White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Part of James seems to have felt a faint homesickness for England. Certainly, at the other side of his estate from the Mughal watercourses of ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’, in the farmland he had acquired in the treaty of 1800, he wished to create the sort of gentle, informal park that William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton had made fashionable in the England of his youth: an arrangement that had become as central to British conceptions of peaceful, civilised refinement, as cool rippling waters and the shade of overarching broadleaf trees was to that of the Mughals. For this purpose he got teams of men to lay out, on the main axis of the Mughal pavilion, ‘Pleasure Grounds, and a paddock well stocked with Deer, of nearly a mile in circumference’.65 To keep the deer company, he ordered from Bombay some elk and a herd of ‘Abyssinian sheep’.66fn

  Creating an expanse of pseudo-English parkland was not, however, without its problems in the middle of India, and by the end of the year James had had to send to Bombay for ‘a fire engine, or even two, to water my trees and Pleasure Grounds’ to prevent the grass withering in the intense Deccani heat.67

  Visitors to the Residency make it clear, however, that the overall style of James’s very extensive gardens remained principally Indian in inspiration: according to Malcolm, for example, they were ‘laid out more in the Oriental than European style’. Moreover, James told Kennaway that ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’ was still as he would remember it, and that he had deliberately kept it unchanged. This ‘Hindoostanny Garden’ appears to have been a typical irrigated Mughal char bagh with rippling rills, thickets of fruit trees and flowing fountains; it lay in the corner of the compound beside Khair un-Nissa’s Rang Mahal.

  With James’s clear fondness for Indian paradise gardens in mind,fo it is intriguing to wonder how much he discussed gardening with the Nizam, Aristu Jah and his friends in the Hyderabad durbar. For just as Nizam Ali Khan’s highly cultured reign had led to a revival of Hyderabad as a centre of Deccani literary and artistic endeavour, so the Nizam’s interest in the art of gardening led to a revival of the Deccan’s remarkable traditions of Indo-Islamic horticulture.

  The court chronicles of Nizam Ali’s reign from the 1790s onwards are suddenly full of references to visits to gardens, and to new gardens being built around Hyderabad: for example Aristu Jah’s chief wife, Sarwar Afza Begum, built a huge new char bagh named Suroor Nagar, where the Minister used to go to relax. Beside it she created a deer park where Aristu Jah, the Nizam and the men of their families would hunt black buck.68 Mir Alam was also a passionate lover of gardens, and was so proud of his creations that towards the end of his life he opened his char bagh to the public in spring; according to the Gulzar-i-Asafiya people would flock there to relax and to fly kites.69 The Hyderabadi miniatures of the period, especially those by the court artist Venkatchellam, are particularly concerned with the cultivated Arcadia of the pleasure garden, and the fountains and ranked cedar trees of the irrigated garden became the standard background to all Hyderabadi portraits of the time.70 The famous Venkatchellam image of Aristu Jah’s son Ma’ali Mian, for example, shows him sitting in a garden sniffing a flower and admiring a tame hawk as five small fountain jets play amid the roses and dragonflies at his feet, and clouds of rosy parakeets fly to roost in the banana trees and toddy palms that frame the scene.71

  Moreover, it was during Nizam Ali’s reign that a great number of gardening books came to be written, translated and copied: one particularly influential manual named the Risala i-Baghbani was written in Golconda at the beginning of Nizam Ali’s reign in 1762. These books contain wonderful passages of advice to Hyderabadi gardeners which mix the scientific with the pseudo-scientific, the useful and well-observed with more eccentric—and probably rather less useful—items of mali’s lore and old wives’ tales. The Risala, for example, recommends that melons can be made especially sweet and tasty if, before planting, their seeds are stored in mounds of fresh rose petals, and if honey, dates, cows’ milk and chopped liquorice are dug into the plants’ roots. Bananas meanwhile can be encouraged to elongate to become as long and as firm as elephant tusks ‘if an iron bar dipped in a steamy mix of animal wastes’ is used to ‘scorch’ the tree.72

  The Khazan wa-Bahar, another contemporary Deccani gardening treatise, contains a great deal of detailed information which would have been of interest to James. This is especially so in the section on the planting of fruit trees, which it recommends should be done by the light of the waning moon if the gardener wishes to promote the growth of fruit rather than the trees’ size. To prevent disease the earth should be fertilised with pigeon dung and olive-leaf extract, while wild onions should be planted around the tree’s base. The anonymous writer also has advice to those, like James, who had problems getting their mango trees to fruit. A barren tree, he advises, will suddenly spring into life if it is loudly threatened with the axe, or if the appropriate Koranic verses are tied to its branches.73 Had James read the Khazan wa-Bahar he would have learned that he could have produced seedless grapes by applying musk and opium to the roots of his vines; grow bright-red apples by pegging down the lower branches with an iron bar; and stimulate his peach trees to fruit by inserting pine or willow cuttings in the roots. He would also have learned of some intriguing methods of ecologically sound pest control: black hellebore and mustard planted at the entrance of a garden would keep away snakes, while filling his vegetable patch with turnips, cabbage, radish and broad beans would free the garden from mosquitoes.

  Another concept that James would have come across among the garden connoisseurs of Hyderabad was the lovely idea of the evening garden. By day, the ‘flowers of the sun’ were there to be admired for their beauty; but as the sun set at the end of the day, other ‘flowers of the night’ came to the fore, to be enjoyed for their scent or for the glow of their foliage in the light of the moon. In these specially planted areas, marble pavilions would be arranged with bolsters and carpets for nights of wine, music, poetry and the company of women, all surrounded by beds of carefully selected night flowers. Here the heady perfume of tuberose would mix with that of chandni, the moon-flower, said to diffuse the sweetest perfume on nights when the moon shone brightly. The importance of such scents was a central concept in Islamic thought, an idea which derived from the Hadith, attributed to the Prophet: ‘Scent is the food of the soul, and the soul is the vehicle of the faculties of man.’74

  It is impossible now to say whether James was familiar with the finer points of the aesthetics of the Deccani garden, and whether he made an attempt to maintain his Residency char bagh according to these traditions. However, given what is known about his fondness for Hyderabadi food, architecture, clothes, poetry and women, and given his feeling for plants and gardening, it would be extraordinary if he did not. Certainly there are two clear hints that he was indeed as au fait with current fashions in Hyderabadi garden design as one would have expected. The first is his eclectic choice of trees for the Residency, many of which are still alive and which show a close similarity to those selected at the same time by Mah Laqa Bai Chanda in the shady walled garden she built to surround her mother’s tomb below the hill of Maula Ali, notably the extensive use of the relatively rare mulsarry (or Indian medlar).fp

  The second hint is the Residency pigeon tower, and the pigeon pots which still survive in the ruins of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal. Pigeon-fancying was never a feature of the Georgian gentleman’s house, and no other examples are known in British India. It was however central to the idea of refinement in the social life of a Mughal nobleman, with flying pigeons regarded as an essential part of the cultivated enjoyment of a gentleman’s pleasure garden. This seems to have been especially the case in Hyderabad: the Khazan wa-Bahar dedicates a whole chapter to the subject of the pigeon and its place in the garden of a civilised Hyderabadi amir.

  Not only were pigeons supposed to keep snakes away, and their excrement deemed ideal for the cultivation of fruit trees; their voices—or rather their billing and cooing—were believed to be stimula
ting for the human intellect. The anonymous author of the Khazan advises his reader to burn incense and to mix mastaki (mastic or terbinth) and honey in the pigeons’ water, in order to keep them content and happy in the garden.75

  Somehow, it seems impossible to imagine that James and Khair un-Nissa did not closely follow this advice.

  After the departure of the Palmers in April 1802, explicit details of the daily life and routine of James’s two children and their young mother become frustratingly elusive. It is as if they have retreated out of the sudden shaft of sunlight provoked by the visit of Fyze and the General, and disappeared back into the shadows. We know they are there, and it is clear that James is increasingly spending his time with them; but only occasionally do the clouds roll back to let the sun briefly break through once more. One day Khair and Sahib Allum are glimpsed sending their greetings and more parcels of bangles to Fyze and Fanny Palmer; on another the two children are being sent off to Dr Ure to be inoculated against smallpox, or possibly cholera: as James reported to the General in October 1802, ‘Both my little ones here have been vaccinated, and are enjoying excellent health and spirits … By the bye, I have prevailed on Nizzy and Solomon to render vaccination general, by introducing the practice into their own families.’76

  Nevertheless, reading carefully between the lines, it is possible to piece together some fairly detailed information about James’s domestic life and the choices that he made as to the upbringing of his young family. It is quite clear, for example, that the children were brought up by Khair and her mother—assisted by a great retinue of serving girls, aseels and wetnurses—in a more or less entirely Hyderabadi environment. They were raised as Muslims, had Mughal names, spoke Persian (or possibly Deccani Urdu) as their first language (Khair un-Nissa spoke no English77) and wore typical aristocratic Hyderabadi dress. They do not seem to have been introduced to the Europeans of the Residency,78 and given their aristocratic status were probably not encouraged to play with the other Anglo-Indian children on the campus, such as Henry Russell’s child by his unnamed (and therefore probably non-aristocratic) mistress.79 All the indications are that the mahal was like a detached fragment of the old city dropped into the middle of the semi-Anglicised world of the Residency, and that James’s children mixed mainly with the children of the zenanas of other Hyderabadi nobles, and especially with the inhabitants of Aristu Jah’s mansion.80

  Held firmly within the cultural and religious embrace of Mughlai Hyderabad, the children must presumably have undergone the normal cycle of ceremonies and initiations that would mark the childhood of any other Deccani Muslim child of their rank and status. The birth itself was the first staging-post on this ceremonial journey. On the day of delivery, almost as soon as the baby had been cleaned and swaddled, the call to prayer, the Azan, would be recited into the babe’s right ear, followed by the Kalima (or creed), which would be read into the left. The idea was to introduce the holy words into the ears of the child as it first opened its eyes, after which paan would be distributed among eagerly waiting friends and relatives. Then a little piece of dried date, chewed by a respected scholar or qazi, would be inserted into the child’s mouth, followed shortly afterwards by a little honey water, sucked through a piece of clean, soft cloth—the former being a Middle Eastern custom, the latter a Hindu one, both of which were absorbed into and became part of the composite Deccani Mughal culture. After this, the child would be applied to the breast for the first time. As was the custom among aristocratic Mughal women, Khair un-Nissa did not breastfeed her children herself, instead giving them to a wetnurse, who in some Mughal zenanas could continue feeding the child up to the age of three or even four.81

  The choice of a wetnurse was considered a matter of the greatest importance, as it was believed that with her milk were transferred some of her spiritual and moral qualities. Honest, pious, good-tempered women of unimpeachable reputation were sought out for the job, especially those from grand or Sayyid families who had for one reason or another fallen into poverty; after they had finished suckling, they and their own children were brought to live in the family mansion as honoured and respected members of the household.82fq Nothing is known of the family backgrounds of Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum’s wetnurses, Ummat ul-Fatimeh and Maham Aloopaim[?],fr but both continued to live in Sharaf un-Nissa’s household, with their sons and daughters, and were still there forty years later when Sharaf un-Nissa sent their greetings to her two beloved grandchildren.83

  Two or three days into breastfeeding a girl, another small rite of passage took place. In India it has always been the custom—though the practice is completely unknown in the West—to squeeze the nipples of a suckling child so that small ‘milkdrops’ emerge. This is believed to be of great medicinal value, and is said to ensure the future well-being of the breast. In the case of female babies of Mughal families, the brother of the infant was asked to suckle the ‘milkdrop’ so produced; this was believed to create a deep bond of love between a brother and his sister, as the Emperor Jehangir recorded in his diaries. His sister Shakar un-Nissa Begum was, he writes,of good disposition and naturally compassionate towards all people. From infancy and childhood she had been extremely fond of me, and there can be few such close relationships between a brother and a sister. The first time when, according to the custom of pressing the breast of a child and a drop of milk is perceptible, they pressed my sister’s breast and a drop of milk appeared, my revered father [the Emperor Akbar] said to me: ‘Baba! Drink this milk that in truth this sister may be to thee as a mother.’ God the Knower of Secrets, knows that from that day forward, after I drank that drop of milk, I have felt love for my sister such as children have for their mothers... 84

  The custom is still current among many Indian families—Hindu and Muslim—today. It was certainly the practice in Mughal families of James Kirkpatrick’s period, and the women of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal would no doubt have expected Sahib Allum to taste his sister’s ‘milkdrops’ in just this manner.85fs

  On the sixth, seventh or ninth day after the birth, a Mughal family would normally hold the chatthi, or birth celebration, when the mother and child would be bathed and clothed in costly new dresses—another Mughal borrowing from Hindu tradition. The same day, the aqiqa, or the first shaving of the child’s head, would take place with a silver razor; the shaved head was rubbed in saffron, and goats sacrificed (two for a boy, one for a girl) to remove impurities and preserve against the evil eye. Alms would then be distributed among the poor.

  The evening of the chatthi, tradition dictated that the house would be cleaned and illuminated, and guests entertained by fireworks, singers and dancing girls, as well as feasted with the most precious and costly food. Guests would present gifts of infants’ clothes, such as embroidered kurtas and topis (long shirts and skullcaps), with further trunkloads of presents—jewels, toys and sweetmeats—being presented by the mother’s relations. Finally, at the climax of the chatthi, the mother of the child, along with her girlfriends, would carry the infant into an open courtyard and then, for the first time, ‘tare dikhana’, show the child the stars in the night sky. While this was happening, so the Mughals believed, the child’s destiny was written by the angel whose duty it was to record a person’s fate.86

  Khair un-Nissa, one can presume, would have insisted on all the basic traditional ceremonies being performed for her children: the remark in Sahib Allum’s birth note, that Khair called her son Ali after dreaming of the Prophet’s son-in-law, would seem to point to her particular piety. Nor does James seem likely to have opposed his children being brought up as Muslims. He had, after all, been prepared himself to undergo a formal conversion ceremony to marry Khair, and although there is no unequivocal evidence that he regularly practised his new faith, or regarded himself as an active Muslim, his mother-in-law, who lived closely with him, certainly believed him to be such, as did his Munshi, Aziz Ullah.ft

  What is certain is that James respected Islam and made sure, for example, that the Residenc
y gave money to Hyderabad Sufi shrines. But his attraction to the faith is likely to have been as much cultural as religious. His own letters to Europeans deliberately use vague and Deist terms for God—he refers at one stage for example to ‘Bounteous Providence’87—rather than more specifically sectarian terms such as ‘Christ’ or ‘Allah’, and this vague approach to religious boundaries would seem to have fitted in well with the widespread Indian belief, very much lying at the heart of Deccani culture with its strong Sufi and Bhakti influences, that all faiths were really one, and that there were many different paths up the mountain. Hyderabad’s principal festivals, after all, were Shi’ite but were attended by Sunni Muslims, Christians and Hindus alike. Clear European ideas of the firm and heavily defended frontiers separating different religions were quite alien to Hyderabadi culture, and in this fluid and porous atmosphere James’s broadly Deist approach to his faith would have fitted in easily both with those Europeans who had embraced the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and with the general outlook of the Hyderabadis around him.fu

  Even so, it would be intriguing to know if James would have been confident enough to hold such large and public non-Christian ceremonies as the chatthi for his wife and babies in the Residency compound, within view of his less open-minded colleagues. If not, might he have held them in Bâqar Ali Khan’s mansion in the old city? It is clear that Khair and Sharaf un-Nissa kept their deorhi townhouse in use, frequently visiting Sharaf’s mother Durdanah Begum who was still residing there, while living principally at the Residency mahal. We also know, intriguingly, that James used to keep ‘three or four [spare] setts’ of his Mughal robes, cummerbunds and turbans there, including some of the especially fine quality normally used by nobles at the durbar.88 This then was perhaps the most likely place for him to have held the chatthi, in a venue that Khair’s relations could have more easily reached and felt at ease within—though even so the ceremonies would have doubtless appeared a little strange to Hyderabadis, as James had no female family relations on his side to host the zenana celebrations as in a normal Mughal family.