Nor, claimed ‘Philothetes’, was he alone in being impressed by James’s ‘engaging address and captivating manners’. James, he says, was exceptionally popular at the Hyderabadi durbar, and even Khair un-Nissa’s cousin Abdul Lateef Shushtari (’a respectable mussulman, to whose Name and Circumstances, your Lordship is not a stranger’) believed him to be entirely innocent in the matter of his relationship with Khair:with the most pleasing satisfaction, I have learned that the Connection of Major Kirkpatrick with a female of that House arose in the warmest attachment of her heart, and has been cemented by the most liberal conduct on his part. He never aspired to her Seduction, nor ever sought an illicit enjoyment of her person. The Gratification of her fondest desire was her determined resolution. The disappointment of her wish would have closed her existence. In whatever point of view, my Lord, this Circumstance may be considered to the Character of Major Kirkpatrick no Crime can be attached; but the deviation from the Rules of morality according to its Restrictions only in the more polished societies of Europe.
He adds that the only reason the soldiers in the Subsidiary Force were unaware of this was that ‘throughout the Camp at Hyderabad there is not one man who possesses a sufficient knowledge of the Deckanee or Persian to open and support a conversation to whose result the stamp of precision can be legally applied’. Only James could properly speak the languages, and Wellesley should realise, says ‘Philothetes’, that ‘to the Resident of Hyderabad there is due from your Lordship the most Unlimited Confidence’. He then suggests that Wellesley seek confirmation of all this from ‘the late Resident of Poonah [i.e. the General, William’s father]’, who he says ‘will give you every Information. In a few days he will be at Calcutta.’
All this, though strangely and sometimes tactlessly expressed, would in itself have done James no harm. But where ‘Philothetes’ went badly wrong was to ask, in a manner that was deemed threatening and indeed containing hints of blackmail by Wellesley, whether the Governor General was himself entitled to criticise such amorous adventures: ‘To such an Imputation is the Character of your Lordship invulnerable? Has the daring insolence of curiosity presumed to explore the Mysteries of your secret apartments? In the inmost Recesses of your mind, are the Motives of all your actions opened to public inspection and public censure?’
The answer to this was of course no. For all his evident indignation at James’s conduct, Wellesley was no puritan. Indeed he was notoriously highly sexed, telling his wife Hyacinthe in London that if she did not join him in Calcutta it was inconceivable that he would remain faithful, as ‘I assure you that this climate excites one sexually most terribly.’ Later he repeated the same belief, simultaneously confessing that he had been true to his threat and was indeed indulging in every sort of vice: ‘As for sex, one must have it in this climate … je vais pralaquer dix fois au moins!!!!!!’fg
The Governor General tended to take grave offence at the mildest criticism. A letter such as that written by ‘Philothetes’—in Wellesley’s eyes impudent, ignorant and threatening—sent him into a towering rage; and his response, dictated the same day to his long-suffering secretary Neil Edmonstone, rings with outraged viceregal indignation. While admitting that James was in no way responsible for what his anonymous supporter had written, Wellesley quite unreasonably went on to use the letter as a pretext for savaging James’s diplomatic record, claiming that ‘so far from possessing any claim to that elevated and commanding situation which this letter arrogates for you in a tone of such ridiculous pomp, your conduct in the execution of orders has frequently and on the most important occasions, required the direct interposition’ of Calcutta. He also reminded James that ‘you owe your continuance in your present station and the credit which you possess in it, at least as much to his Excellency’s forbearance and to his desire of forgiving occasional indiscretions, as to his love of justice’.48
The only way James could regain the confidence of Lord Wellesley, concluded the tirade, was immediately to ‘employ your utmost endeavours for the discovery of the author of this anonymous Libel … His Excellency is confident that your zeal for the public service, together with your sense of your own character, will urge you to exert every degree of activity in discovering, and enabling His Excellency to bring to justice, a Criminal whose attempt requires the severe punishment of the Law.’
This, James realised immediately, he could never do. His response to Wellesley was measured and dignified, defending his exceptional record as Resident by mentioning merely that ‘the detail of my diplomatic services, and Lord Wellesley’s opinions on them, have long been upon record’. But he then wrote that, much as he regretted the upset the letter had caused and the insults it contained, he could in no way be expected to carry out a witch-hunt to discover the identity of ‘Philothetes’, or to be ‘instrumental in the disgrace and ruin of a person, who though he has undoubtedly merited his Lordship’s highest indignation, would be considered by the World at large as having incurred it by his zeal and attachment—however deplorable & mistaken—to my cause’.49
This politely defiant reply fell far short of promising the sort of action Wellesley demanded. By early May, less than a month after being cleared of the charges contained in the Clive Report, and having survived one of the most thorough investigations ever mounted by the East India Company into the private life of one of its servants, James found that he was again back in the doghouse.
This time, however, he was too weary and disgusted with it all to really care. Frustrated in his career and his public life, but confident that Wellesley could not sack him for refusing to track down the writer of an anonymous letter of support, James retreated into the happiness of domesticity and fatherhood. Mentally withdrawing from the political front line, and more or less ignoring Lord Wellesley’s hurt pride, he began to focus instead on his wife and children—‘my dear little ones’, as he described them repeatedly to his brother William.
Though he continued as Resident, James’s letters show how pleasing his masters in Calcutta gradually grew less and less central to his daily concerns. By conciliation and friendship with the Nizam and the Hyderabadi durbar, he had pulled off a series of mutually beneficial treaties which set the relationship between Hyderabad and the Company on a permanent and sustainable footing. If Wellesley wished to wreck all that for the sake of greed, pride and out-and-out belligerency, then that, believed James, was his problem.
As so many have done since in the same situation, James Kirkpatrick effectively drew back, ‘to spend more time with his family’; he even took up home improvements and gardening. He went about these endeavours, however, on a rather different scale to most of his modern successors, beginning work on building what John Malcolm would later describe as a dream palace that was ‘surpassed in splendour and magnitude only by the Government House at Calcutta … [The Governor’s House] at Madras cannot even be compared to it.’
As James realised at the time, the palatial Residency that he planned, a perfect fusion of British and Mughlai tastes, and financed by the Nizam, would be a monument not only to himself, but to the close relations between Britain and Hyderabad that he had worked so hard to build, and which were now in danger of being soured for ever.50
The British Residency in Hyderabad that James inherited from William was, as Mountstuart Elphinstone memorably pointed out in 1801, ‘laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan’.51
Ever since John Holland, the first British Resident, arrived in Hyderabad in 1779, the British had rented a beautiful but half-ruined Qutb Shahi riverside garden in which was situated ‘the house of a native gentleman, which was pleasant from being surrounded by small gardens and fountains’.52 This house—an open baradari pavilion lying at the centre of the rambling garden complex—had been turned into the principal dining hall and reception area of the Residency. Around it had grown up a spread of new neo-classical bungalows and mansions to house the Residency staff, many of which commanded views over the low garde
n wall to the waters of the Musi and the domes and minarets of the great city beyond.fh
The Hyderabad Residency complex may have been a wonderful architectural expression of the cultural hybridity of its inhabitants; but in practical terms it was by 1800 a fairly ramshackle collection of buildings. James’s bungalow leaked, and attempts at patching it up had failed to stop the damp and decay. In August 1800, James had written to William that the upper half was ‘scarcely habitable’.53 Two wet monsoon months later, the building had nearly collapsed, and James was forced to write to Calcutta to apply for funds as several of the Residency buildings were ‘now perfectly uninhabitable. Their condition indeed is such that they have with difficulty been prevented from falling so that their being taken down altogether is a matter of absolute necessity.’
Nor was decay the only problem. With the growing size of the Residency staff and the vast number of British soldiers coming to live in Hyderabad, the old Qutb Shahi pavilion which formed the centrepiece of the garden was no longer remotely adequate for throwing parties. As James wrote to Calcutta,the Mussulman building which has always been used as a dining hall and place of public entertainment is both uncomfortable and inconvenient in a very great degree, from its being open and exposed to the South and from its roof being supported on large Gothic pillars which fill so considerable a space in the centre of the room that on particular public days I find it impossible to accommodate as I could wish the numerous guests which the increased and still increasing state of the Subsidiary Force renders me liable to.
James planned as a first improvement to ‘add a spacious Hall or Dining Room to the South or open side of [the pavilion] and immediately connected with it’. He also asked for permission to construct ‘a suite of apartments consisting of a sitting room for the reception of occasional visitors, a bed chamber and two smaller rooms for writing in or as temporary bedrooms—the whole to be sheltered by a verandah on the two sides most exposed to the weather’.54
There was another reason for James’s sudden interest in rebuilding the Residency. In the summer of 1800, around the time he was negotiating the Subsidiary Treaty with the Nizam, his landlord, a venerable Hyderabadi amir named Nawab Shumshair Jung, had died of old age. Realising the opportunity this provided, James had asked the Nizam for both the Residency compound and some of the fields that immediately surrounded it, to be thrown in with the other land handed over to the British in the treaty.55 The Nizam had agreed, and James’s letter asking Calcutta for funds to begin the rebuilding was written only four days after the treaty was signed. James was no longer a tenant: he was now the effective owner of the Residency, and while he had to wait for Calcutta’s say-so to rebuild the house, there was nothing to stop him immediately improving and replanning the gardens around him.
James already had the beginnings of a wonderful mango orchard thanks to the trees sent from Pune by General Palmer. Now he asked his brother William to help to procure some first-class peach trees and, a little later, enough orange trees to plant a decent orange grove. The detail of his requirements demonstrates the degree to which James was becoming a connoisseur in such matters: ‘I wish you would endeavour,’ he asked William, who was just about to catch ship back home, to procure [in England], and send out to me under the charge of some careful trusty friend or acquaintance, a few well grown orange trees, the fruit of which can be warranted excellent of its kind. The best are, I imagine, those that are brought from Portugal. The Malta orange indeed is reckoned the highest flavoured fruit in Europe, and from its juice being red is supposed to be a graft on the Pomegranate.fi It may be difficult, if not absolutely impracticable perhaps, to procure plants of this last …
You must know that I am turned a great gardener of late, and from what I have heard of the vast superiority of the Portuguese orange over any in this country, have a great notion that I could improve the fruit very much, by having a few European standards to engraft from. General Martin,fj I am told, had one European orange tree at Lucknow the fruit of which was so vastly superior to anything of the kind cultivated there (where they pique themselves on the goodness of their fruit) as to render the best flavour of the best oranges of Lucknow growth perfectly insipid.
He added: ‘By the means of a few Alphonso and Massagon plants which I got from our friend [General Palmer] I hope in a few years to improve the mangoes here wonderfully … ’56 A year later, James was still searching for more varieties of mango, and told his agent in Bombay that he was ‘desirous if it is practicable to have an orchard of those fine fruits at once, and I have now in my garden an avenue of many trees of six years growth that will I think all yield fruit next season, if only I could engraft them all from mature grafts’.57
In the months following James’s rupture with Wellesley over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, his correspondence became more and more centred on the ‘improvements’ he was planning at the Residency. Disillusioned with diplomacy and the Company’s ambitions, which he now saw were in danger of destroying a world and a civilisation he had come to love, he concentrated instead on building a nest for his little family, and living with his wife and children in a style which mixed Mughal tastes with the ambitions of a Georgian gentleman ‘improving’ his estates.
One day he would write to his agent in Madras asking for ‘a handsome house clock’, some good ‘wheels for my chariot’ and ‘three pipes of the very best Madeira together with twelve dozen of choice Malmsey wine’; the next, he sought out the type of Mughal goods which catered to his more Indianised tastes: from Lucknow he ordered a set of best-quality hookah snakes, a large pack of scented Lucknavi tobacco and some soorayes (or surahis)—the traditional north Indian water-coolers which he believed were of much better quality than those made in Hyderabad.58
A consistent worry was the lack of any decent china or table linen for entertaining visitors, and for years James kept writing to his various agents with requests for ‘creditable table ware, equipment I consider requisite to the station I fill, and yet it is what this Residency certainly has not had to boast of since I have been at the head of it. My table cloths and napkins I have hitherto had made up from such cloth as bazaars here afford, that is very flimsy and extravagantly dear; and my China ware is a motley collection of occasional auctions’.59fk
A flourishing vegetable garden was another persistent goal of James’s: of one friend in Calcutta he asked for seeds of peas, French beans, lettuce, endive and celery, ‘to which may be added a little choice cabbage and cawliflower seed’.60 In return for these, all he could offer were seeds of aubergines, which appears to have been very much the Hyderabadi vegetable of choice in the late eighteenth century. James particularly pined for ‘a good supply of potatoes, being a vegetable which I like much but have not tasted for these two years and more’—interesting evidence that at this period the potato was only grown around the three Presidency towns—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras—though it is hard now to imagine Indian cooking without aloo.61
James even tried breaking the ice with General Palmer’s uncommunicative successor in Pune, Colonel Barry Close, with some fruit-tree diplomacy. In the course of an exchange of elephants between the two men, James took up an offer from the bluff soldier of some saplings from the General’s old peach trees: ‘The Ceylon Elephant shall be sent off to you in the course of a few days,’ wrote James,and I will readily avail myself by this opportunity of your kind offer of a few Peach Plants, which will be highly acceptable. I have now in my Garden … three very fine ungrafted China Peach Trees sent to me with several other kinds of China Fruit Trees from the botanical garden [in Calcutta] by Doctor Roxburgh.fl If these China plants thrive—and many of them are as yet in good health, I shall be able to add three or four very fine fruits to your present stock at Poonah—The peaches you have been so good as to promise a small supply of, will also be very acceptable if not as an immediate relish, at least as the source at least of much future Enjoyment to the palate.62fm
Within two years, James had arranged all
these fruit trees into a huge orchard and kitchen garden ‘about half a mile in circumference, completely walled in, and abounding in the choicest Grapes, Mangoes (from Bombay), Peaches, Apples, Oranges, Pine Apples, Strawberries, Raspberries, together with all the horticultural productions of the best sort peculiar to Indian Gardens, or introduced into them of late years from Europe’.63
He also tried to acquire a variety of gardeners from different horticultural traditions. In May 1802 he sent requests to his agent in Madras to try to find a good English gardener; five months later he was writing to Bombay trying to find one from China, having heard that Chinese gardeners were to be found in that city, and that they were particularly skilled in the growing of vegetables. For entertainments he also wished to buy
a large assortment of coloured lamps, such as are used in illuminations, and are I understand to be had in ever such quantities in and at very reasonable rate in China … [There are] two kinds, one, large lamps for hanging in trees, the other small and globular, in use for common illuminations such as emblematic figurines and mottos which they are made to represent by judicious arrangement and disposition—of the former a few hundred—or perhaps even one hundred would be sufficient for my purpose, but of the latter, a great many thousand will I imagine be requisite for an illumination or anything of a grand scale. The price of these things I am utterly unacquainted with … but if they can be procured at a moderate rate, that is a sum which would not absolutely ruin me, I should esteem it as a particular favour if you would commission such a supply for me from China.64
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