White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  The letter to Hyderabad arrived too late to catch Charles; he had already set off to Masulipatam to break the news to the Begum. But the express note to Alexander got there just in time. After a week’s journey, the ever-obedient Charles read it and headed straight back to Hyderabad without even waiting to pay a courtesy visit to Khair un-Nissa.

  But it was only a reprieve, a putting-off of the inevitable. Five months later, Charles was back, on the same errand. Jane Casamajor had changed her mind. She eventually married Henry Russell in St Mary’s church in Madras on 20 October 1808. ‘Dear Jane,’ wrote Henry to his brother, ‘has made me love her ten times more than I ever did before... ’76

  Russell had fully briefed his brother on the story that was to be told to the Begum, and it involved what he described as an ‘innocent deception’—perhaps something along the lines that he had been forced into the marriage by his father, and had no option but to submit. Whatever lie it was, it did little to soften the blow, for the news shattered Khair un-Nissa’s already fragile composure and self-assurance. Henry was pleased that Charles had kept his description of the encounter to a minimum: ‘Your account of what passed between you and the Begum was quite sufficiently full to be satisfactory, and not so detailed as to be unbearably painful to me. The subject is a distressing one; and I shall therefore say as little upon it as I can.’ But he still wanted to know one detail more: ‘You said that you went to see the Begum again the day you left Masulipatam. Did you see her? Was she more composed and more satisfied of the necessity of submitting to what you had told her the previous day?’77

  Charles’s reply does not survive. But the answer to his question is quite clear, as Khair un-Nissa’s subsequent story shows.

  With that final conversation, the curtain descends once again on the Begum, but this time not for a month, or a year, or even two years, but for five. In that time Russell wrote thousands of letters, but barely one that mentions Khair un-Nissa. And with his gaze turned elsewhere, she again vanishes from history.

  Following his abandonment of the Begum, Russell’s own life was engulfed in tragedy. Jane Casamajor died quite suddenly of fever only six months after their marriage. For once something genuinely seemed to have moved Russell, and his grief was absolute. He wrote to his brother Charles: ‘Your poor Jane, your poor sister, my wife, my comfort, my darling, my everything, is gone. At ten o’clock this morning her sweet, her heavenly spirit left the frail but lovely tenement it had inhabited; and all hope but her happiness in a better place is now fled. I felt the last vibration of her pulse, I heard the last faint flutter of her breath; and she expired on my arm.’78

  He tried to continue at Madras, but gave up and returned to England for a year, spending much of the time working on poems to his late wife and writing endless drafts of her epitaph. On his return in 1809 he was appointed briefly to the Pune Residency before, in 1810, finally gaining his long-held ambition of becoming Resident at Hyderabad.

  His first act was to summon Aman Ullah from retirement in Benares and to offer him place of honour at the Residency (his elder brother, Aziz Ullah, was now too old to begin work again). The old munshi immediately accepted, but died on the journey, just ten days’ march from Hyderabad.in

  Mir Alam had died of his leprosy on 4 January 1809, and it was at this point that Khair un-Nissa and her mother appear to have limped back to Hyderabad from Masulipatam, and attempted to resume their life in the family deorhi. Fyze Palmer also reappears in Hyderabad around this time, spending time with her son William—and presumably with Khair—in the extensive new Palmer mansion, known as the Kothi, facing the main gate of the Residency.

  After the return of the two Begums to Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa makes occasional fleeting appearances in Russell’s letters: at one point, for example, he receives a petition from one of Nizam Ali Khan’s widows, Pearee Begum, on receiving which he tells Charles: ‘Pearee Begum’s letter I will answer, if necessary, after my arrival at Hyderabad … She is a particular favourite of the Old Begum’s, and so … I should not like to offend her by shewing any sort of slight to her favourite.’79 On another occasion Sharaf un-Nissa sends Henry a broken watch and a chipped locket containing James Kirkpatrick’s hair. Russell succeeds in mending the watch, but manages to lose the precious locket, telling the old Begum, somewhat insensitively, that ‘if she sends some more hair he will have another made’.80 There are also references to Henry having finally received the Chinnery of the children from Calcutta and promising to send it over to the old Begum. But while Sharaf un-Nissa seems to have intermittently kept in touch with Russell, her daughter—significantly—did not.

  It was not until the late summer of 1813 that Khair briefly re-entered Russell’s life. The occasion was the visit of an aristocratic Scottish tomboy from the Isle of Lewis named Lady Mary Hood. Mary Hood had temporally deserted her rich, elderly admiral husband and gone off on her own around India, breaking a series of diplomatic hearts as she passed: Mountstuart Elphinstone, William Fraser and Henry Russell himself all seem to have been, to different extents, a little in love with her. During her stay at Hyderabad, Mary had asked Russell if she might meet some ‘Hyderabadi women of rank’, and he brought Khair and Fyze to see her at the Residency, though whether he attended the meeting and actually saw Khair face to face after all that had passed between them is not clear.

  Either way, Lady Hood was entranced by the sadness, beauty and intelligence of the ‘poor Begum’,io while Khair in turn seems to have liked Lady Hood enough to promise to make her a dress. This dress weaves its way in and out of Russell’s letters over the following three weeks: initially it was too small, and Lady Hood asked Russell to ‘let the Begum be told with my regards & salaams, that if she will allow me I will make a body for the dress myself at Madras to fit me, & send it to her to be trimmed, as I know the one she has kindly made already for me is not large enough for a Scotch princess’.81 But in all these letters there is no hint of Khair un-Nissa’s former engagement with the world. She appears instead like some broken butterfly, wounded, and unhealed by the passage of time.

  At her most vulnerable point, she had opened up her heart, only to be seduced, banished and then betrayed. Five years had passed since she had been abandoned by Russell, but despite her beauty and her fortune, she had never remarried.

  Khair’s last recorded action, towards the end of September 1813, was to send a brief note to her former lover—her first for five years—simply telling Russell that she was dying.

  Russell, for once, rose to the occasion. Perhaps struck with remorse he invited the Begum back to the Rang Mahal, to end her life where she had once been happy. By 1813 those days must have seemed far distant to her: it was, after all, eight years since she had been widowed, eight years since she had kissed first her children and then her husband goodbye.

  Khair un-Nissa—already fading—was duly carried in, and the couch on which she had once given birth to her daughter now became her deathbed. There was no clear cause for her condition: she just seems to have finally turned her face to the wall. Maybe revisiting the Residency—with the flood of memories it must have brought on—had been too painful. But she did not recover, and over a period of two weeks she got weaker and weaker, and her pulse fainter and fainter. She finally slipped away, without pain, on 22 September 1813. She was aged only twenty-seven. By her side, holding her hand to the very end, were Fyze Palmer and Sharaf un-Nissa.

  The following morning a clearly shocked Russell picked up his pen to break the news to Lady Hood: ‘I am sure you will be very much concerned to hear of the poor Begum’s death which happened yesterday morning,’ he wrote.

  What her complaint was he [the doctor] hardly knows even now. On the very first day she sent to me to say she was unwell, her hands were cold and clammy, and her pulse so quiet that Mr Currie [the new Residency medicip] could not count it. She was unable to take any sort of nourishment, and said all along that the feelings she had were such as to convince her she would not recover.
She died [two weeks later] in the Hindoostanee House [the Rang Mahal].

  Her mother and all her relations and friends were with her, and according to Mahommedan customs, must remain in the house in which she died until they have performed some particular ceremony which is observed on the fortieth day.

  You cannot imagine anything so distressing as the old lady’s situation. More sincere or dignified grief I never witnessed. She was quite wrapped up in her daughter, and seems to feel that the only object she lived for was taken from her; yet her calmness and composure were really admirable. I always thought her a woman of a very superior mind. The Begum was buried by the side of her father, in a garden belonging to the family on the opposite side of the city from the Residency, and her funeral was attended by every person of rank in the place.82

  Six weeks later Russell reported that Fyze (whom he calls by her Mughal title, the Sahib Begum) was still ‘I fear in great distress. She has shut herself up entirely ever since the Begum’s death, and will not see anybody. The people about her have not ventured to tell her of the death of another relation which happened about a fortnight ago, and she has not yet mustered the resolution to see the old lady [Sharaf un-Nissa]. I wish for both their sakes that the first meeting were over. She says she has lost the only real friend she ever had; and I suspect from what I have heard of her disposition and habits, that it is truly the case.’

  Sharaf un-Nissa was also completely inconsolable. Russell told Lady Hood that he had shown the letter she had written him about Khair to her mother:She was very much affected, but very much gratified, and desired me, with tears running down her cheeks, how deeply she felt the interest and friendship with which you expressed yourself about her daughter … I am sure that if you had seen the old lady in the scenes which I have seen her you would think as highly of her as I do. I never saw anybody feel more acutely or make greater efforts to appear composed. She is a woman of a lofty mind, and of a heart and understanding of a very high order indeed. She and her daughter were the only native women of birth I ever had the opportunity of being personally acquainted with. In any country and any class of life they would have been extraordinary persons; and although the women of rank in India are very superior to what Europeans generally think, there are few, I imagine, if any who are equal to them. I never recollect an instance of a death at Hyderabad which excited so general an interest or called forth such marked and universal tributes of respect... 83

  Those are the final words we hear of Khair un-Nissa, the Most Excellent of Women, beloved wife of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and Henry Russell’s rejected lover. She had lived the saddest of lives. At a time, and in a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives, Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion. Her love affair had torn her family apart and brought her, her mother, her grandmother and her husband to the brink of destruction. Then, just when it seemed that she had, against all the odds, finally succeeded in realising her dream, both her husband and her children were taken from her, for ever, and in her widowhood she was first disgraced, then banished, and finally rejected. When she died—this fiery, passionate, beautiful woman—it was as much from a broken heart, from neglect and sorrow, as from any apparent physical cause.

  There is no evidence that Khair un-Nissa received any direct messages from her children after their departure in 1805. It is however recorded that both she and her mother wrote desperate letters to England, begging and pleading for the children to be sent back to her.84 No reply ever came to these letters, until, ironically enough, six weeks after her death. For in November 1813, a letter and a pair of portraits of her children finally arrived in Hyderabad. It was of course too late for Khair, but Russell recorded the reaction of Sharaf un-Nissa to the pictures of the ‘poor Begum’s’ children: ‘I like them very much,’ he wrote to Lady Hood,and we all think the likeness strong, though it is eight years since the children left us. The girl is handsome, and seems to be getting like her mother, as everybody here who remembered her mother as a child always said she would be. The boy is exceedingly handsome, and very like his father. The old lady is delighted with the picture, and I do not believe her eyes were off it for five minutes during the first day she had it … Her notion seems to be that the children when they grow up will themselves come to take up their property [the estates they had now inherited from their mother]. It would be cruel to darken the only bright spot that the prospect of her life affords her … The boy was decidedly the grandmother’s favourite, and I confess that I have not the courage to tell her how doubtful I think it whether she will ever see him again... 85

  Yet even here the story does not quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final, extraordinary coda.

  X

  After being helped into the roundhouse of the Lord Hawkesbury at Madras, Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum—or, as they were now known, Katherine Aurora and William George Kirkpatrick—had to endure six long months on board ship, most of it out of sight of land.

  During the voyage they found themselves under the watchful eyes of a posse of four guardians: the motherly figure of Mrs Ure; an equally well-rounded though rather younger (and unnamed) Indian ayah; Mrs Perry, the elderly wife of one of James’s bandsmen; and another faithful Hyderabadi manservant of James whom the children knew from the Residency. As they rounded the Cape, crossed the Equator and headed for the temperate climes of the north, and as the returning English passengers began to relish the familiar sensation of the cool Atlantic climate, the utter strangeness of the bleak, foreign, northern world they were heading towards must have slowly dawned upon the children.

  For those Company servants who had spent many years in India, the barren chill of England held in the cold embrace of winter often came as an unexpected shock: after a decade in the East, and after months of longing for an imagined Britain of Eden-like beauty, the Scottish artist James Baillie Fraser had been horrified to find that ‘the brown of winter shrouded all, a gloomy welcome to the returned wanderer … all about seemed as desolate as a deserted city’.1 To those brought up in the light and warmth and colour of India, who had never before felt the cold, or seen the thick impenetrable murk of an English fog, the February half-light would have seemed all the more unnerving and uninviting.

  The reception that awaited the party at their place of disembarkation ‘some four or five miles from Portsmouth’ could well have compounded this feeling of loss and despair. According to the somewhat condescending George Elers, a captain in the 12th Regiment of Foot, who happened to be travelling home on the same boat:Poor Mrs Ure who had her own infant and the care of Colonel Kirkpatrick’s children—together with a faithful old black man (who was very fond of them), a black nurse, and an English maidservant—felt herself in a very helpless and unprotected state; she had, she said, property in shawls, jewels and other valuables to the amount of upwards of £2000 (and the Custom House officers were expected on board at any minute), and all this property was liable to be seized.iq We were only allowed to take one trunk each on shore. She began to cry and bewail herself, so I told her to be comforted, that I would not leave her until I saw her safe in London with her friends, and would save all her property if I possibly could, but she must place the whole of it, with the key, under my care.

  I had but twenty guineas in my purse to take me to London, and I asked if she had sufficient to pay her expenses to London, for that I should want a good deal to bribe the Customs House officers so as to get her trunk passed. She told me she had plenty of money, and she begged me to arrange everything for her. I then got a large boat and got my black and white party safe on board …

  When the boat grounded on the beach at Portsmouth, I leaped on shore. The Customs House officers seized our trunks and wheeled them off to the Customs House. Some of the officers se
eing the poor fat black nurse, handled her very roughly, thinking from her large size that she had shawls concealed about her person. She poor creature, not speaking a word of English and not understanding their motives, got dreadfully alarmed... 2

  Elers bribed the officers with a massive twenty guineas of baksheesh and in due course delivered the children to the London townhouse of the Handsome Colonel in Fitzroy Square, an area of the capital perennially popular with returned nabobs and old India hands. The children’s uncle William was there to meet them too, luckily perhaps, as it is unclear how much English they would have understood at this stage, and after their parting from the bilingual Mrs Ure, William’s linguistic gifts may well have been much needed. Less than a month later, the two Muslim children were baptised Christian on 25 March 1806 at St Mary’s church, Marylebone Road.3 Another last link with India was severed.

  The children grew up at Hollydale, the Handsome Colonel’s rambling country house near Keston in Kent, with frequent visits to Exeter to see their uncle William and all their West Country cousins. But inevitably they ‘pined for their native surroundings’; and they were forbidden from writing to their mother, grandmother or any of their Indian family, who in turn ‘wrote pathetic appeals to send them [back] out … probably it was feared that, if once they went there, the call of the blood might make complications’.4 Sadder still, ‘in after years the daughter told her own children how long she and her brother had pined for the father and mother they remembered, and longed to get away from the cold of England to Hyderabad, and were sad at hearing that they were not to go there again, which was all they could understand of their father’s death’.5