durbar, especially now that the threat of an attack by the Marathas seemed to have receded: as James told William at a particularly trying moment in the negotiations, ‘Though Solomon [Aristu Jah] is inclined to concede a great deal to us, I begin to doubt whether he will concede all we require, unless really frightened from the Poonah quarter.’17 Yet Wellesley would brook no watering-down of the terms he had set, which were weighed heavily in the Company’s favour. He ordered James to get the Hyderabadis to sign, whatever it took.

  Wellesley was in fact in a particularly foul and uncompromising mood that season. After conquering Seringapatam and ‘Taming the Tiger’ (as he euphemistically referred to the killing of Tipu) he had assumed that he would be lavishly rewarded by his masters in London, and wrote to his French wife Hyacinthe that ‘I don’t see how one can deserve honours more than by such feats, and if there is any justice in England they must send me the Garter by an express courier … I don’t care about any honour except the Garter.’18 When he was offered instead a mere Irish marquessate, which did not even give him the right to sit in the House of Lords in London, Wellesley almost had a nervous breakdown. He took to his bed for ten days, unable to eat or sleep, raging at the perceived insult of what he called this ‘double gilt potato’ and working himself into such a state that he ‘broke out into enormous and painful boils’.

  Nor was there anything in Calcutta that might cheer him up or lure him out of his bedroom. Calcutta society, Wellesley had decided, was boring and vulgar: ‘the men are stupid, are coxcombs, are uneducated; the women are bitches, are badly dressed, are dull’, and he raged to Hyacinthe about ‘the stupidity and ill-bred familiarity’ of the Company merchants he was meant to govern and control: ‘They are so vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar & stupid as to be disgusting and intolerable; especially the ladies, not one of whom, by the bye, is even decently good looking.’19

  In misery, the highly-strung Wellesley wrote to Hyacinthe: ‘I have been reduced to a skeleton, yellow, trembling, too weak to walk around my room … In my mind I suffer martyrdom … I am ruined here, everyone feels my degradation.’20 Hyacinthe, like his staff in Calcutta, was mystified by her husband’s almost psychotic vanity and conceit, and especially the degree to which he cared about the most arcane gradations in the British honours system. Baffled by his behaviour, she wrote gently to her husband pointing out the absurdity that ‘he … before whom all the rulers of Asia tremble [lies] stretched on his bed, devoured by fury, without sufficient philosophy and courage to look on honours and decorations with an indifferent eye … Dear, dear soul you are not a child—your accursed head destroys your body.’21

  None of this of course made Wellesley any more pliable, and it was certainly no moment for one of his staff to take issue with his orders or to fail to achieve all that the Governor General expected of him. William Kirkpatrick wrote urgently to James to tell him to try his very utmost to bring his negotiations to a successful conclusion at least if he wanted to have any chance of retaining his position. Already, he said, Wellesley had been muttering about replacing James with his own brother Arthur.dm

  To add to his difficulties, James’s able and hard-working Assistant, John Malcolm, had left Hyderabad in the summer of 1799 on an embassy to the Shah of Persia. His place had been filled by one of Malcolm’s protégés, an elderly Scottish soldier named Captain Leith. James had been suspicious of Leith’s abilities from the beginning, and had noted laconically to William that ‘Malcolm, like a true good Scotchman, [always] has a happy knack at discerning the special merits in those born North of the Tweed.’22 Leith’s arrival in Hyderabad had been delayed—ominously—by his bad health and an attack of dysentery, and when three months had passed and he had still yet to leave Madras, James wrote in some irritation that ‘If Capt Leith does not soon get into motion for this quarter I shall begin to think that he has no bowels.’23 When Leith did finally make it to Hyderabad, he proved more of a hindrance than a help: ‘The new assistant is a disaster,’ James wrote to William in January 1800. ‘He can barely read or speak Hindoostany—indeed he can barely converse in it so as to be intelligible—or Persian [for that matter], and has taken three days to translate a letter with Amaun Oollah [Aman Ullah, the younger brother of James’s very able munshi dn] the whole time by his side.’24

  The following month, around the time of the wedding of Sikander Jah, James’s own health had begun to fail, yet at this vital moment Leith was unable to assist in any way. James wrote: ‘I have been tormented for this week past to an unusual degree with bile which has at length brought on a fever and ague which I am at this moment suffering under. Pray heavens that the physic which Ure has just given me may afford me some relief! For I plainly see that it will be a long time indeed ‘ere my present assistant [Leith] gives me any. He is slow beyond anything I had conception of … He is almost deaf and blind, and upon the plea of candlelight burning his eyes, has requested me to excuse his attendance at the durbar … ’25

  Over the course of the year, as the treaty negotiations wound their interminable way through successive drafts, proposals and counter-proposals, Leith disappeared from his office for weeks at a time on a variety of excuses: ‘I am almost at my wits end with this strange assistant of Malcolm’s recommendation,’ James wrote in February. ‘I have not set eyes upon him for this last fortnight, he being laid up with worms in his feet, and in a deep salivation in consequence of attempting to kill them with mercury. If ever his finger aches he fancies himself terribly out of order and declares his incapacity to attend the office; though from the specimens [of his work] he has hitherto given, I can’t say I suffer much inconvenience from his absence. I am obliged as hitherto to attend to, and to carry, all the detail [i.e. humdrum] business of t
he Residency, which the assistant surely ought to ease his principal of. Ure says Leith is constantly whimsical and hypochondriacally inclined.’26 Captain Leith finally took fright at the danger Hyderabad posed to his delicate health and fled back to his regiment in Madras later in the year.27

  This left James to deal with the entire business of the treaty negotiation with only his highly intelligent and wily Delhi-born munshi, Aziz Ullah, to help him.28 In order to lure the Hyderabadis into a closer embrace with the Company, James and Aziz Ullah were forced to use every stratagem they could think of, and Aziz Ullah spent many hours at Aristu Jah’s deorhi trying to find ways of making the Minister more pliable. Day after day he would go to sit with him smoking a hookah in the summerhouse of the Minister’s garden, or to fly pigeons, or to watch cockfights; on one occasion the grave munshi even reported in his official record of a meeting that Aristu Jah had invited him to continue their discourse in his personal hamam (Turkish bath), where they could talk without being overheard.29