White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  In 1802 Charles had recently arrived in Calcutta, and Henry puts pen to paper to advise him: ‘I need not direct your attention to the ladies—follow my footsteps and you will be a favourite; the society of females improves the mind as much as the manners of a gentleman, but avoid becoming that detestable or rather negative, contemptible character “a ladies man”.’ He adds, ‘I passed most of the day in the society of a lovely little female friend for whose name and description I refer you to my late Chowringhee correspondence … Have you brought me nothing from Europe? [Not even] a fashionable article of dress?’

  A month later, Henry takes his younger brother to task for failing to have mastered the art of flattering the women of Calcutta: ‘Flattery is only to be administered through the medium of a third person,’ he advises. ‘If you assure a woman that she is handsome she will doubtless believe you but she will not obtain a favourable impression of your sincerity (a virtue you must make a woman believe you possess whether you do or not). But if another man tells her that he has heard you deliver a favourable opinion both of her beauty and her understanding (the two weakest points of a female) she will be upon as good terms with you as she no doubt is with herself...’ This advice appears to have been of little use to Charles, as a month later Henry writes again in exasperation, ‘can it really be possible that a gentleman of your pretensions should not be able to discover a single person through whom to administer the flattery? ’22

  Although now permanently based in Hyderabad, Russell had happened to be in Calcutta visiting his father and stepmother when the news of the death of Aristu Jah reached Bengal. He had been immediately summoned to Government House and consulted by Wellesley about who the British should recommend as a replacement. Unable to resist such red-carpet treatment, Russell had dashed off a short report for the Governor General in which he mentioned in passing that Mir Alam—whom he had never met—was probably the most pro-British of the nobles of the durbar. Wellesley had seized on the line and used it to overrule the various detailed recommendations made by James Kirkpatrick in his despatch on the subject. Mir Alam was the only Hyderabadi noble Wellesley had ever met, and he made his decision in an instant. In the margins of Russell’s report he wrote: ‘This Paper is extremely creditable to Mr Russell’s Judgement, Diligence, and Knowledge of the affairs of the Court of Hyderabad. Meer Allum is the only person qualified for the office or disposed (according to our best information) to exercise it in the Spirit of the Alliance. He must therefore be recommended.’23

  Thereafter, supported by both the new Nizam and by Wellesley, Mir Alam’s appointment was assured. The decision was made even while the Mir was still under house arrest on his country estates, whence he had been banished by Aristu Jah and had yet to return to the city of Hyderabad.

  There was however one major problem that no one had anticipated. Mir Alam had now been in internal exile for four years, and in that time had not once been seen in Hyderabad. What no one in the city (or in Calcutta) knew was that during that time the Mir had been very ill indeed. The leprosy which had first made its appearance in 1799 was now far advanced. On arrival in Hyderabad, the Mir turned out to be not only embittered, twisted and bent on revenge; he had also suffered a more or less complete physical collapse. On his first visit to greet the newly returned Mir, James was horrified, writing to William: ‘The man’s mental faculties appear to have nearly kept pace in decay with his Body, which with his fallen-in nose, is now the most hideous lump of corruption and deformity that was ever beheld.’24

  Nor was James the only one to be alarmed at the sight of the Mir. According to the Tarikh-i-Asaf Jahi,[On his return to Hyderabad] Mir Alam had become hideously afflicted by leprosy, so much so that secretions oozed from his body. Many Indian and British doctors tried to cure him, but it was of no use. At last [at the suggestion of an ayurvedic doctor] a very dangerous and angry snake was brought and put on his bed, for it was said that if a snake bit a leper he would be cured. But the snake did not bite him. Instead, it took one look at the Mir and slithered away as fast as it could.25

  It was now, however, too late to do anything. Mir Alam was confirmed as the First Minister of Nizam Sikander Jah in a ceremony on 13 July 1804. It was not long before he demonstrated the degree to which he was willing to pursue his quest for vengeance on those who had, in his eyes, tricked and humiliated him four years earlier. On 20 October, James was horrified to hear that in the early morning the women soldiers of the Zuffur Plutun had surrounded the mansion of Aristu Jah’s senior widow, Sarwar Afza Begum, and then ransacked the place. As he reported to Calcutta:Meer Allum in order to secure the good favour of His Highness told him that [Aristu Jah] had taken jewels worth 12 lakhs [which rightly belonged to the government]. These he said the Sarwar Afza Begum had [in her Residence], & that they should be confiscated. They could not be got easily and His Highness sent five guards of females with some of his asseels to the Begum’s house. Much violence was used. They dragged the Begum by her arms into the courtyard & dug up the floor, removed the jewels & took that with a list to HH. They found jewels estimated at 12 lacs & a pearl buzuband [armband] belonging to the Begum [worth] one lakh, 35,000 gold mohurs, 50,000 pagodas, 7 lacs and 92 thousand rupees, gold vessels including one [bejewelled elephant] howdah with pearls estimated at one lakh [rupees] ...26

  Despite her pleas, the new Nizam did nothing to help Sarwar Afza Begum, who was his senior wife’s grandmother. Instead, to add to her sufferings, he publicly humiliated his wife, Jahan Pawar Begum, Aristu Jah’s beloved granddaughter, at whose wedding the old Minister had wept and who now, exposed and unprotected since the death of Aristu Jah, began to be subjected to the same indignities as Sikander Jah’s other women. He also remained silent as Mir Alam ransacked in turn the houses and personal properties of each of Aristu Jah’s closest political associates, starting with his deputy Rajah Ragotim Rai.gi

  By the middle of 1804, James’s position must have seemed weaker than ever. Not only was he still effectively persona non grata in Calcutta, in the space of twelve months he had lost his two closest friends and allies in

  Hyderabad. In their place was the paranoid, sadistic and intermittently insane Sikander Jah, and James’s sworn enemy, the embittered and malevolent Mir Alam. Yet James’s position was actually a lot stronger than he might have believed.

  Unknown to him, the Company’s Court of Directors in London increasingly shared his feelings about the unnecessary and wasteful belligerency of Wellesley’s policies, though their concerns were motivated more by the crippling cost of the Governor General’s constant wars than by any ethical or moral considerations: while Wellesley’s conquests had annexed a wider swathe of territory than had the whole of Napoleon’s conquests at the same time in Europe, the effect was only to increase the Company’s deficits, which at this point were running at around £2 million a year.gj Indeed the Company’s overall debt, which had stood at £17 million when Wellesley first arrived in India, was now rising towards £31.5 million.gk The news of the cost of Lord Wellesley’s colossal new Government House in Calcutta was the final straw. Under Wellesley, the government of India, declared the Directors, had ‘simply been turned into a despotism’.

  The pressure was building up, and by the autumn of 1804 the final decision had been taken: Wellesley was to be recalled, and Lord Cornwallis sent out to India for a second term, at the advanced age of sixty-seven.27 He left England towards the end of 1804, although it was not until May 1805 that Wellesley received the news from London that he had been dismissed from office.

  One of the principal problems that had developed under Wellesley, as even his supporters acknowledged, was that no one now ever dared to cross the Governor General. As his brother Arthur put it to Henry Wellesley, the third of the brothers in India, ‘Who will speak his mind to the Governor-General? Since you and [John] Malcolm have left him, there is nobody about him who has the capacity to understand these subjects, who has nerves to discuss them with him, and to oppose his sentiments when
he is wrong.’28

  Of his senior officials only one man had dared to stand up to Wellesley, and even before Cornwallis had arrived in Calcutta, the new Governor General had been fully briefed about James Kirkpatrick’s principled stand against the worst excesses of Wellesley’s expansionist policies. Cornwallis instructed his assistants to arrange an interview with the brave and sensible Resident in Hyderabad as soon as possible. He also let it be known that he wished to see old General Palmer, whom he rememberedwell from his first term in India and whom he had reason to believe had also stood up to Wellesley on the Maratha business.29

  After five years of investigations, hostility and isolation, James’s ideas of co-existence and his more conciliatory approach to British—Indian relations were suddenly being looked at with new eyes. True, Cornwallis was no liberal, and he had been responsible for beginning the erosion of the social and economic status of Indians and Anglo-Indians,gl a process that had merely accelerated throughout Wellesley’s governor generalship. Nevertheless, the old Marquis did not believe in threats and belligerence as an instrument of policy, and saw no need for the sort of naked imperialism imposed by Wellesley; moreover he was appalled by the needless bloodshed and expenditure it had caused. His job, as he saw it, was to ‘avoid war [and] to establish perfect confidence [among Indian princes] in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British—the very policies James had pursued since becoming Resident at Hyderabad.30

  Though he did not know it, James’s future, contrary to all the indications, had in fact never been brighter.

  As the dolls’-house model of James’s new Residency building was being completed in the mahal, the real mansion was slowly beginning to rise from its groaning foundations a short distance to the north. Month by month throughout 1802, James had corresponded frantically with his friend James Brunton in Madras, making the final arrangements for the workmen he needed to build his new house. At the beginning of November there was still no sign of them, and James wrote to Brunton begging news of their progress, as he said he was ‘very anxious for the arrival of the architect & mechanics’.31 By the end of the month the first of the builders had begun to appear up the road from the port of Masulipatam, but many of the more skilled craftsmen were still missing: ‘despatch hither immediately,’ he begged Brunton in one letter, ‘one Head Maistry Bricklayer, one ditto Carpenter and one ditto Smith … Their wages are certainly high, but then I conclude that they are each perfect masters of their respective professions, and the head Maistry bricklayer is a tolerable architect.’32

  Steadily, one by one, the skilled maistry craftsmen arrived, and by the beginning of 1803 they had set to work building foundations. Over the course of the year, successive layers of stonework slowly begun to rise from the cat’s cradle of scaffolding and the piles of raw stonework which now lay about the bungalows of James’s garden. Amid the cries of the mynah birds and parakeets calling from the Residency char bagh came the more insistent tap-tap-tap of chisels on stone, the cries of the coolies and their wives swaying along narrow wooden walkways, and the yelling of the bellows boys and hammermen trying to be heard above the noise of the forge.

  As the pillars of the Residency portico slowly rose above the runnels of the Mahal and the Mughal garden, and as in due course the sculptors began to carve the arms of the East India Company on the great triangular pediment overlooking the new deerpark, filled now with elk and black buck, James looked on with ever growing satisfaction. Judging from his letters, the new Residency was an achievement of which he was hugely proud, though he always recognised how much he owed to his departed mentors, Nizam Ali Khan and Aristu Jah. In one letter to his old patron Sir John Kennaway he wrote how, having been awarded the land by the old Nizam with the assistance of Aristu Jah,It would of course still have been out of my power to have converted their liberal grant to any permanent or splendid use, had they not with still greater liberality readily undertaken to defray the expense of all the improvements which ensued, and which will, I trust, remain a lasting Monument to their generosity and munificence. They are now sadly succeeded by two men who are the very reverse of their regretted Predecessors and vie with each other in meanness and penury.33

  It was to Kennaway that James wrote the fullest description of his Residency ‘improvements’. His brother William, he seemed to accept, was not an aesthete, and would not have appreciated the labours he had undertaken to turn ‘one of the most dreary spots [in Hyderabad] into one of the most delightful in the whole Deckan’.34 Indeed in his letters to William, James describes his ‘improvements’ as rarely as he once described the progress of his amours. But Sir John Kennaway was a man of taste who understood the business of building a country house, as he had demonstrated on his return to Britain when he tastefully extended and beautified the exquisite Inigo Jones mansion of Escot near Exeter that he had bought with his Indian fortune.35 James knew about this, and with Kennaway he was not ashamed to show his pleasure and pride in what he had brought into being: ‘It would be as little in your power to recognise the place where you once resided, as it is out of the power of all who now see it to withhold their surprise and admiration,’ he wrote proudly in October 1804, as the building was nearing completion.

  Of the old plan, nothing now remains but the Hindoostanny Garden, which with great improvements, and an entire restoration of the Cypress Avenues that were cruelly condemned to the axe in my Brother’s time, now flourishes in renovated bloom. The bârâhdurry [the Mughal pavilion] where you used to dine, together with the Mahl or Sleeping Apartment that were behind it on the other side of the square fountain (now an octagonal one) are levelled to the ground, and in their place a Grand Mansion, erected according to the Chastest Rules of Architecture, and two stories high, now rears its proud head on the site of the antient Mahl, and is surrounded in front, and on its Eastern and Western Faces, with Pleasure Grounds, and a paddock well stocked with Deer, of nearly a mile in circumference.

  Of the magnificent new Residency House, he told Sir John:

  I will just inform you, that the House which the last Minister built for me, has a Grand Salon with a Gallery and Painted Ceiling, a Portico to the North of nearly the same dimensions, a verandah to the south, with two grand public staircases, and twelve Private Apartments, the whole finished and furnished in a stile suitable to the magnificence of the Structure and the Rank of the Princely Donors. Besides the above numerated apartments, there is an arched ground floor, some of the apartments of which are particularly cool and pleasant during the hot winds.gm

  Before the North Front of the House, there is an extensive oval sheet of water, which is constantly full, and round which a wide gravel walk with lamps at proper distances meet and terminate at the foot of a most stately flight of granite steps that lead up to the portico.

  As an accompaniment to this description—or rather as a corrective to its lameness—I propose furnishing you by the bye with views of all the Principal Buildings and Grounds at the Residency, which are even now being taken, by the Gentleman who most ably assisted me in laying them out.36gn

  This palace was to be James’s home, and he tried to persuade William to send his eldest daughter Isabella, now aged sixteen, out to him so that he could bring her ‘back with me to the Residency, which by that time will perhaps be one of the most delightful spots in India, as I think Isabella herself will allow when she has once seen it; and where I trust you will ultimately find yourself greatly mistaken in supposing that she cannot meet with an eligible match—while at all events, there can be no harm in trying the experiment’. James also insisted that he would pay Isabella’s Indian costs, whether she came to see him or just went to straight to Calcutta as part of the British ‘fishing fleet’ of girls who sailed out every year on the lookout for an eligible husband:go ‘Isabella, you know, is my daughter by adoption, and as such I beg you will make her over entirely to my management. It shall be my business and my delight, to defray her expenses... ’37

  As the Residency rose higher
and higher, and the prospect of actually moving into it grew closer, James began to think about how he would furnish his huge new mansion. He started by ordering an enormous carpet, sixty feet long by thirty wide, to be woven for the main durbar hall.38 He also purchased an enormous chandelier which the Company had bought from the ever impecunious Prince of Wales, and which had once hung in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. At the same time, thinking of the entertainments he could hold in the house, James asked his Madras agent to try to find him a bandmaster and ‘twelve lads from the orphan school’ to be trained up as musicians.39 He also got a job lot of music and musical instruments sent up, along with twenty cartloads of his much-missed potatoes, plus ‘a few armed peons to guard them on the road’, one of his odder consignments.40

  At the same time James continued sending orders to Europe for other more rare and valuable items that would allow him to fulfil his great dream of combining the lifestyle of a Mughal prince, the landed pursuits of a Georgian gentleman and the interests of a Renaissance man. Over the course of 1803 and 1804, these interests seem to become increasingly scientific, and James’s letters are suddenly full of requests for ‘a good Electrifying Machine with a curious apparatus such as would surprise and delight’ the nobles of the durbar, as well as a ‘box of chemical preparations’. The electrical apparatus apparently got lost in transit, but the ‘chemical box’ duly appeared.gp