White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Eight months later, by June 1805, James’s plans had solidified, and bookings had been made. Dr Ure had, like him, decided to send his two-year-old boy to England, but with the difference that in the Ures’ case, Mrs Ure was to go with the boy on the journey. James realised that this was an excellent chance for the children to be accompanied by a woman they knew and who also spoke Urdu. As he wrote to William:They leave this, please God for Madras, early in August, to embark for England on board (I believe) the Hawkesbury Indiaman, which is expected to sail with the rest of the Fleet early in September. They will be under the immediate charge of Mrs. Ure conjointly with whom I have bespoken about half the [ship’s] Round House [the most comfortable and spacious berths in the ship] and they will besides have for their immediate attendant a very careful, attentive European Woman of the name of Perry, the wife of one of the musicians of my Band, and whom I have hired for the trip to England. Supposing the Fleet to sail in September, you may reasonably expect them all March next, that is in about three or four months as I guess after your receipt of this letter.58

  The original plan had been for James and Khair un-Nissa to escort the children to Madras, ‘whither their respectable and amiable mother insists on accompanying them’, as James explained to William.59 Having said goodbye to the children, James and Khair would then travel on together to Calcutta for the marriage of William’s eldest daughter Isabella, who had not, as her father had feared, ended up a ‘returned empty’ but instead had been snapped up almost before she had left the gangplank by an ambitious young Company servant, Charles Buller.ha Buller had just been appointed Secretary to the Revenue Board, an important and powerfulposition, and the wedding, which was clearly going to be quite a grand one, was set for 26 August.

  But at the last minute there was a hitch: James appears to have been struck down by some sort of fever, in addition to which he seems to have suffered a recurrence of his hepatitis. Together, the two complaints relegated him to his bed and prevented him from travelling. Moreover, there was a political crisis brewing in Hyderabad due to the famine spreading across the Deccan that had followed close on the devastation left by Wellesley’s Maratha War. From his sickbed, James was determined to do what he could in the way of famine relief. As he reported in early August to an old childhood friend,in addition to the hardships and calamities of war, we have now to struggle against the horrors of famine which has already desolated the greatest part of the Dekkan, and is now advancing with rapid strides to this capital where the scarcity has for some time past been so great as to amount nearly to downright want and starvation. Shocking as such calamities are, they do not of course materially affect the higher classes of society, but it must be a hard and unfeeling heart that can witness such scenes without sharing in the misery and woe which they occasion, or without feeling a wish at least to fly from them, when relief as in the present case, is nearly fruitless and unavailing.

  Though thousands are daily fed from the fragments of my table, and from the pecuniary relief which is bestowed by my orders, still I am surrounded, whenever I go abroad, by multitudes of the most ghastly and pitiable objects of both sexes and of all ages that your affrighted fancy could picture...60

  As part of the famine-relief programme, the Nizam and Mir Alam had embarked, on James’s recommendations, on a grand programme of public works and construction as a way of providing employment and money to the starving famine refugees who now flooded into Hyderabad. As James explained to William:By the much admired style of my improvements at the Residency, I have awakened a passion for architectural improvement in the Meer [Alam] and Secunder Jah, both of whom I have persuaded to lay out a little of their enormous hoards in public and private works, both within and without the City … [These are] of considerable extent and some degree of Taste, which at one and the same time improves the Interior of Hyderabad, and gives bread to thousands of Poor, who would otherwise have starved in these dreadful times of scarcity.

  Among other works carrying on, and which are imitated on a humbler scale by rich Mussulman and Hindoo individuals, Meer Allum has constructed under the superintendence of an Engineer Lieut Russellhb a canal which supplies the whole city with water and is about to repair the Hoossein Sagar Bank, and restore the ancient canal that brought water to it from the River. He has also nearly completed a neat square of upstairs houses in front of his own mansion with a stone tank in the centre, a mosque, hammaum [Turkish bath] and madrassah [religious school] on one face, and a wide and long street of shops with upper apartments leading to this square, the tout ensemble effect of which is striking enough.hc

  Secunder Jah has begun something on a similar plan around his old abode, besides having a large Garden House in hand, partly European and partly Asiatic, upon the site of an ancient Garden at Lingumpilly. I shall endeavour in conclusion to get him to build a Bridge at the Residency end of the City, by way of a match to the Bridge at the West or Upper end of Hyderabad.61

  The famine crisis and his dangerously fragile health prevented James from leaving as planned throughout the early summer, and in the end Khair un-Nissa opted to stay in Hyderabad too, nursing her ailing husband—though James still hoped to recover sufficiently to rush to the coast and join the children in Madras for a few days before their scheduled embarkation in late August.

  So it was in late June that James and Khair un-Nissa began sadly to pack up for the children and to make preparations for them to set off from Hyderabad. They were then just five and three years old. Their parting from Khair un-Nissa was a terrible thing. She well knew how slim the chances were of her ever seeing them again, and of how changed they would necessarily be—both in their ways and attitudes and in their love for her—if she ever did. For the children, who were now old enough to understand that they were soon to be taken away from everything they had ever known, it was more traumatic still. Forty years later, Sahib Begum could still recall every detail of the separation:

  My mother has never had any rival in my affections. I can well recollect her cries when we left her & I can now see the place in w[hich] she sat when we parted—her tearing her long hairhd—what worlds would I give [now] to possess one lock of that beautiful and loved hair. Since I have been a mother myself how often have I thought of the anguish she must have endured in seeing us forced away from her ...62

  In Madras, James arranged for the children to stay with his maternal uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs William Petrie, the former of whom had just been appointed as Senior Member of the Council there. Without telling Khair, he had also organised for another man to visit the Petries while the children were staying with them: the Anglo-Irish painter George Chinnery.

  Chinnery, who went on to become one of the greatest of British Imperial artists, had been in Madras two and half years when he undertook James’s commission to paint a life-size portrait of the children for Khair. It was his biggest commission yet: probably his first full-length portrait since he had arrived in Madras to stay with his brother, and certainly his largest. Chinnery was a strange, volatile man, high-spirited and depressive by turns, and a certain emotional fragility seems to have been a family trait: his brother ended his life in a Madras madhouse.he Thanks partly to his commission from James, Chinnery went on the following year to paint Henry Russell’s father, Sir Henry Russell senior, the portly and bewigged Chief Justice of Bengal. While doing so he found himself closely watched by Sir Henry’s attorney, the diarist William Hickey, who left a perceptive pen-portrait of the painter at work:Mr Chinnery, like so many other men of extraordinary talent, was extremely odd and eccentric, so much so as at times to make me think him deranged. His health certainly was not good; and he had a strong tendency to hypochondria which made him ridiculously fanciful, yet in spite of his mental and bodily infirmities, personal vanity shewed itself in various ways. When not under the influence of low spirits, he was a cheerful, pleasant companion, but if hypochondriacal was melancholy and dejected to a degree.63

  James’s son and daughter cannot hav
e been in Madras for longer than three weeks, and children are always notoriously difficult sitters. Yet the completed painting is one of the masterpieces of British painting in India. In the richest and most gorgeous of colours, Chinnery presents the two small children in their Hyderabadi court dress, standing at the top of a flight of steps engulfed by the swags of a huge dark curtain. Sahib Allum—an exceptionally beautiful, poised, dark-eyed child—wears a scarlet jama trimmed with gilt brocade, and a matching gilt cummerbund; he has a glittering topi on his head and crescent-toed slippers. Round his neck hangs a string of enormous pearls. His little sister, who is standing one step up from Sahib Allum, and has her arm around her big brother’s shoulders, is discernibly fairer-skinned, and below her topi is a hint of the red hair that would be much admired in the years to come.

  Yet while Sahib Allum looks directly at the viewer with an almost precocious confidence and assurance, Sahib Begum looks down with an expression of infinite sadness and vulnerability on her face, her little eyes dark and swollen with crying. Chinnery clearly understood the intense sadness of separation that this family were going through: six months earlier his own brother had sent his three young children back to England, and he well knew the empty grief and silence that now filled the Chinnery house in place of their cries and laughter.64

  It was just after his children had arrived to stay with the Petries in late July that James learned the news of his sudden and rather unexpected popularity with the new regime in Calcutta.

  In the middle of the month, the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, had landed at Madras. There he had been briefed by Petrie on the state of politics in India, and especially on James’s single-handed resistance to Wellesley’s more aggressive policies, particularly his creation and subsequent mishandling of the Maratha crisis. As Petrie duly reported to James, he had told Cornwallis how none of Wellesley’s senior officials had had the courage to question the Governor General’s policies, but ‘that impartial justice and the love of truth obliged me to make an exception in favor of the Resident at Hyderabad who was the only one of all the Diplomatic Corps who had ventured to speak his sentiments freely upon the consequences he apprehended from Marquis Wellesley’s Political system respecting the Mahrattas’.65

  Cornwallis landed at Calcutta to replace Wellesley on 30 July 1805. He immediately made it clear that he wanted none of the Imperial paraphernalia Wellesley had insisted was his right. As he landed, according to William Hickey who was in the crowd massed on the shore to greet him, the bluff old soldier ‘looked surprised and vexed at the amazing cavalcade that was drawn up to greet him’—carriages, an escort, bands, staff officers, ADC and servants. ‘Too many people,’ said Cornwallis. ‘I don’t want them, don’t want one of them. I have not yet lost the use of my legs, hey? Thank God I can walk, walk very well, hey!’

  And walk he did. The following evening, according to Hickey, ‘while I was out taking my airing, I met Lord Wellesley in his coach and six, preceded by a party of Dragoons and a number of outriders, and in about ten minutes afterwards I met our new Governor General, Marquis Cornwallis, driving himself in a phaeton with a pair of steady old jogtrot horses, accompanied his Secretary, Mr Robinson, and without a single attendant of any description whatsoever’.66

  Less than a week later, soon after Wellesley had slipped off back to England,hf James received a note from this same Mr Robinson, inviting him to come straight up to Calcutta to meet the new Governor General and to give him a full briefing. The note was written in a very different tone to the sort of despatches he had become used to receiving from Wellesley’s Bengal staff. Robinson assured James that:His Lordship will … be very desirous of availing himself of your long experience, and intimate knowledge of the real state of the Nizam’s mind, in respect to the existing connection between the two Courts, as well as of the disposition of his Minister and principal advisers … [He hopes] to benefit by the continuance of the zeal for the public interest which, from the favourable terms in which you have been mentioned to him by Mr Petrie, he has every reason to suppose has ever been the rule of your conduct in the important station you have so long filled.67

  Robinson went on to hint that Cornwallis intended to bring about a radical change from Wellesley’s aggressive policies, saying that the new Governor General’s principal aim was to ‘establish perfect confidence in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British among Indian princes, and that ‘conciliation and kindness [were] the likeliest means of producing this impression on them’. He wanted ‘to avoid war’ and ‘to give every possible degree of facility’ to enable peace to return to India. With that view, he was planning to leave Calcutta as soon as was practicable to see for himself ‘the upper stations’ where the war against the Marathas had just burst into flame again. This was a new round of hostilities between the Company and the most powerful of the remaining Maratha leaders, Jaswant Rao Holkar, who at the end of August 1804 had succeeded in ambushing and wiping out a retreating British force on the modern Rajasthan-Gujerat border.hg Among the others Cornwallis wished to meet ‘up the country’ was General Palmer, who had recently been put out to grass in the badly-paid position of commander of a garrison at Monghyr, on the banks of the Ganges in Bengal.68

  A copy of the letter was sent by Robinson to Petrie, who wrote by express to James advising him not to delay. This, he implied, was James’s big chance. Petrie had, he said, given Lord Cornwallis all his ‘confidential notes and memorandums which I have taken over the last 3 years … In that detailed narrative you are particularly mentioned … The Marquis at this interview more particularly than before, desired that you would come to Calcutta and [said that] if he had left the place that you should follow him up the country … in great confidence I give you my opinion that there will be great changes... ’69

  James was still very ill, and Dr Kennedyhh advised him to stay in bed. But it was clear to James that his duty, both political and paternal, lay in getting to Madras as quickly as possible. His last piece of work before he left Hyderabad was to patch up some sort of peace with Mir Alam. The conciliatory letter he wrote has disappeared, but the Mir’s reply of 20 August acknowledges that James had supported him ‘on all occasions, in time of adversity, and in the hour of distress’. Because of this, Mir Alam gave his word that ‘I bind myself … to maintain and evince, during the remainder of my life, both in your presence, and in your absence … a regard to the claims of your amicable aid and assistance … I will never adopt any measure which may be inconsistent with the relations of friendship and attachment; or incompatible with your wishes.’70 The Mir also asked James a favour: that while he was in Madras he should help him purchase a property belonging to the Nawab of Arcot that he, Mir Alam, wanted for his personal use. James agreed to do so.

  A week later James kissed goodbye to his Begum and, gathering his strength, galloped off from Hyderabad at speed, hoping above hope that it might still be possible to get to Madras before his children set sail.

  The road from Hyderabad to the port of Masulipatam was one of the most beautiful in the Deccan.

  From the Residency it wound up past the great rounded boulders of the Banjara hills towards the tent lines of the Subsidiary Force cantonments. There it snaked alongside the gleaming new obelisks and pyramids of the Parade Ground Cemetery, where Kirkpatrick had buried his friend James Dalrymple five years earlier.

  From there the land started to fall, and the road followed the Musi—in August a great, brown, churning torrent newly filled with monsoon rain—steadily down towards the coast, out of the dusty cottonfields around Hyderabad, towards the wetter, greener, muggier expanses of paddy that girded the coast. It was a strange, unearthly landscape that linked the two, the Deccan plateau with the Coromandel coast. At first James passed through flat, newly harvested cotton-scrub dotted with coconut and toddy palms, where the land would erupt suddenly and without warning into low ridges of rock, great spines of tumbled boulders rising like the humps of a camel out of the planisphere plain
s.

  Early in the morning after a night of rain, the scent of flowering champa wafting from a roadside tree, James would find that a thin haze veiled the ground like a fine dupatta, blotting out the muddy road ahead but leaving a strangely disembodied forest of palm trunks rising out of the mist, silhouetting the half-naked toddy-tappers shinning up their trunks to harvest their gourds. Roadside caravanserais—strikingly solid and monumental after the floating world of the palms—lay empty but for colonies of monkeys scampering in from the road.

  James had not been out of Hyderabad for nearly three years, and as he galloped on towards the coast his eyes and ears would have been sensitive to the contrast with the urban and predominantly Muslim world he had inhabited for so long. Here and there, beside lakes choked with the blossom of kingfisher-blue lotus flowers, he would see the canopy of a chattri, or the crumbling sati monument marking the burning-place of the wife of some long-dead Hoysala warrior. Occasionally he would pass a Hindu woman with a flower in her hair, or a crocodile of dark-skinned villagers with their short lungis tucked up above the knee, all a reminder of just how fragile and isolated an Islamic island the city of Hyderabad really was. For this was Telengana, a fragment of the rural Hindu world that existed before the Muslim invasions, and which, in these more remote outposts, seemed unchanged and untouched by five hundred years of Muslim rule.

  At first, despite the rains and the muddy roads, the journey went well. The Krishna was the first major obstacle, for during the monsoon a crossing could sometimes be perilous; but James made it over without mishap. On 9 September, a week after James had set off, Henry Russell—left in charge at the Residency in his absence—picked up his pen to report the news from Hyderabad. He wrote:I was glad to hear from Addison [one of the junior Residency staff], who arrived here the day before yesterday, that you had nearly completed your journey to the River, without having experienced any serious inconvenience from fatigue.