White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  In the weeks and months that followed the birth of James’s children, a further succession of rites and ceremonies would continue to mark the babies’ progress to health and toddlerhood. Most of these took place in the zenana wing with only women invited, and commemorated various significant mileposts in the child’s life: the chillah, marking the child’s fortieth day and the mother’s release from confinement;fv the ceremony attendant on the first piercing of a girl’s ears by a barber to allow her to wear earrings;fw or the moment when a little girl’s hair was plaited for the first time,‡ all of which were followed by a small celebration and a general distribution of sweets.

  The final ceremony of early childhood was the bismillah, when a child’s education would begin, usually at the age of three or (more usually) four.fx A girl was dressed as a bride and a special scented powder was rubbed over her body; boys were dressed as grooms. They were then presented to their tutor in the presence of guests, after which they recited, following the tutor’s instruction, the whole of the ninety-sixth chapter of the Koran, the Surah Iqra. After this their study of the Arabic alphabet would begin.

  Throughout her children’s childhood, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Khair un-Nissa.

  Though she was the central figure in the life of James’s family, and clearly a quietly forceful personality, the loss of her letters means that today we can see her only obliquely, reflected through the eyes of her lover, her husband, her mother and her children. Only rarely—and then indirectly—are her own words recorded. Nevertheless, through the impressions of her family and her own actions, a coherent mosaic does emerge.

  Khair was clearly a pious, impulsive and emotional woman, as well as being a remarkably brave and determined figure when the need arose, and few people—certainly not her mother, grandmother or husband—seemed willing or able to stand in her way once she had made up her mind about something.fy She was educated and literate and wrote frequent letters. She was also very generous—constantly loading her friends with presents of clothes and jewellery—and had the gift of friendship: she is frequently recorded as being surrounded by her friends.89 Her children remembered her as a gentle and loving mother, and a much milder figure than James, whom Sahib Allum recalled, surprisingly perhaps, as a slightly stern father—at least initially: many years later he wrote to his sister that he had discovered some copies of James’s old letters to the Handsome Colonel in which it was clear that ‘you [Sahib Begum] were allowed to be over indulged in consequence of my father having found the ill-effect of over-severity to me, and the terror of which severity he says all his subsequent kindness could hardly soothe me out of’.90

  We do catch the occasional glimpse of Khair un-Nissa’s hobbies and pastimes. The evidence of the pigeon pots in her mahal would seem to indicate that she liked flying pigeons, as did many other Hyderabadi Begums, judging by the frequency with which it appears as a motif of Hyderabadi painting at this time. She was also creative, amusing herself making (or at least designing) jewellery and bangles, and together she and James developed an interest in precious stones. In a postscript to one of his letters to William, James lets slip that he and Khair ‘have discovered here by mere accident that the opal which turns opaque in the hot winds completely recovers its clearness and colour by immersion in water, for a greater or less time according to their size and degree of opacity. The opal must therefore be classed among the Hydrophanous gems.’91 It is a lovely image: Khair un-Nissa busily creating her jewellery; James looking on, the amateur Georgian gemmologist scratching his head as the opals change colour and trying to work out his geological classifications.

  One set of her jewel creations Khair sent as a present for her nieces, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters. Many years later a necklace from this consignment found its way back to Sahib Begum, who treasured it as a rare memento of her long-dead mother. In a letter to Sharaf un-Nissa she wrote: ‘I possess a necklace & bracelets of beads interweaved with small pearls made by my mother & sent by my mother to one of my cousins—as it has passed through my mother’s fingers, it is the possession I treasure the most.’92 Khair also made (or, again, at least designed) clothes, which she sent as presents to her family and friends, embroidery being one of the traditional pursuits of Mughal Begums, and a skill in which Nur Jehan (and many other imperial princesses such as Aurangzeb’s daughter Zeb un-Nissa) was especially accomplished. As an adult, one of Sahib Begum’s strongest memories of her Hyderabadi childhood was ‘the place [presumably just outside the mahal] where the tailors worked’.93

  As to the games and the toys with which Khair played with her children, Sahib Begum later remembered some sort of slide on the flat roof of the mahal, while we know that James asked his agent to send out from England ‘a few Europe dolls in high Court Dress’ for the children to play with—possibly as a way of familiarising them with European dress and complexions.

  As a home for the dolls, James built a four-foot-high model of his planned new Residency mansion. The model still lies (albeit now in a ruinous state) immediately behind the remains of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal and within its old enclosure wall. Later tradition in the Residency has it that it was built for Khair, who was locked so deep in purdah that she could not go around the front of the house to see what it looked like—but this story (still current in the town) clearly has no basis in reality, as there is ample evidence that Khair frequently and freely travelled around Hyderabad to visit her friends and family. It would also have been normal for aristocratic Mughal women in purdah to travel out from their mansions for picnics, pilgrimages, visits to shrines and hunting expeditions. 94 The model is much more likely to be a dolls’ house which James constructed, possibly as a birthday present, for one or both of his beloved children.fz

  It was some time before a reply was received from Calcutta in response to James’s request for money to repair and rebuild his collapsing Residency. Funds were sanctioned, but they fell far short of what James wanted or needed: a ceiling of twenty-five thousand rupeesga was put on the expenditure.

  This far from generous offer was particularly mean coming from Wellesley, who had just earmarked the most colossal sum for building himself a vast new Government House in Calcutta, in order, so he said, to protect him from the ‘stupidity and ill-bred familiarity’ of Calcutta society; at the end of four years, the house, modelled on Keddlestone Hall in Derbyshire, had cost a colossal £63,291.gb Visitors certainly admired the new building, designed by Lieutenant Charles Wyatt of the Bengal Engineers, and Lord Valentia famously observed that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’; but it was this spendthrift use of Company funds that more than anything gradually eroded Wellesley’s support among the Company Directors, and put in train a series of decisions in London that ended with his recall in 1805.95

  Already, by early 1803, the Directors of the Company were sending shots across Wellesley’s bows, fiercely attacking Lord Clive’s far less grand constructions in Madras, and making it quite clear that ‘it by no means appears to us essential to the well-being of our Government in India that the pomp, magnificence and ostentation of the Native Governments should be adopted by the former; the expense that such a system would naturally lead to must prove highly injurious to our commercial interests. ’96 But no one in London, it seems, had the slightest idea of the scale of the building Wellesley was engaged in constructing, and when the bill arrived at the Company headquarters in Leadenhall Street, the Directors were appalled by ‘this work of unexampled extent and magnificence … undertaken without any previous or regular communication with us’.97

  It is not clear whether James hinted about the Residency’s financial straits to Aristu Jah, or whether the Minister came to learn of the state of the Residency buildings by direct observation. Whatever the truth, sometime in 1802 he suggested to James that in the absence of Company funds he might apply to the Nizam for money, an offer which James immediately took up. According to the story which James later told John Malcolm, her />
  requested the Engineer of the English force stationed at Hyderabad to make an exact survey of the spot, and when this was finished upon a large sheet carried to the Durbar, where showing it to the Nizam, requested he would give the English Government a grant of the land. The Prince, after gravely examining the survey, said he was sorry he could not comply with the request.

  When the Resident was retiring, not a little disconcerted at the refusal of a favour which seemed so trifling, the Minister98 said to him with a smile, ‘Do not be annoyed. You frightened the Nizam with the size of the plan you showed him. Your fields were almost as large as any of the maps of his Kingdom he had yet seen. No wonder,’ said he, laughing, ‘that he did not like to make such a cession. Make a survey upon a reduced scale, and the difficulty will vanish.’ The Resident could hardly believe this would be the case. But when, at his next interview, he presented the same plan upon a small card, the ready and cheerful assent of the Prince satisfied him that the [Minister] had been quite correct in his guess of the cause of the former failure.99

  In his youth Nizam Ali Khan had won himself the throne by a combination of ruthlessness and charisma; he was also a notable orator.gc But by 1802 this once formidable warrior was a toothless sixty-eight-year-old, and after a lifetime of energetic activity had recently suffered not one but two debilitating strokes, which had left him weak, listless and partly paralysed. He now spent his days sipping camels’ milk (the cure his unani doctors had recommended for his paralysed right arm and leg) and fishing for tame carp in the pools of the palace, a diversion in which he sometimes invited James to join him. His other great passions were flying pigeons, evenings of music and poetry, and disembowelling European clocks.

  Over his years in Hyderabad James had grown very fond of the Nizam, and not only indulged all his whims, but went out of his way to please ‘the old gentleman’ (as he usually called him in his letters). James had been present at the late-night music party when the Nizam had had his first stroke after becoming over-excited by the dancing of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Subsequently he had gone out of his way to find him a pair of ‘prodigious’ spice island doves, ‘each as large as a goose’, as ornaments for his pigeon collection, and a young lioness for his menagerie. These presents were not just a function of James’s undoubted generosity; they were useful policy, and James privately believed that he might never have pulled off the Subsidiary Treaty of 1800 had he not found the Nizam three items for which he had especially asked: a particularly intricate piece of clockwork ‘with cascades and fountains represented by glass set in motion’, ‘an artificial singing bird … an automaton, set with jewels … representing the plumage [and] thirdly a fur cloak … from Nepaul … a most acceptable present to the old gentleman, who even in this hot weather is always wrapped up in a fur dress or shawls’.100

  James also did his best to protect the Nizam from the host of dubious magicians, faith-healers and Dervish quacks who, at Aristu Jah’s bidding, tended to collect around his sickbed (Aristu Jah being, according to James, ‘besotted with astrology and necromancy’101). He was able to arrest English quacks who had manoeuvred their way into the Nizam’s presence—in May 1802 he expelled from Hyderabad ‘an imposter who had passed himself off with the Nizam and the Minister as a famous alchemist’ 102—but he had less influence with local Hyderabadi faith-healers and medicine men, and was particularly worried by one ‘wizard’ who began feeding the ‘old gentleman’ large quantities of mercury. As James told William:I must inform you that the Nizam though he looked so much better at my late visit has taken it into his head to try a medicine which if he continues (as I understand he means to do) for any considerable time, will, by all I can learn, send him to a certainty to his eternal home in a twelve month or less. This medicine is neither more or less than an amalgam of mercury recommended to him by an ambitious quack as an infallible cure for the palsy, and so it certainly is in one sense … By way of having company in the shades below, he kindly associates Solomon [Aristu Jah], and the Bakshi Begum [his senior wife] in this regimen, and I saw Solomon and himself take their prescribed doses together, at my late audience.103

  Six months later, James was surprised to discover that the Nizam was still taking the mercury, and yet showing remarkably few signs of its ill-effects, though James hoped that he was beginning to tire of the ‘wizard’ who was feeding it to him: ‘His Highness certainly has, as Colonel Palmer observes, as many lives as a cat,’ he wrote,or he surely what with age, infirmity, debauchery and quackery would have been numbered ’ere this year with his forefathers. He is now taking mercury again (which once was so near doing his businessgd) under the direction of the Wizard, introduced to him by Conjuror Solomon, who still has great faith in his diabolic medical skills. The wizard himself however disclaims infallibility, and if my private information can be relied upon, is preparing, probably from fear, to vanish: having already by way of preparation declared, that when the foul fiend, or djinn whom he avows to converse with, takes a stick into his hand, he thinks nothing of seizing and transporting him in the twinkling of an eye to the antipodes.104

  James’s affection for the increasingly eccentric Nizam was more than returned. The Nizam used to address him as ‘Beloved Son’, and once the plan for the Residency had been reduced to the size of a card he had been happy to authorise not only the handing over of the adjacent fields, but had generously offered to cover the cost of the rebuilding himself.

  No sooner had the Nizam agreed to pay for the building than James set to work planning a Residency mansion rather larger and more substantial than he had originally envisaged when applying for funds from Calcutta. The magnificent Residency at Hyderabad has traditionally been attributed to Samuel Russell, and there is no doubt that Russell oversaw the last part of the building’s completion, and may have added to or refined the final plan. But equally it is quite clear from James’s letters that the initial plans, and the beginning of construction, were undertaken by James himself with the help of an anonymous Indian ‘maistry’ ge architect, who was apparently trained in Mughal methods before being taught a basic grammar of contemporary neo-classical forms by the British. James’s letters reveal that behind the construction of the apparently perfect European classical form of the Palladian Hyderabad Residency lay a Mughal-trained architect. As with so many features of life in the East India Company, look under an apparently English veneer and one finds a more complicated, hybrid Anglo-Mughal reality.

  In October 1802, some six months after the storm over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, James wrote to James Brunton, a friend in Madras, with a set of detailed instructions and a request for him to start work collecting the men and materials that would be needed to begin work on his great project. Very little is known about the details of the architecture of the East India Company at this period, as buildings tended to be erected in a fairly ad hoc fashion by military engineers rather than trained architects. Most buildings in the three British Presidency towns were copies of originals in England, constructed from plates in books like Robert Adam’s Works of Architecture or Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, although they were given a superficial gloss of Oriental features, such as blinds and verandahs, essential for the climate. Few original plans, or correspondence, survive to indicate the ideas, conceptions and ambitions that lay behind these buildings, and in this—as in so many other areas—James’s letters are unusually illuminating and well worth quoting in full: ‘Being about to build a new mansion at this Residency,’ he wrote to Brunton on 6 October 1802,and desirous of it being erected both with taste and solidity, I could wish to have the advice and aid of a Madras Native Architect, and a few artisans, such as Maistry Bricklayers, Smiths and Carpenters. You will therefore oblige me by setting on foot enquiries immediately and procuring me one of the first description, two or three of the second, and one of each of the latter, taking particular care that they are each sufficiently expert in their respected professions, and that their monthly wages shall be on as reasonable a
scale as possible.

  I am willing to pay them their travelling expenses and to make such addition to the wages which Men of their description earn at Madras as you may deem liberal; and maybe a sufficient encouragement to them to undertake the journey with perhaps one half or two thirds more than they got in their own country—with an engagement of one year certain.

  What I mean by a native architect, is what is termed here a Ruaz or an expert accomplished mason, conversant in the different orders of European architecture. The Maistry bricklayers I require must work themselves in brick and mortar as an example to the native Hyderabad bricklayers who will work under them, and be masters of the art of laying on fine chunam [polished lime plaster]. The maistry smith and carpenter must also be expert in handicrafts, and well acquainted with house timber work—such as ceiling, flooring, door and window making; which the smiths and carpenters here are but rough workmen in.105

  In a final, characteristically thoughtful postscript, James said he was happy to arrange for part of the workmen’s wages to be paid direct to their families in Madras.

  Within a few months the masons and architects had been found and duly despatched to Hyderabad. By the early summer of 1803, the foundations were already being laid for one of the most ambitious buildings to be erected in the Deccan for over a hundred years. James’s main concern now was to remain in his post long enough to complete this project; and on this score he had good reason to worry.