White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  The ostensible reason for Russell’s summary removal was the death of two brigands whom, without any reference to the Nizam’s government, Russell had ordered to be severely flogged; both men had died the following day from the brutality of the wounds inflicted on them. This was however something of a pretext: Russell had become a major embarrassment to the Company, and was widely suspected of massive corruption and bribe-taking, something that the astonishing fortune with which he returned to England would seem to bear out: having come into the job of Resident with total savings of £500, he managed to ship home a fortune of £85,000, which he had impressively succeeded in accumulating in just nine years on an annual salary of £3400.41

  During his time as Resident, Russell had presided over a dramatic souring of relations between the East India Company and the Hyderabad durbar. Despite a personal fondness for Hyderabad, Russell was always personally ambitious, and in a bid to impress his masters in Calcutta he had imposed a series of damaging new treaties on the Nizam, forcing him to pay for ever larger and more unnecessary numbers of British troops at a total cost of forty lakh rupees a year—a sum which amounted to nearly half the entire tax revenue of Hyderabad. This vast fortune all went to pay the salaries of the enlarged Subsidiary Force and Russell’s new Hyderabad Contingent, for which the Nizam had no use and over which he had in reality little control. Unlike the treaties James had signed, which at least initially were hugely useful to Hyderabad, and which did much to preserve its independence, Russell’s not only provided no tangible benefit to the Nizam, they severely undermined and threatened the entire financial stability of his dominions.

  Count Edouard de Warren was a French soldier of fortune working for the Nizam and a relation by marriage of Russell’s second wife.iy He had however little liking for the gross injustices over which Russell presided:Thus we see the ruler of a country larger than France … the finest jewel in the broken crown of the Moghuls … entirely deprived of his liberty, held in utter check-mate, without a soldier of his own worth the name, barely able to count on the loyalty of a few hundred mercenaries, the dregs scraped from distant lands—Sikhs, Arabs, Afghans—who look like robbers lounging at his palace gate, dressed in rags and sporting wretched weapons—is it any surprise then, that the Nizam spends the entire year shut away in his harem, seeking to forget that he is a prince, by drowning himself in vicious pleasures? … [Such is the hatred now felt for Europeans in the city] that no European can normally enter Hyderabad dressed in European costume, whether on foot, on horse or in a palanquin, without exposing himself to the insults of yogis, the execrations of fakirs and the real risk of physical harm from the mob.42

  None of this surprised de Warren, as the British in Hyderabad, especially the soldiers, were now in the habit of behaving with disdain and extreme rudeness to their hosts. He was especially horrified by the behaviour and lack of manners of the British officers at a levée given by the new Minister, Raja Chandu Lal:The entertainment was above reproach … but as a European I was disgusted and ashamed by the lack of refinement, indeed the gluttony, shown by English officers of all ranks and ages: they threw themselves on the French wines, especially the Champagne, with intemperate greed which must have seemed doubly despicable to our native hosts, so sober, grave and courteous, so full of human dignity. Yet again, it was these northern conquerors who were the real barbarians. Even the Resident was aware that his party was transforming itself into a herd of swine, and before the metamorphosis was complete, hurriedly rose from the table and brought the meal to an end.43

  One person de Warren felt particularly sorry for was Fyze’s son, William Palmer. A great deal of Russell’s money had come from his secret and illegal partnership in Palmer’s extraordinarily successful bank, which by 1815 had grown to become the most successful business operation in India outside British control. Henry and William had initially been friends as well as business partners, and Russell had often dined at Palmer’s rambling mansion, known as Palmer’s Kothi. There he would pay his respects to Fyze (or the Sahib Begum, as he always referred to her), who had moved in after the old General had died in 1816. Fyze was eventually buried by her son in a pretty Muslim tomb surrounded by gardens and a small mosque a little to the north of the Kothi.iz But Russell, worried that his illegal financial links with the bank would be exposed, had eventually fallen out with Palmer, and put in train a series of restrictions on Palmer’s business that eventually brought about its complete and disastrous collapse soon after he left Hyderabad.

  De Warren was disgusted by the way Russell and the other British had treated Palmer, and wrote an affectionate description of him in his book L’Inde Anglaise, in which he contrasted the starchy manners of the Residency with the elegance and refinement of Palmer’s mansion:At the Residency, the manners are stiff, cold and polite, and conversation choked in half-whispers, as in a European court; but nearby is the more oriental court of the Palmers, where reigns the politeness of the Persians, the dignity of the Moghuls, the hospitality of the Arabs. At William Palmer’s table, there are always some 20 places laid for any visitors who might chance to come by, and at the head of the table presides Palmer himself, who in spite of the original sin of being half-caste, is ennobled by his own genius. Small in stature and as black as the servant standing behind his chair, he calmly smokes his hookha while running his eye over papers written in the Persian or Nagari script and stacked next to the luncheon he barely touches. His two charming nieces sit next to him and do the honours of his table. While they entertain the English guests, the elite of the three cantonments, he receives the humble salutations of the greatest nobles of the city. The learned Pandit, the pious Mulla, the proud Amir all bow with deep reverence before this frail old man.

  Messrs Palmer have long served as intermediaries between the Nizam and the British government in India, loyally serving both as the Rothschilds of the Deccan. In any crisis, their honestly acquired wealth came to the rescue of the protectors as well as of the protected. And how were they thanked? Just what one would expect from an ungrateful world: the two governments came to an agreement to strip them bare of their assets … and the Palmers lost all their money. Today they have nothing left but a meagre allowance paid at the caprice of [the Minister] Chandu Lal—which is neither reliable nor regular. What they have in undiminished quantity and quality is their honour—the respect of whites as well as of natives will follow them to the grave.

  De Warren went on to give a description of the life led by William Palmer and his younger brother Hastings. It is one of the last accounts that would ever be penned of the hybrid white Mughal lifestyle: when de Warren’s book went to the press in 1845, British and Indians were drawing fast apart, and Palmer’s lifestyle had already become something of an anachronism, a survival from an earlier age. De Warren’s tone, with its mid-nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, is another indication of how fast the world was changing:The private life of the leaders of this family is overtly epicurian … Their European education has made them sceptical deists; their oriental upbringing has habituated them to an extreme refinement; their mixed blood has made it impossible for them to find wives who could also be intellectual partners, and so drives them back to unadulterated oriental sensuality. So they each have their harems filled with women of all ages and colours and creeds, all married and divorced according to the whims of favour, but all kept honourably and generously. Their progeny would do honour to King Priam—I have seen there children of all ages and shades. This family has still been able to hold its own against the prejudice that pursues it relentlessly, but woe to them the day William Palmer should die! Only he can face out public opinion, to overwhelm prejudice by the prestige of his genius, his learning, his independent and liberal ideas, his long-term renown, the memory of his boundless generosity, of his immense hospitality in the years of good fortune, which led to his being called ‘Prince of Merchants’, a title shared with his half-brother in Calcutta.

  But William is a frail and elderly man, wo
rn out by the climate and his private griefs. He will not accept the reality of his poverty, nor put a limit to his generous impulses, and still takes care to relieve the miseries of the poor while poverty itself invades his own home. His superb gardens are untended, trees collapse out of sheer old age and are not replanted; the pools without water; even the house itself is crumbling and may well not outlive its aged master. I last visited the garden and its cypresses in 1839 at the moment when I was leaving India for the last time. Poor Palmer, only these trees will remain after you, and the English whom you have so often hospitably received at your table will repay your generosity by heaping scorn and insults on your children, blocking and refusing them entry into society.44

  Russell had played his part in Palmer’s downfall, and in the inquiry which followed the failure of the bank, which ruined more than 1200 of its investors (who all lost everything), he had not only failed to come to Palmer’s defence, he had also resolutely denied having any connection whatsoever with the bank. He even went so far as bribing, at a cost of £60, the printers of the official inquiry report, The Hyderabad Papers, in order to make sure that the link between him and Palmer was never published.45

  It must therefore have been something of a surprise to Russell when in 1841, two years after de Warren’s last glimpse of Palmer’s crumbling mansion, and a year after Kitty’s surprise visit, a letter from Palmer should arrive at Swallowfield. It must have been even more of a surprise that the subject of the letter—after twenty-one years of silence—was none other than Sharaf un-Nissa.

  After the death of Khair un-Nissa, her mother Sharaf un-Nissa had hoped that Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum would continue to keep in touch with their Hyderabadi family. At Khair’s death they had, after all, inherited not only all Khair’s jewels, the value of which was conservatively estimated at £12,000, and which Sharaf had initially put aside for them, but also considerable estates across the Nizam’s dominions. As Russell wrote soon after Khair’s death, Sharaf un-Nissa’s

  own notion seems to be that the children when they grow up will come to take possession of their property … I am disposed therefore as far as it depends on me to leave the inducement for the boy at least to visit his grandmother a few years hence. His fortune will be such as to make it unnecessary for him to follow any profession for a livelihood, and when his education has been completed, I don’t see how he could employ two or three years better than by coming to India.46

  Since then, however, things had not gone according to plan. Not only had the children been forbidden from keeping in touch with their grandmother, ja as Palmer’s letter to Russell revealed, the family’s huge and lucrative estates had all been summarily confiscated by the Minister, Rajah Chandu Lal, more than a decade earlier, following the death of Nizam Sikander Jah. For the last twelve years, it now emerged, Sharaf un-Nissa had been living off the charity of William Palmer. Now that Palmer was himself on the verge of destitution, he had suggested that Sharaf had no option but to write a begging letter to Russell, the man who had not only destroyed her beloved daughter three decades earlier, but had also played his part in ruining Palmer himself. Sharaf un-Nissa duly wrote to Russell asking him to use his influence with the Minister, as she was now utterly without means and, having sold her last piece of jewellery, had no one else to appeal to. As she explained through a Persian letter-writer:Now in these days I am in debt and helpless. If I were to describe my situation, it would only upset you. In the past 12 years since my jagirs were confiscated, I have had to sell everything that was in my home just in order to be able to buy food for myself—the barest provisions necessary for mere survival—so as not to die. Now there is nothing left. I have nobody to turn to, other than God Himself! This is no longer the time for forgetfulness and neglect. What more can I write, except my prayers ... 47

  The tone of utter desperation pricked Russell’s generally far from over-active conscience, and he wrote back by return, offering to do all he could. In a covering letter to William Palmer, Russell thanked him for getting in touch despite all that had passed between them:I assure you that I take it very kindly of you to have written … After the changes of one and twenty years the Begum would have found it difficult to obtain access to me in any other way, and I should have had no means of conveying my answer to her … The Begum desires nothing more than the common right of being protected in the enjoyment of that property which originally and personally belonged to her … What has already been done cannot be recalled but I may, and if I can I will, devise some security for the future. There is no one for whom I have a stronger respect and affection than for Shurfoon Nissa Begum, and there is no effort I will not make to mitigate any difficulties that may press upon her.48

  He went on to describe his own growing health problems: a series of ‘paralytic seizures’, and a severe infection in his eyes that had left him all but blind. Via Palmer, he then sent the old lady the first news of her granddaughter that she had received for many years:Col. Kirkpatrick’s daughter, Mrs Phillipps, is well & happy. She lives in Devonshire & I unfortunately missed seeing her owing to her Residence being in a different part of the country when I was there on a visit to my sister last year. She was with Mrs Duller on a visit to a relation in our neighbourhood, and at Swallowfield when I happened to be in London. As to the 2000 Rupees which you say is pressing upon her [Sharaf un-Nissa] and which would remove her difficulty I must beg of you to pay it for me. I still have a small account with Binny’s House at Madras and I have no doubt they will cash the bill upon me for the amount.

  He saved a more personal request for last:

  I am sorry to see a confirmation of what I had before heard of the Begum having disposed of some of her jewels. Among them was a teeka [forehead jewel] of diamond which I will be sorry from old association to see pass into the hands of a stranger. Should you be able to ascertain delicately whether that was one of the things disposed of & if it was possible to trace it, I should be thankful to you to repurchase it & send it to me …

  The tika he refers to must, presumably, have belonged to Khair un-Nissa, and been a jewel he would have known well on the forehead of his old lover. It is always difficult to divine motives, and especially so in this case. Was this the sexual vanity of an old man? Or can one imagine that Russell was perhaps regretful, or remorseful—or even, at some level, still a little in love with the memory of Khair un-Nissa, and the times they had spent together in Calcutta some four decades earlier, in younger, happier days when his future was still bright and his reputation still un-compromised? Russell was, after all, always a weak, rather than a bad man. But it was too late, in every sense, to recapture that moment or to undo what had been done. William Palmer made discreet enquiries, but answered that sadly ‘the teeka was sold many years ago—& there is no trace left of it’. He added: ‘Your assistance came very timely to the poor Begum; she is in great distress. Everything of value has been sold; and a silver chilumchee [basin] was sold through my means a short time back to meet some immediate exigencies. The other things which came with the chilumchee, silver articles of small value, necessitated a breaking up of all that belonged to her establishment... ’49

  On hearing this, Russell then did one more thing for the old lady. He finally got directly in touch with Kitty, by return, and told her that her grandmother was in dire need.

  Shortly after her visit to Swallowfield, Kitty had had another chance encounter: on a visit to Exmouth in 1841, she had happened to meet the wife of the newly appointed Assistant to the Resident at Hyderabad, Captain Duncan Malcolm, the nephew of James Kirkpatrick’s former Assistant, John Malcolm.

  Now, alerted by Russell, and using Malcolm as an intermediary and Persian translator, Kitty managed to re-establish contact with Sharaf un-Nissa, the grandmother with whom she had not communicated for nearly forty years. There followed a remarkable and extremely emotional correspondence between the two women, one writing in English from Torquay, the other from Hyderabad dictating in Persian to a scribe who wrot
e on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed in a kharita, a sealed bag of gold Mughal brocade.

  Sitting in her villa in Torquay, looking out over the breakers of the same grey northern sea which had brought her to England in 1805, Kitty wrote:My dear Grandmother,

  I received many years ago, your kind letter of condolence with me on the death of my beloved brother. I was very grateful to you for it, tho’ by my not having answered it, I am afraid that you may have thought that I little regarded it. But indeed I did, & the more so, because I felt that you too mourned for him I loved so well & that you too were connected with him by the binding ties of blood.

  Two years after his death I was married to a nephew of Sir John Kennaway’s. My husband is of my own age & is a Captain in the English army.

  I have four children living, my eldest daughter is 11 years old. She is exactly like my husband. I have a boy of 8 years & a half, then another girl of 7 and a half who is exactly like my mothers picture & one darling infant of 19 months. I have had seven living children-1 sweet boy and two sweet girls are gone, but I am blest in those that survive. My boy is so striking an image of my father that a picture that was drawn of my father as a little boy is always taken for my boy. They have a good intellect & are blest with fair skin. I live in a nice pretty house in the midst of a garden on the sea coast. My dear husband is very kind to me & I love him greatly.