Equally integrated into the life of Lucknow was one of Palmer’s best friends, the Swiss-French engineer, businessman, spy and scholar, Colonel Antoine Polier. On his jagir near Agra or in his haveli in Lucknow, Polier lived entirely like a Mughal nobleman, as his voluminous Persian correspondence, now in the Bibliothèque National in Paris, shows. One day he might instruct his agents to find him betel-leaf holders, hookahs and luxurious palanquins; the next he would send for the great Lucknavi painter Mir Chand and order an album-ful of miniatures of his wives and dancing girls; a third he might send out for his favourite green mango pickle or a particular type of scented tobacco. He had two Indian wives (one senior, one junior, who were deeply jealous of each other and fought incessantly), a large number of half-Indian children (one of whom, George, later went to live with Palmer’s sister-in-law Nur Begum in Sussex29), and a vast collection of rare Mughal manuscripts (which mostly ended up in Paris).30ej
In his letters to Hastings from this tolerant and hedonistic oasis, Palmer’s letters mixed happy expressions of pleasure in the life he lived in Lucknow with darker passages recording his growing horror at the ever-increasing arrogance and indeed naked racism of the Company’s government in Calcutta from the late 1790s onwards. When Wellesley arrived in 1798 things rapidly went from bad to worse, and Palmer’s correspondence shows that he intensely disliked the new Governor General from the start; he wrote perceptively to Hastings of Wellesley’s ‘inordinate love of pomp, and a Vanity which almost surpasses conception’. He added, equally perceptively, ‘It is sincerely to be lamented that such weakness should accompany and defeat the effects of talents of the first order.’ A couple of years later, Palmer had become firmly convinced that Wellesley’s policies were bringing disaster to India, and permanently estranging Indians from the British. ‘I do not take His Lordship’s patriotism to be of the first order,’ he wrote to Hastings after a trip to Calcutta.
The desire of fame is his ruling passion & it is insatiable, too often indeed ridiculous. His state maxims are those audacious one’s of Mr. Pitt’s that the end justifies the means & convenience sanctifies the ends … Little or no attention is [now] paid to those [of your friends] who are Vakils [ambassadors] of the Native Courts by Lord Wellesley. They are not permitted to pay their respects to him oftener than two or three times a year which I think is as impolitic as it is ingracious …
I observe with great concern the system of oppressing them adopted by the present government and imitated in the manners of almost every European. They are excluded from all posts of great respectability or emolument, and are treated in society with mortifying hauteur and reserve. In fact they now have hardly any social intercourse with us. The functions of magistrate and judge are performed by Europeans who know neither the laws nor the language of the country, and with an enormous expense to the Company. The Head Molavy in each court, on whose information and explanation the judges must decide, has a salary of Rs.50 a month. And this I believe one of the most trustworthy and lucrative employments which a Native is allowed to hold in the Company’s service. What must be the sensations of this people at our thus starving them in their native land?31
A couple of months on, Palmer was gloomier still: ‘Our weakness, arrogance & injustice cannot fail to draw upon us the vengeance of a united India,’ he wrote prophetically. ‘Already there have been insurrections …’32 Against this background of growing British conceit, and with Palmer feeling increasingly isolated as he saw successive new generations of British officials behaving with ever greater hauteur to his Indian friends, he quickly realised that James Kirkpatrick represented a kindred spirit. As soon as he arrived in Pune in 1798, Palmer jumped to befriend his counterpart over the border in Hyderabad.
In a series of increasingly warm letters, the General did his best to establish a close friendship with James, though they had yet to meet face to face. Among their many shared enthusiasms, it turned out in the course of their correspondence, was a passionate love of mangoes: ‘The mango season has been late but tolerably abundant & of no bad flavour,’ wrote James in one of the first letters, whereupon Palmer offered to send him a selection of mango grafts for his orchards; the two were soon comparing notes on their favourite varieties, agreeing—sensibly enough—that Alphonsos were hard to beat. When Mir Alam complained to Calcutta about James, Palmer was quick to offer support, and when the Mir finally fell from grace after Aristu Jah managed to get him sacked and arrested, Palmer wrote a characteristically discerning letter about him to James:I confess I feel no compassion for Mir Alam. His malice and ingratitude to you deserve much severer retribution than has yet fallen upon him, and his mind is so sordid as to render him unworthy of confidence or esteem. All his zeal in our cause was excited by his persuasion of its carrying him, by the nearest road, to reputation & fortune, and if these objects could have been obtained by opposing our interests, or even by exterminating us, I have no doubt he would have laboured to that effect. His firmness and abilities certainly make him a valuable acquisition to any cause he thinks it in his interest to support; but unbounded sacrifices to his avarice must be made to retain him … He well knows that Aristu Jah has never forgiven his conduct towards him while he was prisoner here, and to expose himself to the consequences of it, and of your resentment, by acting upon the silly stories which were framed of you in the hope of injuring you, shows that his rancour had quite subdued his reason.33
Other letters expressed both men’s growing disillusion with Wellesley, and in this Palmer led the way, encouraging his younger colleague to express openly what he really thought about the vain and aggressive Governor General. Letter by letter, Palmer openly voiced the heresies that James had up to now only expressed tentatively to his elder brother: of Wellesley’s personal arrogance, his imperious way of behaving both to his own colleagues and to Indian rulers and ambassadors, his ruinous overspending, and his habit of making appointments and decisions without even summoning the Council through whose majority vote all his predecessors had filtered their decisions.34
Throughout June 1801, James was already becoming more and more disgusted with Wellesley’s bullying approach to Indian rulers, when an order came from Calcutta commanding him to renegotiate the solemn Subsidiary Treaty Wellesley and the Nizam had signed only the previous year. In that treaty, the chunk ofTipu’s territory won by the Nizam after the fall of Seringapatam had been surrendered to the Company in return for the British agreeing to send a large number of extra troops to increase the size of the Subsidiary Force in Hyderabad. The extra troops had yet to arrive, indeed they had not yet left Madras, but when Wellesley discovered that the revenue of the area handed over to the Company had fallen far short of what he expected, he wrote to James demanding that he get the Nizam to make up the shortfall, despite the fact this was specifically forbidden in the small print of the treaty.35 Wellesley had no leg to stand on: he was manifestly bullying an important and friendly ally into handing over large sums of cash without any legal pretext, and in direct contravention of a treaty he had signed only eight months earlier.The fact that no new troops, and only a limited quantity of artillery, had yet arrived in Hyderabad made the blatant injustice of Wellesley’s position all the more glaring.
Palmer was quite clear what this would mean for British relations with Hyderabad: due to these ‘hard exactions … I fear our harmony with the court of Hyderabad will be completely interrupted’.36 James was even more baffled by Wellesley’s ‘cruel’ instructions, and wrote privately to his elder brother in a state of deep depression: ‘My dear Will, the more I reflect on these secret commands, the more deeply they fill me with regret, astonishment and alarm … [they are a] glaring attempt at infringement on a recent advantageous treaty with an old and highly useful ally and [if they should] get abroad nothing on earth could save his Lordship from impeachment [back in Britain].’37
It was a turning point for James. From this moment, he wrote to William, it was ‘no longer in my power to cherish that high awareness o
f his [Wellesley’s] political wisdom and integrity that I hitherto did’.38 James had his opinion of Wellesley’s rapaciousness confirmed in November 1801, when the Governor General sent his youngest brother Henry to Lucknow to extract massive territorial concessions from the hapless Nawab. Having bullied and threatened Nawab Saadat Ali Khan into signing over more than half of his dominions to the Company, including most of the rich and fertile Doab region, worth a total annual revenue of more than thirteen million rupees, Henry Wellesley was then given charge of the newly seized territories.39
James could not believe what was happening, all of it without any legal justification, and wrote to Palmer that he was again half-considering resignation rather than continue to serve such a master:I am, my dear Sir, so heartily sick (between ourselves) of witnessing such disgraceful doings that I do not think it at all impossible but I may keep you company from hence [when Palmer’s successor arrived in Pune], as far as our two routes be together, yours to Calcutta, mine to Madras [where James could catch ship to England]. [It is scarcely possible to credit] the extraordinary threats said to have been held out to the Nabob [Nawab] by Mr [Henry] Wellesley, who I understand is to enjoy the fruits of his labours in some great office of controul over the countries thus wrested from their rightful owner.40
In the meantime James had to decide how to react to Lord Wellesley’s instructions to renegotiate his Subsidiary Treaty. He wrote in despair to Palmer, saying that ‘the Dispatch of the Gov General almost sets me frantic. How, after all the assurances that I gave Solomon [Aristu Jah] in the course of the late Negotiations, can I show my face to him with such demands as I am now ordered to bring forward, and how will he, poor man, be able to shew his face to his master?’41 In the end, screwing up his courage, James wrote back to Wellesley and told him that he thought the orders he had received were frankly unreasonable, and clearly contrary to the stipulations of the treaty he, Wellesley, had signed less than a year earlier. It was a major mistake, at least as far as James’s future career was concerned: Wellesley was never one to take criticism lightly, and his attitude towards James, and the language in which his letters were phrased, grew progressively more hostile and adversarial from this point onwards.
James’s letters to Palmer strayed, however, far beyond their shared political beliefs, hopes and fears: the pair also discussed the less upsetting and more intimate subject of Palmer’s Anglo-Indian children, who had all been educated in England and were now returning to try to make lives for themselves in India. In 1799, James had found a job for William, Fyze’s eldest son, in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, and he now offered to look after their daughter Mary on her return from England as she made her way from Madras to Pune (an offer that in the end was not taken up, as Mary chose instead to join her half-brother John Palmer, a successful Calcutta banker known as ‘The Prince of Merchants’, and so did not in the end pass through James’s Residencyek). The offer was greatly appreciated by Fyze and the General: at a time of growing prejudice against Anglo-Indians, the Palmers felt sure that they could trust James to be friendly to their beloved daughter.
Soon Palmer was writing to James that he planned to visit Hyderabad himself once he had finally been relieved of his duties. He would return to Calcutta via Hyderabad and Masulipatam, and would it be possible for him to stay at the Residency?42 James replied that he was delighted at the prospect: ‘I have a large bangaloe prepared, which will I think accomadate you and your entire family,’ he wrote. ‘There is a zennanah, though rather a small one, attached to it.’43 This, it soon became apparent, was not going to be by any means sufficient. As James wrote in a letter shortly afterwards, the General’s ‘suite is rather numerous and includes at least a dozen females’.44
The Palmers—especially Fyze, now honoured as an ‘adopted daughter’ of the Mughal Emperor, and known by the title Sahib Begum—clearly liked to travel in style.45
In that long, hot summer of 1801, James had also found his own zenana rather too small for his needs. For sometime in late August, he had decided to throw caution to the winds, and formally to invite Khair un-Nissa and their little baby Sahib Allum (and also, so it seems, James’s mother-in-law, Sharaf un-Nissa) to come and live in his zenana in the Residency, apparently displacing, if they had not done so already, James’s existing concubines.
The reason he later gave for taking this risky decision was that he ‘did hearken to the voice of nature, pleading eloquently in the engaging form of an helpless and innocent infant’, and this may well have been partly true.46 The child was considered by everyone who saw him ‘a most lovely infant’, and ‘by his female connexions as a downright prodigy of loveliness of every kind’.47 James also remarked that ‘among other circumstances which render this child peculiarly dear and interesting to me is the striking resemblance which he bears to my dear father [the Handsome Colonel], which has been remarked by all his female attendants who have seen the picture [of the Colonel] hanging up in my room, and which Ure and his wife (who are the only Europeans who have seen him) declare to be uncommonly strong. He is indeed, in every respect, a most lovely infant, the most so, if their declarations can be relied upon, that Ure or his good wife, ever in their lives saw.’48
Later, discussing with William the distant prospects for following Palmer’s lead and sending the boy to England to be educated, James admitted, ‘it will go to my soul to part with him, to say nothing of the opposition I may expect to meet with on this point in another quarter’.49 But it clearly was not just because he had fallen in love with his baby son that the proud father finally invited his family onto the British Residency compound; he was badly missing Khair un-Nissa too. He knew he was risking everything by allowing his aristocratic Muslim wife into the Residency when he was yet to admit to Calcutta that there was any truth at all in the stories of their liaison, and when that liaison had already caused him so much grief with his masters. The fact that he willingly took that risk—as he had already taken so many others—is a measure of the strength of his commitment to his young wife.
Now he directed all his energies into building Khair a zenana-palace that would meet her expectations and requirements. That month he began work constructing the Mughal-style ‘Hindoostanee House’ or ‘Rang Mahal’ (‘Palace of Colours’), which was later described as ‘a very elegant and highly finished specimen of Hindustan architecture’.50 James never describes the building himself in his letters, but according to an impressed visitor who was allowed to look around it in 1809, it was ‘built according to the native fashion & I have been assured that no Indian prince has so elegant a zenana. It would be reckoned a most beautiful set of apartments in Europe. It is situated in a garden. Within the court is a parterre. Round the interior of the court is a verandah of which the walls and ceilings are painted & gilded with great brilliancy & taste. The principal bedroom is larger than the Asiatics are accustomed to construct. The dressing room and baths are exactly the size they prefer.’51 At the centre of the principal courtyard was a large marble basin of water, fed by numerous fountains and lined by stately cypress trees. The arcades and terraces surrounding the court were gilded and richly ornamented with trellised jail screens and paintings of birds, flowers and beasts. Here Khair would entertain the ladies while Kirkpatrick received their husbands in the main Residency building.52
Seventy years later, almost the entire structure was destroyed and levelled by a shocked Victorian Resident who believed that it smacked of ‘native immorality’.el All that remains now is the beautifully built and decorated gatehouse, and some fragments of the interior including what appears to be Khair’s kabooter khana, or pigeon house. Dilapidated and overgrown as these fragments are, lying at the rear of a space still known as ‘the Begum’s Garden’, the quite exceptional finish and beauty of their construction hint at just how fine was the palace that James built for his beloved Khair un-Nissa, and for their son, Sahib Allum, the little Lord of the World.
Wellesley had given Palmer notice that he was to be r
eplaced in June 1800, but a year later he was still in place, thanks to the increasing illness of his putative successor, William Kirkpatrick.
William did not set off from Calcutta until March 1801, and far from getting better on the voyage, as he had hoped, instead found his condition rapidly worsening. He arrived in Madras ‘in a grievous state of health’, with his agonising bladder condition greatly inflamed and much more painful. James immediately sent Dr Ure off to Madras to try to treat his elder brother—Ure had, after all, tended to William throughout his time as Resident in Hyderabad, especially after his health broke down during the siege of Khardla—and for once, Ure’s treatment seemed to work.
On 5 April 1801, James was able to write that he had just heard of the improvement in William’s condition: ‘I may consequently ’ere long have the happiness of embracing you at Hyderabad.’ But he went on to tell William that if things got worse again, Ure had been clear that ‘you should return home without further delay, [and] for heavens sake let no [financial] consideration prevent your doing so by the very next opportunity from Madras.’53
Twelve days later, however, while staying in Madras with William Thackeray, the uncle of the novelist, William Kirkpatrick’s health had once again broken down. The Madras doctor had made him drink ‘caustic’ in an attempt to unblock his urethra, with drastic results: ‘I am glad you did not attempt to give me an idea of the sufferings you have laboured under, as they have already by a sort of sympathy affected me more than I can describe,’ wrote James. ‘Heaven grant that my dearest brother may never again be exposed to them … I perfectly concur with you in thinking that the caustic ought not to have been applied until the irritation of your body had somewhat more subsided, and I earnestly trust that this opinion will prevent you from submitting to any further operations until your strength shall enable you to bear them, and your habit be in a proper condition to meet them.’ James also promised to search Hyderabad for some presents for Thackeray’s boys and nephews as a way of rewarding him for his care: ‘I will enquire for toys for Thackeray’s children immediately,’ he wrote on the seventeenth. ‘What is there indeed that I would not most heartily make him an offer of, within the compass of my means and ability, if he returns my beloved William to the full enjoyment of health again, which I am now sanguine enough to expect he will.’54em
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