White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  This, in Islamic law, involved fixing the bride’s dowry and the amount that would be given back to her in the event of a divorce. In Khair un-Nissa’s case it was clearly a large sum, as James refers in his will to his wife’s private fortune and says that he need not provide for her as she was ‘amply provided for by Jaghiers [estates] and other possessions both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees’, a very large sum indeed, perhaps £300,000 in today’s currency.81 Khair un-Nissa’s jagirs were presumably the gift of Aristu Jah, implying that he stood in for her dead father in more ways than one. The marriage, in other words, made James not only a very happy man, but a very rich one too.ea

  If Sharaf un-Nissa’s account of the marriage is read in this way, it might be taken to indicate the degree to which—in the eyes of the Nizam and Aristu Jah at least—this was a political marriage, and a variation on the traditional courtly way of concluding alliances: first you signed a treaty, then organised a marriage between the two parties to seal the alliance. Khair un-Nissa was not of course an Asafiya princess, but for the purpose of this wedding she had become the Minister’s adopted daughter, while James was now the Nizam’s adopted son. In this way Aristu Jah believed he had finally succeeded in binding the British Resident through marriage into obedience and gratitude to the Nizam. No wonder the Nizam and Aristu Jah had been so angry at Bâqar Ali’s attempts to wreck so useful an alliance. It gave the two men a considerable degree of leverage on the Resident sent to keep an eye on them.

  Whatever sensations of relief and elation James might have felt at the happy conclusion of eighteen months of often desperate hopelessness, he left no surviving record of his emotions at the moment of the marriage. For despite the fact that everyone in Hyderabad who needed to give their assent to the marriage had now done so, James continued to pretend to his brother William—and to everyone else in Calcutta—that the affair was over.82 On 16 January 1801 he wrote William a letter that veered further from the truth than any he had ever written, telling him that he had forbidden all messages from Khair’s family, despite their continual entreaties that he should marry her.83 James now clearly believed that with his conversion to Islam he had moved far beyond a position that he could ever explain to William; and so rather than telling the truth he began creating a whole Pandora’s box of lies and half-truths which once opened and exposed would come back to haunt him at intervals over the next few years. James also thought—presumably for safety’s sake—that for the time being it was better for Khair un-Nissa to continue in her house in the old city, at least until memory of the scandal had passed. So it was that less than two months later Khair un-Nissa gave birth to their first child, a little boy, in the family deorhi in the shadow of the Char Minar, the principal symbol of old Hyderabad.

  James was in the house for the birth, and the note he wrote that night on a tiny scrap of paper still survives in the private archive of their descendants. It reads as follows:On Wednesday the

  4 th of March,1801

  answering to ye 10th

  Shuwaul AH

  1215, at about

  four o clock in the

  morning a Son was

  born to me in the

  Cityof Hyderabad.

  His mother from a

  Dream she had, wishes

  Him to be named Meer

  Goolam Ali,eb to which

  I mean to add that of Saheb

  Aallum [Lord of the World].

  VI

  In the summer of 1800—at around the time Khair un-Nissa became pregnant—James’s friend and closest political ally, General William Palmer, the liberal and sympathetic British Resident at the Maratha court in Pune, found that he had become a victim of Lord Wellesley’s new, harsher political order.

  In late June, Palmer had received a letter from the Governor General giving him notice that in due course he would be removed from his important and ‘arduous public station’ on the ostensible grounds of his ‘precarious state of health and advanced time of life’. The true reason for his removal, as Palmer immediately realised, was that he represented exactly the sort of tolerant, Indophile white Mughal that Wellesley most abhorred, and which he was determined to weed out of the Company’s service.1

  General Palmer was married to Fyze Baksh, a beautiful Mughal Begum from Delhi. He was a gentle, thoughtful and highly intelligent man, who was openly sympathetic to Indian fears and aspirations: Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who stayed with the Palmers at the Pune Residency, called him ‘almost angel-like in his good nature’.2 General Palmer was, moreover, a man of firm principles, and had stated publicly to Calcutta that he refused to engage in ‘practices against the Peishwa [the Maratha leader] in any degree incompatible with [the] good faith … [or] candour and rectitude so essential to confidence and harmony in the public intercourse of nations’—in other words, he resolutely refused to obey Calcutta’s orders to bully, bribe and browbeat the Maratha durbar into a treaty which could reduce them to a state of subservience and which they had not the slightest wish to sign.3 This was not the sort of man who could expect to flourish in Wellesley’s India.

  Palmer’s replacement, it was announced, was to be William Kirkpatrick, whom Wellesley knew would bring a much tougher and more inflexible approach to British relations with Pune. Nana Phadnavis, the great Maratha Minister and Aristu Jah’s former rival, had died just three months earlier, and without him to hold it together, the Maratha Confederacy began to unravel at speed, as rival chieftains and warlords jockeyed for power. Wellesley knew that unlike Palmer, William Kirkpatrick would be quite prepared to take full advantage of what the Governor General described as ‘the critical state of affairs in the Mahratta Empire [which] becomes hourly more interesting’, adding, ominously for the Marathas: ‘opportunities [for British intervention] appear likely to open up … ’4

  The idea that William Kirkpatrick’s health was in any way better than Palmer’s was laughable: while Palmer was a fit, active man of sixty, Kirkpatrick, fourteen years his junior, was almost an invalid: his ‘cure’ at the Cape had been of short duration, and he spent much of his time in Calcutta prostrate with both severe rheumatism and a serious bladder complaint, the pain from which he attempted to alleviate with larger and larger doses of opium. Nevertheless, publicly at least, Palmer accepted his enforced ‘retirement’ with good grace, replying to Wellesley: ‘I am perfectly sensible, My Lord, that the cares and fatigues of an arduous public station may require powers of mind and strength of constitution that it cannot be expected I still possess.’5

  Privately, however, Palmer was outraged at his ‘removal from office without the slightest public pretext’ after a lifetime of highly distinguished service to the Company.6 He would not normally be expected to retire from the Residency for many years, unless he actually wished to do so: twenty years later, for example, the Delhi Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, was still busily at work at the time of his death aged sixty-seven. Writing to his old friend and patron Warren Hastings, now retired into the depths of the Gloucestershire countryside, Palmer maintained that he had ‘preserved the best understanding with the [Maratha] durbar during my Residency, and have experienced more attention & cordiality from the Peishwa & his principal servants than any of my predecessors … Perhaps my disposition is not thought suitable to the management of our concerns, and if alliances are [now] to be obtained by menace & intimidation instead of argument & persuasion & conciliation, then it is certain that a fitter person than I may easily be found.’7

  Palmer was one of the last survivors of an earlier generation of East India Company scholar-officials. His career had flourished under Hastings, who had shared his love of, and interest in, all things Indian. For four years between 1776 and 1785 Palmer had been Hastings’ Military Secretary in Calcutta, before being sent up-country as his personal agent (or representative) at the sybaritic court of Lucknow.

  While performing his diplomatic dutie
s, Palmer had spent his leisure hours busily searching around for interesting Sanskrit and Mughal manuscripts, often for Hastings, to whom he wrote a long series of enthusiastic, scholarly letters about his quest.ec Palmer also formed his own extensive collection of ancient Indian coins, and took a scholarly interest in the traditions of the eighteenth-century military adventurers.8

  With these interests and enthusiasms, the General soon grew to love the highly cultured city of Lucknow. In the late eighteenth century, with Mughal Delhi sinking into headlong decline, Lucknow was at the height of its golden age and had usurped the great Mughal capital to become indisputably the largest, most prosperous and most civilised pre-colonial city in northern India. The city’s courtly Urdu diction and elaborate codes of etiquette were renowned as the most subtle and refined in Hindustan;ed its dancers admired as the most accomplished; its cuisine famous as the most flamboyantly baroque. According to one historian, this hedonistic city resembled an Indian version of ‘[pre-Revolutionary] Teheran, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, with just a touch of Glyndebourne for good measure’. 9 It was here, in this Bacchanalian atmosphere that Palmer met his lifelong love, and the woman who in due course would become Khair un-Nissa’s closest friend, Begum Fyze Baksh.

  Palmer was, in fact, already married at the time he met Fyze. As a young man he had been sent as a soldier in the 70th Foot to the West Indies. There, in 1761, on the island of St Kitts, he had married Sarah Hazell, a Creole beauty, by whom he had three boys and two girls.10 But when Palmer was posted to India six years later, Sarah opted to stay in St Kitts with her daughters while her husband and three boys caught ship to India. The boys continued to write to their mother,11 and after she left the Caribbean and moved to Greenwich, the permanently impecunious Palmer tried to persuade his friends in Britain to send her money;‡ but there seems to have been no question of Sarah ever intending to join him in Lucknow, nor of William planning to return to England to see either her or the two girls who had remained with her.12 The marriage, one can only assume, had collapsed—or at least jaded into mutual distaste—in the West Indies, and the two had agreed to separate, though there was no divorce and Palmer continued to refer to Sarah as his ‘wife’. Either way, by 1779 Palmer had met and married Fyze, according to Muslim law;13 and the following year the couple had their first child, named William Palmer after his father. In due course the boy’s destiny was to be closely—and tragically—interwoven with that of James Kirkpatrick, Khair un-Nissa and her mother.

  Palmer’s young bride had been born in Mughal Delhi. She was the daughter of ‘a Persian captain of cavalry’ formerly in the service of the Emperor Shah Alam II, who had emigrated to Lucknow where he rose to prominence in the Nawab’s service, and where he later married Fyze’s Lucknavi mother.14 Fyze also had a sister, Nur Begum,15 who having been married as a child to the Nawab of Pundri, to the west of Delhi, found herself widowed at the age of fifteen, before the marriage could be consummated, and who thereafter seems to have spent much of her time with Fyze in her house in Lucknow. Over the next few years, with Nur on hand to play the role of maiden aunt, Fyze produced child after child on an almost annual basis, until the couple had produced a brood of six—four boys and two girls—in just eight years.

  Both Fyze and her children figure prominently in Palmer’s letters. ‘Your little friend Fyze sends Bunder-gee and bote bote Salaam [many good wishes and may peace be with you],’ he wrote to David Anderson in 1781. ‘She brought me a little boy soon after you left Lucknow and another here last year, but born dead. I expect another in about four months.’16 In May 1783, William was outside Lucknow, unable to return home due to an epidemic that had attacked his children. ‘It is my intention to proceed to the residency as soon as I can move my little family,’ he reported. ‘The boy is just recovered from Small Pox and a Girl which Fyze brought me six months ago is still ill of it.’17 A year later ‘poor Fyze’ was pregnant yet again, and ‘has been for this month past so unwieldy that she [cannot make it to their first-floor bedroom and] has been obliged to sleep below stairs’.18

  A picture of the family painted between April and July 1785 by the artist Johan Zoffanyee survives today in the India Office library in London.19 It is one of the most charming images of a family group to survive from the entire Indo—British encounter. Fyze is placed at the centre of the picture, barefoot and dressed in Lucknavi court costume: a magnificent saffron peshwaz and dupatta over a brief angia bodice.20 She is seated on the ground, surrounded by her children and their ayahs and wetnurses, a calm, serene and beautiful young woman in her late teens, modest and maternal, but hung with the finest Mughal jewellery: sparkling diamond earrings, several strings of pearl necklace and silver payal anklets. In her lap she lovingly cradles a sleeping newborn infant. This is her third son, later baptised Hastings Palmer, but now still wrapped in swaddling clothes, his head covered with an embroidered Muslim topi. Hastings’ two elder siblings, William and Mary, then aged five and three respectively, look on engagingly from the sides of the canvas in their long, flowing Lucknavi jamas.

  To Fyze’s left, seated in a European chair and wearing the formal red coat of his British military uniform, is her husband, a dark, thin, still-handsome man in his early forties. He looks down at Fyze with a long gaze that is at once adoring and protective. To his left, kneeling at his feet but with her expression directed at her elder sister, sits Fyze’s sister Nur, then a beautiful girl of around sixteen, wearing a thin white veil. Another sister looks on from the right of the painting.21

  Sometime towards the end of the 1780s Nur married William’s friend, the great Savoy-born Maratha General, Benoît de Boigne, and went to live with him in his house in Aligarh, near Agra. The letters between the two brothers-in-law, preserved in the de Boigne family archives in Chambéry, contain many fond references to the two sisters: ‘Fyze sends her affectionate salaams to her bahyne [sister], to which I add mine,’ Palmer writes at one point. ‘Give my love to the Begum & kiss the young Baron for me,’ he writes again in February 1792; then more unexpectedly two months later, ‘Make my affectionate salaams to my sister the Begum.ef How will she bear a rival princess?’22

  This is a reference to one of de Boigne’s two other concubines, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut,eg who were both given to de Boigne as spoils of war, although of at least one of them he swore ‘Je ne l’ai jamais touché.’‡ When de Boigne returned to Europe in November 1796, bringing Nur with him, he left the allowance due to his two other women in the hands of Fyze, and the Chambéry archive contains a fascinating Persian arzee, or petition, in Fyze’s hand, begging her brother-in-law de Boigne to increase their pensions—a fascinating instance of female solidarity within the zenana: after all, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut might in other circumstances have been taken to be rivals of Fyze’s sister, and therefore hardly eligible for her support. The arzee is headed, very grandly:Arzee from Lady Fyze un-Nissa Khanum

  to the Saheb Kalan [Great Lord] M. Benoît de Boigne.

  My Lord Hail!

  From the day I parted from you, God and the people are my witness, that I am continually thinking of you, and I hope you will not forget me. The money which you entrusted me to present to Moutie [Mihr un-Nissa’s mother], she has refused it; saying, never mind, it is too little to be of consequence. We must think about this. My Lord, she is an influential person; if the sum had been worthy of her position, she would have accepted it; [but she didn’t, so] the purse and that sum are returned herewith. Pray do not be offended in the least by my returning the money. You are a great man, and she is likewise very respectable. Perhaps we should consult together on what to offer her. The purse is sent merely to remind you. Forget me not.23

  The Lucknow that Fyze and Palmer inhabited was every bit as hybrid as their own marriage; indeed Lucknow in many ways pioneered the sort of white Mughal Residency culture which James Kirkpatrick later cultivated at Hyderabad. If the Nawab sometimes amazed foreign visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral, or even as a clergyman of the
Church of England, then the Europeans of Lucknow often returned the compliment.24 Miniature after miniature from late-eighteenth-century Lucknow shows Europeans of the period dressed in long white Avadhi gowns, lying back on carpets, hubble-bubbles in their mouths, as they watch their nautch girls dance before them. Some Europeans even married into the Nawabi royal family: William Linnaeus Gardner’s Anglo-Indian son James, for example, married the Nawab’s sister-in-law, Mulka Begum.25eh

  Nor was this sexual curiosity one-way: at least two British memsahibs (or possibly Anglo-Indians) were recruited to join the Avadhi harem, and a mosque survives which was built by the Nawab for one of them, a Miss Walters.26 Another Englishwoman who was married to a prominent Lucknavi Muslim nobleman at this time wrote a remarkable book entitled, somewhat cumbersomely, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions Made During Twelve Years Residence in their Immediate Society, which she published under the name Mrs Meer Hassan Ali.27 After returning to England, Mrs Meer Hassan Ali ended her life, bizarrely enough, ‘attached in some capacity to the household of [George III’s sister] Princess Augusta’.28ei