Black was worn, and meat, smoking, sex and paan-chewing were all strictly forbidden, while the usual half-hearted ban on alcohol was more seriously observed than usual. Men went through the streets barefoot. Women unloosed their tresses, removed their bangles and put on mourning clothes. Charpoys were removed from the zenana wings so that even the grandest begum would have to spend Muharram sitting on the floor like the servants. Day after day, processions of pious Shi’ite men beat their chests and flagellated themselves in sorrow at the sufferings of the man they regarded as the legitimate heir of the Prophet: ‘The spectatorsare roused to an unbearable pitch of grief and the women shriek and wail as if it were indeed the end of the world, crying, Lord save us! Lord save us! Ma’adh Allah! Ma’adh Allah!’
Singers and reciters of the marsiyas would come in succession around those houses which had their own private ashur khanas (mourning halls), competing with each other to reduce their audiences to tears, or to raise them to such extremes of devotional hysteria that they would wail and beat their chests. In some houses the women would organise their own majlis (or assembly) in which women singers would sit on carpets in the illuminated zenana courtyards and sing devotional elegies; sometimes aristocratic women would even perform their own compositions.74
Aristu Jah and Mir Alam, both of whom competed to be the most cultured of the Hyderabadi amirs, were especially keen to be seen promoting and patronising the most talented young Hyderabadi poets to excel in the art of marsiya-writing. Each year James and his Residency Assistants would visit the ashur khanas of both rivals to hear the works that they had commissioned. As one historian put it, Aristu Jah
was very keen on such gatherings, and he organised many, mostly at night. [Such was the reputation of the poets who attended Aristu Jah’s ashur khanas that] other reciters and chanters would come secretly and listen to the most popular chants and learn them to perform at their own gatherings, which inevitably led to many quarrels and literary feuds among the town’s poets. Indeed the Nizam and his Minister showed such a passion for these recitations that it became quite the fashion for the nobles to compete in bringing poets and reciters even from as far away as Delhi and Lucknow, and they were all kept busy. One year, Aristu Jah organised 17 such soirées and the Nizam 20. Even more modest amirs had two or three such events each.75
The grandest and most magnificent of the ashur khanas was, however, that used by Nizam Ali Khan, the ancient Badshahi Ashur Khana, which the Nizam had recently renovated and enlarged after Aurangzeb had used it as a stable for his horses, as a way of deliberately humiliating the conquered Hyderabadi Shi’as. This beautiful Safavid-style mourning hall, which would not have looked out of place in the centre of Isfahan, was filled with some of the most exquisite tilework in India: great intricate swathes of startling parrot-blue, canary-yellow and egret-white, containing delirious swirls of roaring dragons and flame-like clouds.76 Here, each Muharram, every one of the fourteen brass and silver alams (representing the Prophet, his daughter Fatima and the twelve imams, beginning with Ali) was ‘clothed’ by the Nizam’s family in gold brocade on which Koranic verses had been woven. Like Christianity, Shi’a Islam has at its core the story of the scandalously unjust suffering of innocents. Just as relics—especially relics of the True Cross—acted as devotional focuses for the meditations of medieval Christians, so the alams acted for Shi’a Muslims.
The walls of the Badshahi Ashur Khana and its forecourt were lined with arched recesses. The lowermost thousand rows were lit with small earthen lamps on the first night of Muharram, and the rows above each successive evening until, on the evening of the tenth of Muharram, each wall glowed with the light of ten thousand lamps—‘a flaming garden of Ali’, as one poet put it, ‘lit up by ten thousand burning, grieving hearts’. In addition a circular pit was dug in the centre of the forecourt and filled with incense sticks, so that a great fragrant cloud rose from the building as a long procession of black-clad mourners reciting the elegies and holding the alams high circled around the complex.77
For all the sadness of Muharram, and of the events it commemorated, there was nevertheless a carnival element in the festival. There were fireworks every night. Houses were decorated and lit up with oil lamps, as at the Hindu festival of Diwali. As so often in India, and especially in the Deccan, Islam found itself unwittingly absorbed, transformed and assimilated by its overwhelmingly Hindu environment. Indian Muharram processions are unique in that large wooden models of the mausoleum of Hussain at Karbala, called ta’ziyas, are borne through the streets by devotees; sometimes in Hyderabad as many as two hundred ta’ziyas would be carried in succession. This practice was almost certainly modelled on the Hindu tradition of temple chariots, such as the famous Jagannather car at Puri in Orissa.78 Even more Hindu was the practice of placing ‘on the ta’ziyas small portions of corn, rice, bread, fruit, flowers, cups of water &c’, offerings to Hussain derived from the Hindu custom of leaving flour balls (or pinda) for the spirits of the dead.79
Certainly the Hyderabad Muharram celebrations witnessed by Abdul Lateef Shushtari in September 1801 bore hardly any resemblance to the festivities he had grown up with in the solidly Sh’ia environment of Iran. Instead they had been transformed into a sort of syncretic Indo-Islamic saturnalia which had almost as much in common with Hindu river festivals such as the Kumb Mela as it did with the purely Islamic Muharram he knew from home: ‘I have seen with my own eyes how the Muslims in India copy Hindu styles of mourning, fasting and prostrating themselves in the Ashur Khanas,’ wrote a shocked Shushtari in his Tuhfat al-’Alam.
The two groups compete in self-mortification, wounding their chests, and flagellating themselves till the blood flows and they fall unconscious … More bizarrely still, the lower orders disguise themselves, going around in animal skins, some as camels, some as lions and so on, making grotesque gestures and setting up at crossroads and passages a standard [of their quarter], under which they light a great fire: there both men and women and these strange apparitions beat their breasts and dance—but never do they give any food to the hungry nor any drink to the thirsty!80es
Ghulam Husain Khan also describes this strange, almost animist tradition of dressing up in animal skins during Muharram, adding that some of the ‘lions’
take sheep by the throat and bite through their jugular veins so that blood spurts out and adds to their image of a fierce blood-covered lion. In the city and Begum Bazaar [immediately behind Khair un-Nissa’s townhouse] … there are not less than 200 of them.
On the [tenth, the] day of the martyrdom, most of them gather under the Purana Pul, the Old Bridge. Some go mad and wear large hats with multicoloured paper streamers, and others put bells around their wastes like harkarra messengers. As they wander around the town banging their tambourines, quarrels and fights arise between them which threaten to become serious disturbances if it were not for the policing by the state.
At this time, two Ethiopians, young and well built, gild their bodies with gold leaf, and wearing only a turban, rush out into the streets with 25 other Ethiops and Arabs fully armed. All the other would-be lions become timorous foxes and pull in their codpieces not daring to confront these two. If any dare to they cut off his wooden tail …
In these celebrations both Muslims and Hindus take part together, and on the tenth, the actual day of the martyrdom, all the alam standards and ta’zya models and life size wooden images of buraq flying horseset go down the Hussaini Alam street to the Musi, accompanied by elephant standards and fanfares and guards of Arabs and Western trained sepoys … Hindus and Muslims go by the thousands, all bare-headed and bare-foot, beating their chests and crying Hussain! Hussain! The Hindus in particular participate with full reverence tying onto the alam standards garlands of flowers with their own hands … From houses rich and poor, as many as can manage stream out of the old Bridge Gate. The mendicants in their two processions under their two rival leaders, the dervishes, the madmen dressed as runners, the lions and so on all go down
to the river, chanting praises to Ali, and stay there overnight. The number of people is fifty thousand, not to mention the elephants, some of which carry perfume to spray over the crowd, and horses beyond counting, and all the tents which those who can bring and set up on the bank. There is no more wonderful sight in all Hyderabad!
The difficulty of maintaining order during this frenzy is a constant theme of Ghulam Husain Khan’s account, and he emphasises how in the past, many died during clashes, especially as rival processions of the fakirs of the different quarters of the city would clash, usually when they converged on the ghats of the Musi, where they would go to wash the alams in the river—a direct echo of the ceremony of washing and garlanding the standards of the different orders of sadhus that takes place every twelve years at the Kumb Mela, also with traditionally bloody results: ‘unfortunately,’ he adds, ‘when thousands and thousands of people are scrabbling in the sand on the ghats there are many injured in the shoving and fighting that ensues … ’
Keeping some semblance of order over this mystical Saturnalia was also the matter most firmly on James Kirkpatrick’s mind throughout the 1801 Muharram celebrations.
During a particularly bad bout of violence one night between the ecstatic mourners of two rival quarters, the Nizam had called him to the palace and asked if the Subsidiary Force might be brought in to restore order, and James had agreed. The order was sent up to the cantonments, but only a fraction of the required men had turned up. As James wrote to William ten days later, ‘the last Mohurram festival, having occasion for a strong battalion to go into the city at the Nizam’s application, and having consequently desired Col. Vigors [the new commander] to send me the very strongest [battalion available], one of [only] seven hundred and eighty firelocks was with some difficulty produced! And I have heard it said that if the Sub[sidiar]y Force were to be required to move tomorrow, not more than the above number could be reckoned upon.’81
A day later, having made a few more enquiries, James was shocked to have his first suspicions confirmed: a major fraud appeared to be taking place in the cantonments. Writing to William, who was still bedridden in Madras, he reported: ‘The more I reflect on the matter the more I am persuaded that there must be some serious abuses going on in the corps, which cannot too soon be put a stop to … ’
James had suspected that the officers were pocketing most of the allowances the Nizam had given them to provide for their weapons, equipment, tents and carriage. Not only were there not enough guns and artillery, there were hardly any tents.82
Further investigations over the days that followed revealed the situation to be even worse than James had feared: his inquiries showed that, ‘if my information is correct’ there could not have been more than four thousand guns when there should have been, according to the treaty, 7200-in other words ‘little more than half of what [the Nizam] pays for’. This, James realised, put him in an impossible position, as he would
be under the unavoidable necessity of bringing [corruption] to public notice ‘ere long … a great deal of dishonest concealment must be going on, for all the corps are returned as complete or nearly so [in their official accounts]. At this rate what terrible abuses must be going in the Subsidiary Force! And how much are both our own government and this state imposed upon, and what a consequent load of responsibility will fall upon my shoulders if it should ever come out that I know, or even suspected, the serious deception going on, without taking any steps to remedy it?
Col Vigors’ faculties, I am sorry to say, both bodily and mental appear to be rapidly in decline, and he seems to possess in no small degree a defect common more or less to all who have attained to his rank in our service by the usual gradual rise, I mean the defect of winking at abuses, which they are probably conscious of having themselves in similar situations practised. The muster of the troops also must, I fear, be taken in a very slovenly way.
James’s sources, one of whom was almost certainly Fyze’s son, the young Captain William Palmer, who was now attached to the Nizam’s irregular cavalry and so had easy access to the British cantonments while remaining distinct from the regular soldiers, had informed him that the male children of the sepoys were being produced at parade to artificially inflate the numbers in the muster rolls.83
Yet again, James found himself in a hopeless quandary, caught between his conscience and his sense of duty, between the British and Hyderabad, unsure whether to honour his residual loyalties to his old army colleagues and ‘wink’ at their clear corruption, or to honour his commitments to the Nizam under the treaty he had signed. In the end, aware of the unpopularity and odium it would bring down upon him, James eventually wrote to William that, after much hesitation, he was clear where his duty lay, and that he was intent on rooting out the abuses.
What he did not know when he wrote this was that his inquiries had already been noticed in the cantonments; and the suspicions of the senior officers were confirmed when William Kirkpatrick wrote to the commander asking for details of muster rolls and the amount of equipment available, saying that he had received a worrying letter from someone in Hyderabad: ‘They [now] know they are being watched,’ wrote James to William in early October.84 He was also unaware that the senior officers in the force had already acted to defend themselves—by turning the spotlight back on him.
Sometime towards the end of September, an anonymous letter was sent from Hyderabad to the Governor General, detailing all the facts about Khair un-Nissa and her child and their move to the Residency that James had so far managed to keep concealed from Calcutta. The letter reached Wellesley in Patna at the very end of the month. Only a week later, having first checked the facts with James’s former Assistant John Malcolm, who had accompanied Wellesley on his journey, the Governor General picked up his pen and wrote an ominous letter to William Kirkpatrick as follows:private and secret
patna october 7th 1801
My dear Sir,
It is with the utmost degree of pain and sorrow that I inform you that intelligence has reached me from various quarters which leaves no doubt on my mind that your brother the Resident at Hyderabad has abused my confidence in the most criminal manner and has deceived both me and yourself with respect to his conduct towards the granddaughter of Bauker Alli under circumstances of the most aggravated guilt.
The accusation originally came before me as a charge against the Resident of having employed the authority of his station to compel the family of this unfortunate woman to grant her to him in marriage. This charge led to a reference to the Nizam himself & I thought your brother fully acquitted himself by his Highness’s reply, and by the report of some respectable gentlemen then at Hyderabad. But it now appears evident that whether Kirkpatrick ever attempted to force such a marriage or not, he has debauched the granddaughter of Bauker Alli, he has a child born of this woman and he now lives with her.
The effect at Hyderabad is mischievous in the extreme as might be expected from such an outrage upon the general principles of normality & upon the most revered prejudices of the Musselmans. I will not press the aggravations of the most hideous crime to the extent which they would bear because I know the justice, honor & purity of your mind too well to suppose that you do not anticipate every topic which I could devise from the principles of public duty, or private gratitude. I will therefore only add the determination which I have formed upon this case.
Although thoroughly convinced of the bulk of the charges preferred against Major Kirkpatrick, it is not my intention to proceed to extremities until they shall have been verified by evidence regularly taken by competent authority. When I shall have reduced the facts alleged to regular form, I shall remove the Resident from his station and I shall afford him the fullest opportunity of entering upon any species of defence which can tend to exempt him from any more severe punishment. This course appears to me to be the most just, & expedient; the facts now alleged, when stated in a solemn manner by credible and respectable evidence will require the immediate removal of the
person representing me at Hyderabad.
As if all this was not bad enough, the letter grew worse. Having stated his belief that James was guilty of gross deception, Wellesley then asked William to disown and publicly denounce his brother if he wanted to save his own reputation: Now my dear sir, I wish to call your attention to the situation in which the offences of Major Kirkpatrick against me and against the State have placed (what I know you value more than life) against your character & honor. I know that your brother has deceived you even more flagrantly than he has deceived me and the Government, but the World is ignorant of this fact, the Court of Directors & the Government at home must be ignorant of it, & may continue in error unless you shall resort to some effectual mode of manifesting to the World what is evident to me that you have been as much injured by this nefarious transaction as I have been.
I therefore most earnestly represent to you the absolute necessity of your remaining in India while the whole enquiry into your brother’s conduct shall be concluded and until a regular opportunity shall be afforded to you of furnishing me with the means of recording such materials as shall preserve the actual lustre of your character from blemish.
You shall receive full information of every proceeding respecting Major Kirkpatrick; in the meanwhile I desire that you will not open the subject to him until you shall have received further intimation from me. His eminent public services & his connection with you have rendered me slow to credit the charges against him, until the truth became too manifest to justify hesitation; I must therefore proceed to the execution of the most painful part of my public Duty, in the instance in which that duty will be most painful; but I shall proceed with calmness & deliberation.
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