White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  James’s interest in chemistry, however, seems to have been soon overtaken by his growing fascination with astronomy. He hatched an ambitious plan to build an observatory on the roof of the Residency, and towards the end of 1804 he asked William to send out to him ‘a capital telescope for astronomical observations … The terrace of my new house is a noble observatory, and there is a gentleman here who has inspired me with a great love and admiration of the noble science of astronomy.’41

  gq This was none other than James’s old friend and now relation by marriage, Khair’s first cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari. At the end of 1804, Shushtari had taken advantage of the death of Aristu Jah and Mir Alam’s return to power to come back to Hyderabad from Bombay (where he had been briefly engaged in the textile trade42), to complete the writing of his great memoir, the Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam. Astronomy, like philosophy and jurisprudence, was one of the traditional accomplishments of Abdul Lateef’s polymathic branch of the Shushtari sayyids, and before coming to India he had spent several years studying the stars with one of his many learned cousins, Sayyid Ali Shushtari. Sayyid Ali, as remarkable a scholar as the rest of his clan, had been the chief astronomer in Baghdad when the young Abdul Lateef came to him for instruction.gs

  Shushtari came to recognise that not only were the British more knowledgeable than Persians on some astronomical matters, so, to his surprise, were the Indians: ‘Copernicus was more exact in astronomical observation than the traditional Muslim astronomers which makes the Muslim zij tables and our astronomers’ predictions less reliable. What appears to onlookers as the movement of the sun is in reality the movement of the earth … Moreover, the English reject the idea of astral influences … Even the Hindus have more knowledge than us in some matters of astronomy and mathematics’—a virtually unprecedented admission for the often Indophobic Abdul Lateef.43

  In some matters, however, Islamic astronomy was still well ahead of European learning, as other British amateur astronomers in India had learned to their surprise. Thomas Deane Pearse, who acted as Warren Hastings’ second during his famous duel with Philip Francis in 1780, developed an interest in astronomy in the late 1770s and regularly sent his observations to Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.gr In September 1783 a conversation with ‘a learned Musulman’ directed Pearse’s attention to a Persian text, The Wonders of Creation, which showed that Saturn (as Pearse wrote excitedly to the Secretary of the Royal Society in a long letter of the twenty-second of that month) was ‘possessed of what, till very lately, we were utterly ignorant of, I mean his satellites or ring. Hitherto only five satellites have been seen by Europeans, [but in this text] he is there represented as having seven … I am much inclined to believe that the [medieval Arabs] had better instruments than we have.’ The seventh satellite of Saturn was only formally ‘discovered’ by the astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) in 1789, six years after this correspondence.44 For the next few years Pearse’s letters contain intermittent references to his conversations with pundits and ‘learned Mussulmen’ on astronomical matters.†

  In a similar manner, although the exact details are now sadly lost, James and Abdul Lateef Shushtari seem to have been spending their nights on the Residency roof, busy comparing notes to see how Indian, Islamic and European astronomical systems could be reconciled, and what each could learn from the other. Certainly James’s letters between 1804 and 1805 become full of requests for such objects as ‘A Compleat Planetarium, Tellurian and Lunerian, all in brass showing the motions completely by wheel work, packed in a portable mahogany case’, and ‘a pair of 18 inch terrestrial and celestial globes’. But over and again his letters come back to the matter of the telescope, which he repeatedly tells William he should spare no expense upon, instructing him to take the very greatest care in shipping:No pains indeed should be spared in the package of the [telescope] and on the skill and judgement employed in the packing of the speculum of the telescope depends entirely the value of this instrument, which will be useless and of course worth not one farthing if the least injury befalls the speculum either from damp or from any other cause … It is of great importance that these packages should be stowed in some very dry and commodious part of the ship in some snug corner of the gun room, for instance. Pray let this point be carefully attended to, and the packages recommended if possible to the particular care and charge of the Captain and Chief Mate, or of both together … [If properly packed the telescope will] enable me to descry clearly and distinctly the spots on the sun’s dish, and the mountains and even the volcanoes on the Moon, Jupiter’s bells and Saturn’s ring, as plain as you can see the cross on the top of St. Paul’s...45

  James seems to have been determined that not only would the Residency become a place where British and Mughal ideas of civilised refinement would be fused, it would also be a place where, albeit in a typically amateur Enlightenment way, the intellectual life of the two peoples might begin to meet and enrich each other, to the mutual benefit and fascination of both.

  At about this time, James entrusted a small confidence to Sir John Kennaway: that despite his fears for the way India was going under Wellesley, and despite his professional difficulties, surveying his creation and the life he had made for himself in Hyderabad, he was now ‘as happy and comfortable’ as he could ever imagine himself being. In a rare letter to his elder brother George Kirkpatrick, with whom he had little contact,gt he echoed his feelings of intense happiness and fulfilment, noting, as he signed off:I shall just say that my health, though not very robust, is upon the whole as good as can be expected after a Residence of near 25 years in this Climate; that my circumstances (thanks to a bounteous Providenceguare flourishing beyond my most sanguine wishes; that my two children are daily improving in mind and body; and that I want nothing to complete my happiness, but the much coveted society of my absent friends and far removed but dearly beloved kindred and relations ...46

  Yet amid the now Eden-like idyll of the magnificent new Residency and its observatory, the elk and the grazing Abyssinian sheep, the laughing children playing with their ayahs, the gardens and the park, the Rang Mahal with its frescoed walls and its gently falling fountains—amid all this, there always lay a great unspoken sadness: the knowledge of the eggshell fragility of this creation, and the growing realisation that it could not last.

  Towards the end of January 1805, James’s health had suddenly gone into rapid decline. In July, Dr Ure wrote out a medical certificate for James to send to Calcutta. It read:This is to certify that Lieutenant Colonel Kirkpatrick, Resident at the Court of His Highness the Soubah of the Deccan, has been for the last eighteen months subject to severe Hepatic and Rheumatic Complaints, & although the disease of the Liver has always hitherto yielded to a course of Mercury, yet the attacks of late have been so frequent (almost every two months) and so much more difficult to remove than formerly that I solemnly & sincerely declare that according to the best of my judgement a change of air is essentially necessary to his recovery, and do therefore recommend that he may be permitted to go to the sea coast; & if necessary after his arrival on the coast eventually to proceed to sea.

  George Ure Surgeon to the Residency at Hyderabad Hyderabad 13th July 180547

  James hoped that a quick sea voyage would do the trick and restore him to health; but he feared that, realistically, it was unlikely to do more than ‘patch up my constitution to a certain degree’.48 He was sufficiently worried to write a will, dividing his now considerable fortune between his children, his nieces and ‘the excellent and respectable … Kheir oon Nissah Begum’.49 Moreover he realised that if the voyage failed to cure him, in the medium term the only other two options were dying (pretty promptly) in India, or retiring to England. His spirit might feel completely at home in India; but his wretched body, less malleable, seemed to need England.

  In which case, he wondered, what would happen to his beloved Khair un-Nissa? Most Indian wives and consorts did not accompany their husbands back to Britain when they le
ft the subcontinent at the end of their service, though there was no law preventing it. When the Mughal travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan visited London at about this time he described meeting several completely Anglicised Indian women who had returned with their husbands and children. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarrol, especially impressed him: ‘She is very fair,’ he wrote, ‘and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India.’ He added: ‘The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans.’50

  But other attempts to take Indian wives back to England ran into disastrous and tragic problems. Another Indian woman whom Mirza Abu Taleb Khan met and admired in London was Fyze Palmer’s younger sister from Lucknow, Nur Begum: ‘Noor Begum who accompanied General de Boigne from India … was dressed in the English fashion, and looked remarkably well,’ he wrote. ‘She was much pleased with my visit, and requested me to take charge of a letter for her mother, who resides at Lucknow.’51 But Khan was being discreet here, for he does not say what James and Khair knew well, and what he must have known too: that Nur’s marriage had not survived the transition to England, and though she might look ‘remarkably well’, her life was in ruins.

  Within a few months of General de Boigne’s arrival in England in May 1797, Nur had been dumped out of sight in the tiny village of Enfield, outside London, with her two small children Anne and Charles, to which she voluntarily added the extra burden of the orphaned half-Indian son of Antoine Polier, General Palmer’s white Mughal friend from Lucknow who had been killed two years earlier, soon after his return from India, in the terror that followed the French Revolution. De Boigne, meanwhile, had taken up with a beautiful and spirited young French émigrée aristocrat (and, though he only discovered this later when it was too late, a completely unprincipled fortune-hunter), Adèle d’Osmond, whom he married in June 1798, thirteen months after arriving in England with Nur.

  Nur’s household receipts, which survive in de Boigne’s family archive in Chambéry, make painful reading: at the same time that ‘Mrs. Begum’ (as she is referred to in the accounts) was expected to subsist on an allowance of £200 a year—with which she had to live, pay her rent, the children’s school fees and all other expenses—de Boigne was cruising around Britain spending, in a single weekend, £78 on necklaces, clasps, bracelets and earrings for his youthful new European wife.gv Fyze and the General had been deeply dismayed to hear of Nur’s fate, and had told James about it. This cannot but have added to his worries about how Khair would fare if a return to England was forced upon him.

  There was at least some hope that James’s uncertain health could recover; but there was another, greater, sadness in the air, and from this it seemed that there was no escape. Almost from the day of her children’s birth, Khair un-Nissa had known that they would be taken from her when Sahib Allum reached the age of five, and sent away over the Black Watergw to England. There they would spend the rest of their childhood away from her, receiving an English education—an idea to which she was instinctively and bitterly opposed. James looked forward to the children’s departure with as much dread as she did, but thought that it had to be. In 1801, soon after the birth of Sahib Allum, he wrote to William: ‘I will certainly endeavour to send my little Hyderabadi to England as soon as possible: but it will go to my soul to part with him, to say nothing of the opposition I may expect to meet with on this point in another quarter in spite of any agreements.’52

  In sending his little Hyderabadi Muslim children to Britain without either of their parents, James was not (at least in his own eyes) acting heartlessly: on the contrary, he believed he was making a considerable sacrifice for the sake of his children. It was widely and probably correctly believed at the time that the only way Anglo-Indian children had the chance of making something of their lives was if they received a pukka English public-school education. English racism against ‘country born’ Anglo-Indian children was now becoming so vicious in India as to make this provision very necessary. Without it, their options were limited in the extreme, and they were condemned to sink to the margins, pushed away and ostracised by both British and Indian society.

  One of the most moving testaments to this is General Sir David Ochterlony’s letters concerning his two daughters by Mubarak Begum. These were written around 1803, and in them he discusses the question of whether it would be better to bring the girls up as Anglo-Indian Christians and attempt to integrate them into British society, or instead to educate them as fully Muslim Indians, and to propel them as best he could into the parallel world of late-Mughal society. ‘My children are uncommonly fair,’ wrote Ochterlony, ‘but if educated [in India] in the European manner they will in spite of complexion labour under all the disadvantages of being known as the NATURAL DAUGHTERS OF OCHTERLONY BY A NATIVE WOMAN—In that one sentence is compressed all that ill nature and illiberality can convey, of which you must have seen numerous instances during your Residence in this country.’53

  If he were to make his daughters Christian and keep them in British company, argues Ochterlony, they would be constantly derided for their ‘dark blood’; but he hesitates to bring them up as Muslims, with a view to them marrying into the Mughal aristocracy, as ‘I own I could not bear that my child should be one of a numerous haramgx even were I certain that no other Disadvantages attended this mode of disposal & were I proof against the observations of the world who tho’ unjust to the children, would not fail to comment on the Conduct of a father who educatedhis offspring in Tenets of the Prophet.’ The letter to Major Hugh Sutherland, another Scot in a similar position who had eventually opted to bring up his children as Muslim,gy ends rather movingly: ‘In short my dear M[ajor] I have spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to come to a positive Decision.’54

  A similar dilemma faced James. Six months after Sahib Allum’s birth, James had written to his brother in Madras asking him to take especial care to look after his other unnamed ‘Hindustani’ son when William arrived in England. In the course of the letter James reflects with pain on the racism then prevalent among the British in India, which he well knew to be especially harsh towards children of mixed race, and he writes of the worries this causes him for his young baby’s future.gz At first he believed the solution to the problem lay in sending Sahib Allum to join his cousins in Britain, where colour prejudice was still much less prevalent than among Company servants in India: ‘I still retain the opinion I expressed to my father,’ he wrote to William in September 1801,

  of [the Hindustani boy’s] future happiness and perhaps success in life, being best consulted by providing for him if possible in the country he is now in [i.e. England], rather than in his native one [India]. And that for the very same reason—namely the illiberal prejudices entertained [by the British in India] against children born of native mothers,be their colour ever so fair, their conduct ever so correct, or their spirit ever so indomitable.

  In point of complexion my little boy here has greatly the advantage over his brother in England being as fair as it is possible I conceive for the offspring of any European female to be, and yet [here James scored out his first attempt to express himself][before beginning again:] he would I have no doubt, be exposed to the same illiberal objection and obloquy, should he ever be obliged to seek his fortunes in the country which gave him birth. Among other circumstances which render this child peculiarly dear and interesting to me is the striking resemblance which he bears to my dear father. He is indeed, in every respect, a most lovely infant ...55

  Over time, however, with the example of the Anglo-Indian Captain William Palmer’s growing power and success in Hyderabad before him, James seems to have reconsidered his assumption that his children’s future necessarily lay in Britain. Without an élite British education, and the éclat that brought, Anglo-Indian children would alm
ost certainly suffer from the worst prejudices of both races, just as James feared; but with it, as Palmer’s career seemed to show, it might be possible for his children to use both sides of their racial inheritance to their advantage, and to be equally at ease in both worlds. With due preparation, in other words, their future might well lie in India.

  For this reason, by the beginning of 1804 James had begun to write to the Handsome Colonel to find out if the old man was still active and energetic enough to add two more grandchildren to his collection, and to explain in some detail his hopes and ideas for their education: ‘On the subject of the girl’s education,’ he wrote to his father in October 1804,I shall at present content myself with expressing a wish that it should be private—that is not carried on through the means of a boarding school. But with regard to the Boy, in whose infantine lineaments I delight in tracing your likeness, which to me appears very striking, he cannot perhaps be sent too early to a public seminary, where I shall be happy to learn that he emulates the good example which I have no doubt will be set him by his kinsman the young stranger announced to me in your letter.56

  This latter clause seems to be a reference to what must have been the last of the Handsome Colonel’s many illegitimate children, fathered—if this is the correct interpretation—while the old Lothario was in his early seventies. In the same letter, James explained that when he sent the children to England, ‘as my own state of health has long required a temporary change at least of climate, I propose if I can obtain leave of absence for the purpose, to accompany them myself to the Presidency in December or January next, and after seeing them safe on board, to take a cruise to sea, as the most likely means of recovering a sufficient stock of health to enable me to return to my station’.57