White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Noor ool Omrah [also] sent me a long account which he had received of your progress from his manager at Nilgoonda, and which conveyed the first intelligence that we had received of your having actually crossed the Kistnah [Krishna River].

  I know not whether to wish you should still be at Madras when this letter arrives there. If the fleet should not have sailed for England, it will be gratifying for you to pass a few days with the little ones; but otherwise, I think it will be desirable for you to reach Calcutta as soon as possible.

  Having just sent to the Mahl to say that I was writing to you, and to know if the Begum had any message to send—she has desired, in reply, that I will convey to you her Salaam; and that I will assure you she is perfectly well, and anxiously hoping to hear of your safe arrival at Madras.71

  This was the last communication that would ever take place between James and his Begum. It is unclear exactly what happened after he crossed the Krishna, but he arrived in Madras much later than expected with his health in tatters, having missed the fleet by three days. When the town finally hove into view on 12 September, there was none of the hoped-for thicket of tall masts rising over the walls of the fort and the spire of St Mary’s church. The Lord Hawkesbury had set sail for England, with the rest of the convoy, on 9 September. On board, according to the passenger list published a week later in the Calcutta Gazette, were Mrs Ure and Master John Ure, Miss Katherine Kirkpatrick and Master William George Kirkpatrick. It was the first time that James’s children had been referred to by their new Christian names, names which they would bear for the rest of their lives. Never again would they be called Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum. The Lady of High Lineage and the little Lord of the World had shed their Muslim identities as finally and conclusively as a snake sheds its first skin.72

  James had missed his beloved children, and his body was badly weakened by the exertion of rushing to try to catch them in time. He had simply left too late, and with the roads boggy, with the incessant late-monsoon rains and the Krishna swollen to its full size, he had missed the chance to say goodbye.

  He spent two weeks in Madras trying to regain his strength, but without much success. As there seemed to be no point in waiting any longer, on 22 September he went over to see the Nawab of Arcot, and carried out Mir Alam’s errand as he had promised.73 Despite his fraying health, he then pressed on to Bengal and his appointment with Lord Cornwallis. On 25 September he caught the Metcalfe to Calcutta.74 By the time the ship docked to take on water at Masulipatam, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was very ill indeed.

  And then, quite suddenly, nothing.

  In a story powered by a succession of extraordinarily detailed and revealing sources—letters, diaries, reports, despatches—without warning the current that has supported this book suddenly flickers and fails. There are no more letters. The record goes dead, with James critically ill, delirious and feverish on the boat. The lights go out and we are left in darkness.

  Now and again there is a tiny surge, and the bulb flickers briefly into life. A single item in a newspaper: according to the passenger list published in the Calcutta Gazette of 10 October, Dr Ure was with James on the boat. After saying goodbye to his own wife and children, he must have come across James in Madras, seen the state he was in, and offered to accompany him to Calcutta. Also on board, though probably less welcome, were Captain and Mrs Samuel Dalrymple: Sam was a cousin of Kirkpatrick’s late friend Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, and in the absence of a clergyman James had married the couple in Hyderabad four years earlier. But as a senior member of the Subsidiary Force, Captain Dalrymple was probably not that well disposed towards James, and his wife Margaret was renowned as one of the biggest shrews in Hyderabad: Mountstuart Elphinstone thought her ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.75 But she was probably too busy nursing her husband to give much offence on this particular journey: Samuel Dalrymple was also ill, and like James was ‘proceeding to Bengal on a sick certificate’.76

  The Metcalfe reached Calcutta on Monday evening, 7 October, and James was carried ashore, now clearly dying. He was taken to the house of his niece Isabella, whom he had probably never met before. The last-minute delay in Hyderabad meant that he had just missed not only his children’s departure but also Isabella’s grand wedding to Charles Buller, which had taken place in St John’s church shortly before.

  Nursed by his niece and by Dr Ure, James clung on for another week—long enough to learn the bitter news that his last journey had been wasted: Cornwallis, pushing on into the interior of Bengal had also overdone it. He too had become critically ill, and died hours after meeting General Palmer, another loser in the great Indian lottery. As the General wrote to Warren Hastings:The poor Marquiss desired me to meet him on the river, so as that he might have one day’s conversation with me. I proceeded from Monghyr to Bhaugulpore where I met him, but he was so exceedingly exhausted that he desired Robinson to tell me that he found it impossible to converse with me, and wished to spare us the distress of seeing him in that condition … He was carried on shore where he has daily become more exhausted. He has lain for the last two days in a state of stupor & total insensibility … Thus are our fair prospects of rescue from impending ruin, & the restoration of our national character of justice, good faith & moderation blasted in the bud.77

  By the time Palmer completed his letter on the following day, 5 October, Cornwallis was dead. James need never have bothered leaving Hyderabad; his whole journey had been in vain. On 14 October James recovered sufficiently to add a few codicils to his will, which, fearing the worst, he had secretly carried with him.78 That night he fell into a coma. He died the early the following morning, 15 October 1805. He was aged only forty-one.

  That same evening, as was the custom in Bengal, where putrefaction sets in fast, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was laid to rest amid the obelisks and mausolea of Park Street Cemetery. It was a hurried but formal funeral, with full military honours. The coffin was escorted by His Majesty’s 67th Regiment, and Major General Sir Ewen Baillie read an oration recording James’s ‘meritorious public character’ and the ‘important services’ he rendered to the Honourable East India Company.

  But it cannot have been a very emotional affair. For James had died among strangers, away from everyone he loved, and far from everyone who loved him. His beloved wife, his two little children, his brothers, his friends, and his father: as he was laid in the muddy monsoon ground, not one of them even knew that he was dead. In place of tears, there was a cold military salute. The coffin was lowered, and the mud of the grave was filled in.

  And that was that. Calcutta was inured to death: as one Company man commented, ‘We have known instances of dining with a gentleman [at midday] and being invited to his burial before suppertime.’ Nowhere else would a death have caused less stir. As the saying went, two monsoons was the average life-span of a European in Bengal; one year, out of a total European population of 1200, over a third died between August and the end of December. Every year at the end of the monsoon in October, the survivors used to hold thanksgiving banquets to celebrate their deliverance. In her diary for 1826 a newly arrived Company wife wrote: ‘Here people die one day and are buried the next. Their furniture is sold the third. They are forgotten the fourth...’79

  In James’s case there was no furniture, but there was, bizarrely enough, the ‘Electrifying Machine’ which he had ordered to amuse the nobles of the Hyderabad durbar two years previously. It had somehow got lost in the post, and disappeared off to the China coast. The week of James’s death, it suddenly reappeared on the quayside at the port of Calcutta. On 28 October, before a single obituary had appeared, the Calcutta Gazette contained a large advertisement:

  TO BE SOLD AT PUBLIC AUCTION

  ON SATURDAY NEXT

  AN EXTENSIVE NEW AND VALUABLE

  SET OF

  APPARATUS FOR EXPERIMENTS ON

  ELECTRICITY

  MAGNETISM AND MAGIC

  BELONGING TO THE ESTATE OF

 
THE LATE LT COL JAMES ACHILLES KIRKPATRICK

  But there is no account of how much it went for; or to whom.80

  It was eighteen days before the news of James’s death reached Hyderabad. According to Henry Russell’s official despatch, it was announced to the durbar to ‘universal gloom’. There is no record of Khair un-Nissa’s reaction to losing her husband, but it can easily be imagined. She was, after all, still only nineteen, and James’s death meant that in all likelihood she would never again see her son and daughter. They would now be kept from her, and turned into little English children. This was the loss of everything she had ever worked for, or dreamed of. There was no future, and in such circumstances there could be no comfort.

  Her last love letter from her husband—at least the last to have survived—was in effect James’s will. Here he makes it clear that Khair had no need of his money: ‘The excellent and respectable Mother of my two natural children, who is named Kheir oon Nissah Begum, being amply provided for by Jaghiers and other possessions, both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees, I have not thought it necessary to provide particularly for her.’ But, James implies, this might be misinterpreted, possibly by Khair, possibly by their children, and possibly by his relations. So he added an unequivocal declaration of his love for her: ‘By way of proof however of my unbounded love and affection towards her, and as a last token of my Esteem and Remembrance, I hereby will and ordain the sum of ten thousand Hyderabad rupees to be paid to her out of my funds immediately after my demise.’

  A further ten thousand rupees was apportioned to Khair un-Nissa should there be any residue left to the estate after the children’s legacies had been paid. But Khair did not need such proof of her husband’s love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive—or not—without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James’s fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times. Four entirely separate inquiries had been carried out into his affair with Khair. At each stage he could easily have washed his hands of his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.

  That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.

  And there, abruptly and tragically, the story seemed to end.

  In the various short accounts of the romance that have been written over the last two hundred years, there have been a number of solutions proposed as to what might have happened to Khair un-Nissa. Some say she faded away and died of grief. Another version has it that she tried to follow her children to England, but was drowned off the coast of Sri Lanka. Another has her moving to Calcutta or Madras. None of this speculation seemed to be based on any hard documentary evidence.

  Four years into the research for this book, I was still none the wiser as to what happened to Khair. After James’s death, there was not one single reference to her in the hundreds of boxes that make up the Kirkpatrick Papers in the India Office Library in London. This seemed surprising, as William Kirkpatrick’s papers are fairly extensive for the years following 1805; but despite spending weeks hunting down and checking through every scrap of paper in his files, there was still not one hint as to Khair’s fate. There was no clue either in James’s overblown and oddly inappropriate epitaph, erected by the orders of the grieving Handsome Colonel on the south wall of St John’s church in Calcutta (where it still remainshi). The Kennaway and Palmer Papers are equally silent, as are the various Hyderabadi chronicles and histories which discuss the affair. Even Abdul Lateef Shushtari does not utter a word as to what happened to his young cousin. After James’s death, Khair un-Nissa just seemed to disappear, to vanish from history.

  But there turned out to be one source I had forgotten to check. In the summer of 2001, I drove up to Oxford to the Bodleian Library, to have a quick look at the Russell Papers. This voluminous set of manuscripts was deposited by Henry Russell’s grandson, Sir Arthur Russell, after the sale of the family’s mansion in the dog days of Spam and rationing following the Second World War.

  At first Russell’s papers were a slight disappointment. Although there was no shortage of huge volumes, all beautifully bound in blue leather, here too there was an inexplicable gap in the vital period between June 1805 and January 1806, filled only by a single letter from November. It was from Sir Henry Russell (senior) in Calcutta to his son Charles Russell in Hyderabad, and referred in passing to Kirkpatrick’s death as ‘the melancholy event that has lately happened’. But here again there was no mention whatsoever of the Begum.81

  Then I found a passage about a trip Henry Russell made to Calcutta in April 1806, in connection with his duties as an executor of James’s will. Russell was a in a bad mood: ‘I have been annoyed with boils ever since I came here,’ he wrote to his brother Charles, and, vain as ever, Transcendent art: whose magic skill alone

  Can soften rock and animate stone

  By symbol mark the heart, reflect the head

  And raise a living image from the dead!

  Cease from these toils and lend a chisel’s grace

  To filial virtues courting your embrace.

  These relate his pride, his transport and relief

  A father’s tears, commemorate, with grief.

  Still while their genial lustre cheers his breast

  Emits a ray that points to blissful rest.

  Hope built on faith, affections balm and cure

  Divinely whispers ‘Their reward is sure.’

  added: ‘[I] have therefore gone but little out.’ But on the opposite page was a passage that read plainly enough: ‘They left Cuttack with the poor Begum and the Moonshy a few days after me, and will probably arrive here about the 25th.’

  It was like coming up for air. After four years of searching, here at last was a lead. The Begum was alive, and heading for Calcutta in the company of Munshi Aziz Ullah. But what was she up to? I read on as fast as Russell’s faded and often illegible copperplate would allow.

  The shadows which seemed to obscure the documentation as James left Madras in September 1805, plunging the story into darkness at the most vital moment, dispersed as quickly as they had gathered. The detail was never so clear as it had been in the period before James’s death, with multiple sources from all sorts of different angles, and there remained a lot of unanswered questions. But after a month in the Bodleian, the outlines of an extraordinary story were quite clear. Moreover, Khair un-Nissa herself came into sharper focus than she ever had done in James’s discreet letters.

  The year which followed James’s death still remained a complete blank. But from the autumn of 1806, Khair un-Nissa re-emerged into the centre of the spotlit stage. Having never left Hyderabad before, she was in the process of making what must have been for her an epic pilgrimage: a one-thousand-mile journey to the other end of India, at the most inclement time of year, to mourn at her husband’s grave. This seemed an unambiguous mark of her fidelity and devotion to James, and a final proof, if proof were needed, that her involvement with him was not just a political ruse dreamt up by her mother and Aristu Jah to entrap the Resident. She loved him, after all.

  As the letters unfolded, it was clear that Khair was not alone on her expedition. Apart from the Munshi, Sharaf un-Nissa was coming too, though her mother, Durdanah Begum, now presumably in her seventies or even eighties, had opted to stay behind in the family deorhi in the old city. By good fortune, Russell was also in Calcutta at the time, and recorded everything in his letters. He travelled separately, and on separate business, but planned to meet the two Begums in Calcutta: two women beside whom he had lived, and whose notes and messages he had carried, but whose faces he had never yet seen.

  There was another plan afoot too: Fyze and General Palmer were going to be in Calcutta to meet the two Begums, as was James’s niece Isabella Buller, to whom Khair had sent presents of opal jewellery, but whom she had never met. It sounded as if this expedition was like so
me sort of rebirth for Khair, an escape from the empty cage of the Residency mahal, with all its memories, and perhaps a part of a necessary exorcism.

  There was certainly little indication at this stage, with Russell’s jaunty letters recording their progress, that the saddest and most tragic part of the whole story was still to come.

  IX

  When William Hunter sailed into Calcutta for the first time to take up a job as a Junior Clerk in the Company at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, he wrote home: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’ And this wasn’t just because (as one cruel commentator has suggested) he was in love—and had arrived fresh from Peckham.1

  In 1806 Calcutta was at the height of its golden age. Known as the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East, the British bridgehead in Bengal was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in India. Here a Nabob like Philip Francis could boast in the 1770s that he was ‘master of the finest house in Bengal, with a hundred servants, a country house, spacious gardens, horses and carriages’. Francis’s ‘wine book’, which survives in the India Office Library, gives an indication of the style in which such men lived: in one typical month, chosen at random, Francis, his family and his guests drank seventy-five bottles of Madeira, ninety-nine bottles of claret, seventy-four bottles of porter, sixteen bottles of rum, three bottles of brandy and one bottle of cherry brandy—some 268 bottles in all, though part of the reason for such consumption was the noxious state of the Calcutta drinking water, and the widespread belief that it should always be ‘purified’ by the addition of alcohol—and especially by a little tot of brandy.2