White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Not only was he completely and irreparably out of favour with Lord Wellesley, his health was in decline too. His rheumatism grew worse over the course of 1802, and towards the end of the year he developed some severe hepatitic complaint that left him bedridden for a month, and very weak for the entire first quarter of 1803. He never entirely recovered from the disease and suffered from intermittent relapses the rest of his life. For the first time, Dr Ure began to mutter about James considering following his half-brother William back to Europe.

  England was no longer the place that James really considered to be his home. He had been born in India, and had spent all but eleven years of his life there. Like General Palmer, he felt most himself in India, and returning to England was the last thing he wanted. But as his health continued to decline, it increasingly became a prospect he was forced to hold in reserve, to consider as a final option, if the worst came to the worst.

  VIII

  On 6 August 1803 Nizam Ali Khan died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-nine. That same day Lord Wellesley declared war on the Maratha Confederacy, and sent his younger brother Arthur into battle. James had long predicted both events, and had dreaded the prospect of either.

  For years he had worried about the Nizam’s death and the possibility of the major upheavals that might follow it. He had good reason to do so: almost every Mughal Emperor had come to power in a fratricidal bloodbath, and the same pattern had shown every sign of developing in the Mughal satellite of Hyderabad: when Nizam Ali’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had died in 1748, Hyderabad had been engulfed in fourteen years of disastrous civil war as the Nizam’s six sons fought for control. Moreover, Nizam Ali’s own progeny had already demonstrated their capacity for internecine anarchy: in 1795 and 1796 the Nizam’s eldest son Ali Jah, and his ambitious son-in-law Dara Jah, had both revolted. Although the two rebellions had been quickly crushed (and Ali Jah despatched in an apparent suicide, while under Mir Alam’s charge), fear of the Nizam’s sudden death had kept James in Hyderabad, or its immediate vicinity, for most of the previous two years. This worry was the reason he had been unable to go to Madras to see his brother William off to England—a meeting both knew might well have been their last.gf

  In the event, however, to the surprise of most observers, the transition of power was completely smooth. The Nizam had had another stroke in early June 1803, after which James had reported sadly to Calcutta that ‘his whole appearance is now [suddenly] emaciated in the extreme, his eyesight dim and drowsy, his countenance worn, his speech feeble and inarticulate, and his faculties in short greatly impaired’.1 A month later, ‘Old Nizzy’s’ condition had worsened further: ‘The very dangerous state of the Nizam’s health continues to be such as to leave very little hope of his Recovery,’ James reported, ‘the Palsey having spread to his left side, and deprived him nearly of the use of his left arm and leg … ’2 As the old man’s end was clearly approaching, James and Aristu Jah—who was the grandfather of the Crown Prince Sikander Jah’s wife and so, like James, firmly committed to his swift accession—were both able to make minute arrangements for ensuring a peaceful handover of power.

  The Nizam finally passed away in the Chaumhala Palace in the early morning of 6 August, and was buried that evening beside his mother in the great marble forecourt of the Hyderabad Mecca Masjid.gg The following day James was able to report to Arthur Wellesley that ‘nothing has hitherto occurred beyond that sort of stir and commotion in the capital usually attendant on such an event, and I have little doubt that I shall have it in my power to announce to you in the course of tomorrow, the Prince Secunder Jah’s peaceable succession’.3

  This was indeed the case. Remarkably, the thirty-one-year-old Sikander Jah was able to take over the reigns of government without a single sword being removed from its scabbard. The following evening James picked up his pen to report: ‘I am just returning from witnessing and assisting in the ceremony of His Highness Secunder Jah’s installation on the vacant musnud [throne] of the Deccan. This was conducted in the due forms, but with little if any pomp or ceremony, owing to the very recent death of the late sovereign.’ To mark the accession of Sikander Jah guns were fired in the cantonments, from the city walls and from the parapets of Golconda, while (somewhat bizarrely) James gravely reported that ‘extra butter [was] served to the Europeans’ of the Subsidiary Force as part of the celebrations; but otherwise ‘the utmost tranquillity reigns, both within and without the city, and I see no probability of its meeting with the smallest interruption’.4

  It was only in the period that followed the carefully stage-managed succession that James realised how much he found himself missing his old friend, the eccentric but kindly Nizam: ‘His memory will be ever dear to me,’ he wrote to William a week after the death. ‘His eldest son, the Prince Secunder Jah ascended the musnud on the 8th amid the universal acclamation of the people. I all along assured the GG [Wellesley] that the succession would be a peaceable one, and I think myself particularly fortunate that it has so turned out. I have reason to believe that some doubts on this head were entertained in other quarters, so that if my predictionhad not been verified, I should have been subjected to, and no doubt have met with, considerable reproach, if not something worse...’5

  Privately, however, James had few illusions about Nizam Ali Khan’s successor. Five years earlier, in his first major report from Hyderabad, he had written to Wellesley of Sikander Jah’s ‘unpopularity and sordid avarice’, remarking that he was ‘not extolled for the brightness of his talents nor the strength of his judgement’, though he also remarked that, ‘inclined to corpulency though he may be, yet [Sikander] is not ungraceful … His deportment is easy and affable, and in his placid well-favoured countenance, mildness, diffidence and good nature, are conspicuously enough depicted.’6 This, it soon became clear, was wishful thinking: reports quickly began to circulate of the new Nizam publicly kicking his concubines and even attempting to hang various members of his family with silk handkerchiefs. Soon there were mutterings that he was suffering from bouts of insanity. According to Henry Russell, James’s assistant, Sikander Jah’s

  expression is dull, melancholy and care-worn … and he looks much older than he is. He has been supposed in some degree insane, and certainly [his behaviour] has countenanced the suspicion … He is subject both to the delusion of his own fears and jealousies, and to the pernicious influence of those low senseless creatures that are about him …

  The Nizam leads a life of almost total seclusion. He hardly ever appears in public, and seldom even sees his Ministers. What little intercourse he has with them is sometimes by notes, but generally by messages conveyed through female servants. His time is passed either in his private apartments where he sits quite alone, or with a few personal attendants of profligate character and low habits who flatter his prejudices, and poison his mind with stories of the treachery of his Ministers. He has no domestic intercourse even with his nearest male relations. Neither his brothers nor his sons ever visit him, except on the great festivals, and even then they are admitted to him in public, where he generally receives their nuzzurs [ceremonial offerings] and then dismisses them without speaking to them... 7

  The days when James could rely on a friendly and sympathetic figure on the throne of Hyderabad were clearly over.

  At the same time as the Nizam’s dominions were experiencing a moment of unexpected tranquillity, the Marathas territories to the north and west of Hyderabad were given over to a war of quite extraordinary violence.

  Wellesley’s intricate manoeuvres to divide and subjugate the Marathas—the last great military force in India really able to take on the British—were now reaching their head. With the death of the great Minister Nana Phadnavis, as General Palmer put it, ‘all the wisdom and moderation of the Mahratta government departed’, and Wellesley could sit back in Calcutta and watch as the great Confederacy unravelled.8 In Nana’s absence, rival warlords conspired and intrigued against each other in a welter of mutual distrust.
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br />   The young Peshwa, Baji Rao II, had proved wholly unequal to the challenge of holding together the different factions that made up his power base. In particular he had alienated the powerful Holkar clan, watching with glee as one of the senior males of the family was trampled to death on his orders by an elephant. The dead man’s brother, Jaswant Rao Holkar, duly attacked Pune, and took the city by surprise.gh Jaswant Rao fired the town and ravaged the vicinity so as to leave ‘not a stick standing at a distance of 150 miles’ from Pune.9 Fleeing the violence, the Peshwa was driven into exile in British territory at Bassein, a former Portuguese city a little to the north of Bombay, full of crumbling Jesuit churches and Dominican convents.

  There Wellesley succeeded where General Palmer had failed, and forced the now powerless Peshwa to sign a humiliating Subsidiary Treaty. This document, known as the Treaty of Bassein, was ratified on 31 December 1802. With it, Wellesley believed he had at last succeeded in turning the Marathas into dependants of the British, with a huge British garrison installed, according to the terms of the treaty, to overlook the Peshwa’s palace in Pune, into which British arms would now reinstall him.

  As soon as he heard the details of the treaty, James knew that this was never going to work, and he had the courage to speak out and say so. In an official despatch in March 1803 he warned that not one of the Maratha warlords—the real powers in the Peshwa’s dominions—would sit back and allow the English to control Baji Rao as their puppet and in this way attempt to subvert and undermine the Maratha Empire. Moreover he predicted that Wellesley’s actions would only succeed in uniting the Marathas where Baji Rao had failed, and that together the Maratha armies would mass in a great ‘hostile confederacy’ to fight the Company.

  Wellesley was predictably furious at what he regarded as James’s impertinence, and wrote his most intemperate despatch yet to Hyderabad, saying that any sort of united Maratha resistance was now ‘categorically impossible’ and that Kirkpatrick was guilty of ‘ignorance, folly, and treachery’ in suggesting otherwise. But James held his ground, replying that his sources of intelligence indicated that ‘such a confederacy was highly probable’, that Jaswant Rao was even now on his way to reoccupy Pune, and that one of the leading Maratha chieftains, the Rajah of Berar, was planning to join him there. He also defended his action in sending notice of his intelligence to Arthur Wellesley and Colonel Close, arguing that it was his clear duty to ‘prepare men’s minds for an event which by coming unexpectedly might be apt to excite temporary alarm and inconvenience’. He concluded the letter by challenging Wellesley to sack him if he was wrong:If the explanations I have here offered should fail of their expected effect, and the unfavourable impressions which his Excellency seems to have received of my character and conduct should unfortunately not be removed, it will rest with his Excellency to determine on the steps proper in such an event to be pursued. Whatever they may be, I shall be found I trust ready to submit to them with a resignation and a fortitude arising from conscious rectitude of intention.10

  Having sent the despatch off, James sat down to await his removal from office, which he thought could not be far away. His job was, however, narrowly saved yet again when all his predictions about the Marathas proved entirely correct. Within eleven days of accusing James of being an incompetent fool, Wellesley had his secretary write to him again, this time (as James later told William) ‘apprising me, that the Gov Genl had selected me as peculiarly qualified for the task [of leading] an immediate Deputation to the Rajah of Berar’s Camp, for the express purpose of preventing if possible the very Confederacy which a few days before his Ldship pronounced to be impracticable, and which I was charged with folly and ignorance or something worse for stating the possibility of’.11

  It was however too late now to undo the damage Wellesley’s aggressive policies had done. In August, hostilities were opened, with five British armies converging from different directions on the huge and now united Maratha Confederacy. In a bloody five-month campaign, the Marathas were defeated in a succession of brilliant victories by Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, one of which, the Battle of Assaye, was reckoned by him the finest in his entire military career. But there was a huge cost. At Assaye alone, Arthur Wellesley left a quarter of his army dead on the battlefield; as one of his senior officers wrote to him soon afterwards: ‘I hope you will not have occasion to purchase any more victories at such a high price.’12

  James Kirkpatrick, who believed the entire conflict unnecessary and misconceived, was more acerbic: ‘oceans of blood and treasure have been wasted in his [Lord Wellesley’s] pretended plan of general pacification which was [in fact] a mere pretence for the general subjugation [of India … the completion of which] we appear to be as far from as ever, and [which has] roused a restless uneasy spirit of dread and animosity against us’ amongst all the other Indian princes.13

  As far as James was concerned this only added to the intense dislike he felt for his master, and he wrote to William (now reunited with his daughters in England and ‘taking the waters’ at Bath), of the ‘contempt and abhorrence’ with which he now regarded the Governor General.14 He added, in a rare show of anger with his beloved elder brother, ‘I am concerned to find that you retain your former sentiments regarding the public principles and conduct of a Certain Person [i.e. Lord Wellesley] as it must occasion a difference of political opinion at least between us, which there seems to be no prospect of reconciling.’15

  He also told William of the callous manner in which Lord Wellesley had broken all his most solemn promises to General Palmer. Having eased the old General out of his Residency in Pune with the promise of a generous pension and a prominent position by his side in Calcutta, Wellesley had completely neglected and ignored Palmer since his arrival in Bengal. Not only had he failed to produce the promised job or indeed any sort of financial compensation, he had insulted him by failing to summon him even once for consultation during the course of the Maratha War, despite the fact that there was no Englishman in Calcutta, or indeed anywhere else in India, who knew the mind of the Peshwa or his warlords as Palmer did. As Palmer wrote helplessly to his old patron Warren Hastings, ‘Lord W has totally discontinued his levées, and as he has not invited me to dinner I have no means of access to him.’16

  Throughout the course of the Maratha War James’s letters are full of concern for the General’s ‘cruel situation’ and his ‘continued slight and ill treatment, which afflict me much more than they frankly surprise me’.17

  For James the sky darkened even further seven months later. For on 9 May 1804, his other great friend and ally in Hyderabad, the Minister Aristu Jah, died, and was buried the same day in his Suroor Nagar garden.

  Unlike the Nizam’s death, which had been long expected, Aristu Jah’s end came as a complete surprise. Although he was a direct contemporary of Nizam Ali Khan, the Minister had always seemed far stronger and more active and robust; well into his mid-sixties he would take regular exercise, notably with his daily gallop on the fine Arab stallions whose breeding and maintenance he minutely oversaw. At the end of April he had caught a fever which for a week had looked serious, but after ten days he had appeared to be pulling through. As James reported to Calcutta:after having been pronounced out of danger yesterday by his Physicians, [Aristu Jah] relapsed towards the evening, and after a continued fever and delirium during the whole course of the night, this morning early breathed his last. His remains have just been interred with considerable funereal Pomp, at the family Vault, about a mile from the City; the procession being attended by most of the principal Omrahs at Court and a vast concourse of Inhabitants.18

  Worse yet for James, while he was still recovering from the shock of the loss of his friend, it became clear within a few days that Nizam Sikander Jah’s preferred candidate to replace Aristu Jah as Minister was none other than James’s bitterest old enemy, Mir Alam. Moreover, it soon became equally apparent that Mir Alam’s candidacy was fully supported by Wellesley from Calcutta.
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br />   The person responsible for Wellesley’s decision to support Mir Alam’s return to power was Henry Russell. Russell had been James’s Assistant in Hyderabad since the end of 1801 and, with James’s recommendation, had recently, at the age of only twenty-one, been promoted to the job of the Residency’s Chief Secretary. He had also become James’s main friend and ally among the British in Hyderabad: James wrote to William that ‘young Henry Russell continues as much as ever attached to me’, and was ‘my most valuable young friend’.19

  Despite the nineteen-year age gap between them, the two men had much in common, and James found Russell a lively and interesting companion. Moreover, like James, Russell showed every sign of appreciating Hyderabadi culture, and he kept an Indian bibi by whom he had had a child of about the same age as Sahib Begum.20 A picture of him at this period by an Indian miniaturist survives in a private collection. It shows an alert, neat, handsome young man with close-cropped hair and elongated muttonchop whiskers of a style very similar to those then being sported by Lord Wellesley. He is dressed in a hybrid uniform of an embroidered black jacket of a vaguely English cut, but below it he wears cool white Indian pyjama bottoms and Hindustani slippers.21

  Russell had one major flaw, though James never mentions it, and it is apparent more in his own letters than in the comments others made about him. This was an unusual vanity and conceit about himself, his looks and his intelligence. The eldest of ten children, Russell was regarded as a child prodigy by his adoring father, and he grew up patronising his younger brother Charles, as he would later patronise his staff, his colleagues, his lovers and his wives. His early letters to Charles, written when he was eighteen and had only just arrived in Hyderabad, are very much those of an experienced man of the world (as he clearly saw himself) attempting to help his little brother fathom the mysteries of adult-hood.