White Mughals
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21 As with much else concerning Palmer’s marriage, there has been a great deal of scholarly controversy about the identity of the figures in the picture. A letter written by Palmer’s great-great-granddaughter, M.P. Hanley ‘of Assam’, now in the India Office Library, maintains that ‘the General was a ‘’bad old man” and had two wives, the first being the Princess Fyzun Nissa of Delhi, the mother of William Palmer of Hyderabad and the second a princess of Oudh. I have this information from Mr. Charles Palmer who tells me he got it from Miss Meadows Taylor who edited Meadows Taylor’s Story of My Life’ (OIOC, L/R/7/49). This version of events was followed by Mildred Archer in her India and British Portraiture, op. cit., pp.281-6, who thought that the figure kneeling to Palmer’s left must be the ‘Oudh Princess’, and that she was ‘looking ardently at Palmer and leaning against his knee while he for his part holds her hand’ (although this is clearly not the case if you look carefully at the unfinished painting, and represents an almost unique case of the usually super-scrupulous Mrs Archer failing to look closely at a picture: Nur is in fact neither looking at Palmer nor holding his hand). Archer’s reading of the picture has been blindly followed by Beth Toibin in Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting (Duke, 1999), pp.113-14. The story seems however to have got garbled in the retelling, for while Fyze and her sister appear frequently in Palmer’s letters and will, there is never a single mention of a second Indian wife or concubine—though the General did in fact have a second wife, Sarah Hazell, in St Kitts, and here must lie the origin of the confused story. Palmer’s ‘Begum of Oudh’ referred to in a Times marriage announcement of 19 February 1925 (taken out by a proud great-grandson of the Begum who was getting married), which Archer believed to be substantiating evidence for a second Indian wife, was of course Fyze herself, who though born in Delhi had long been a Lucknow resident. The beautiful bejewelled figure kneeling beside Palmer in the picture must presumably be Nur Begum, as Mrs Hester Eiloart, another great-granddaughter (who sold the picture to the India Office), always maintained, and as Durba Ghosh also concluded in her investigation of the picture (see ‘Colonial Companions’, op. cit., p.97, n36). This is also the view of the current Director of the Prints and Drawings Section in the India Office, Dr Jerry Losty, who, just to add to the confusion, has recently re-attributed the picture to the painter Johan Zoffany. (Mildred Archer believed it to be the work of Francesco Renaldi: see her India and British Portraiture, op. cit., p.282, and ‘Renaldi and India: A Romantic Encounter’, in Apollo, Vol. 104, July- September 1976, pp.98-105.) The well-dressed female figure standing on the extreme right of the picture must presumably be another of Fyze’s sisters.
22 De Boigne archive, Chambéry, letters from William Palmer to Benoît de Boigne, 13 March 1790; Ogeine, 23 April 1792; and ‘Friday Evening’ (undated but c.1785).
23 De Boigne archive, Chambéry, arzee from the Lady Faiz un-Nissa.
24 Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India 1608-1937 (London, 1938).
25 Mulka Begum was also the Mughal Emperor’s niece. See Narindar Saroop, A Squire of Hindustan (London, 1983), p.149.
26 When she visited the Nawab’s harem, Fanny Parkes met one of the Angrezi Begums and writes in detail about her in Wanderings of a Pilgrim, op. cit.
27 Mrs B. Meer Hassan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions Made During Twelve Years Residence in their Immediate Society (London, 1832).
28 See the Introduction by W. Crooke to the 1917 Oxford University Press (OUP) edition, p.xv.
29 De Boigne archive, Chambéry, ‘Mrs Begum’s London accounts’.
30 Alam and Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient, op. cit., esp. pp.69-71.
31 Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,178, Vol. XLVII, 1801-02, 10 October 1802, pp.277-8, William Palmer to Hastings.
32 Ibid., 4 December 1802, pp.314-19.
33 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, p.30, 5 May 1800.
34 For example ibid., p.179, 16 September 1801, William Palmer to James Kirkpatrick.
35 This had stated that the land handed over was, as William Palmer reported to Warren Hastings, ‘a full and complete equivalent and discharge, whether revenue should exceed or fall short of the estimate, in either of which events neither party was to make any demand on the other’. Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,178, Vol. XLVII, 1801-02, 10 July 1801, pp.61-3.
36 Ibid.
37 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.70, 23 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
38 Ibid., p.113, 4 August 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
39 See Moon, op. cit., p.305, and Butler, op. cit., pp.242-51.
40 OIC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.2, 2 December 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
41 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.58, 7 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
42 Ibid., p.17, 26 January, William Palmer to James Kirkpatrick.
43 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.13, 4 January 1802, and p.14, 10 January 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
44 Ibid., p.26, 1 February 1802, James Kirkpatrick to John Tulloch.
45 For Fyze’s adoption by the Emperor and her title see OIOC, Persian Mss, IO 4440.
46 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/83, pp.19-24, 4 January 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Lord Wellesley.
47 Ibid., p.152, 6 September 1801, and p.166, 21 September 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
48 Ibid., p.152, 6 September, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
49 Ibid., p.166, 21 September 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
50 Thomas Sydenham, quoted in Anon., Some Notes on the Hyderabad Residency Collected from Original Records in the Residency Office (Hyderabad, c.1880), p.3.
51 Mackintosh, Memoirs, op. cit., Vol. 1, p.511.
52 Julian James Cotton, ‘Kitty Kirkpatrick’, Calcutta Review, April 1899, p.243.
53 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.35, 5 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
54 Ibid., p.39, 17 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick. For William Thackeray in Madras see Sir William Hunter, The Thackerays in India (London, 1897), pp.111-40. This odd little book also contains (on p.174) an interesting mention of James’s now-vanished grave in South Park Street Cemetery, as he was buried adjacent to the grave of Richmond Thackeray, the father of the novelist.
55 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.40, 22 April 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
56 Ibid., p.58, 7 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
57 Ibid., p.44, 4 May 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
58 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/25, p.21, 20 June 1801, Lord Wellesley to William Kirkpatrick.
59 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.62, 11 June 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
60 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/55, p.3, 6 December 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
61 There is a wonderful account of the two young men’s trip written by Edward’s descendant, Barbara Strachey, in The Strachey Line: An English Family in America, India and at home from 1570 to 1902 (London, 1985), pp.100-5. The diaries of both survive in the India Office Library, though Elphinstone’s writing is so scruffy as to be partly illegible. Mountstuart Elphinstone’s is in Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], and Edward Strachey’s in Mss Eur F128/196.
62 OIOC, Edward Strachey’s Diary, Mss Eur F128/196, pp.16-20.
63 OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], entry for 14 September 1801.
64 OIOC, Edward Strachey’s Diary, Mss Eur F128/196, p.33.
65 Ibid., p.17.
66 OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box13/16[b], entry for 13 September 1801.
67 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.92, 16 October 1802, James Kirkpatrick to to Sir John Kennaway.
68 Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales’, op. cit., pp.180-1, 184.
69 OIOC, Mss Eur F88 Box 13/16[b], entry for 22 August 1801.
70 Ibid., entry for 23 August 1801.
71 Ibid., entry for 15 November 1801.
72 Khan, Gulzar i-Asafiya, p.560.
73 Ibid., pp.560-5.
74 For this practice in Lucknow see Fisher, ‘Women and the Feminine … ’, op. cit., p.507.
75 Khan, Gulzar i-Asafiya, p.588.
76 For this tilework, which has recently been drastically ‘renovated’ by the Archaeological Survey of India in hideous Disney colours, see the excellent description in Michell and Zebrowski, The New Cambridge History of India 1.7: Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (Cambridge, 1999), p.138.
77 Husain, Scent in the Islamic Garden, op. cit., p.31.
78 Kausar, op. cit., p.224.
79 Ali, Observations on the Mussulmauns … , op. cit., p.51.
80 Shushtari, op. cit., pp.545-8.
81 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.166, 21 September, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
82 Ibid., p.168, 22 September, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
83 Ibid., p.187, 29 September, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
84 Ibid., p.216, 13 October, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
85 Wellesley Papers, BL Add Mss 37,282, p.279, 7 October 1801, Lord Wellesley to William Kirkpatrick.
CHAPTER 7
1 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.13, 4 January 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
2 Ibid., p.26, 1 February 1802, James Kirkpatrick to John Tulloch; also F228/57, p.7, Hyderabad, 5 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to John Read.
3 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.25, 1 February 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Petrie.
4 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.36, 2 October 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
5 James actually spelt Sulaiman’s name ‘Sooleymaun’, but I have updated the spelling to ease comprehension throughout.
6 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.23, 6 May 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
7 Ibid., p.15, 24 July 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
8 Ibid., p.24, 1 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
9 That Fyze was literate is clear from her letter to de Boigne quoted in Chapter 6. Khair un-Nissa’s literacy is alluded to frequently in Henry Russell’s letters in the Bodleian Library, which refer to him receiving regular letters from her, although none have survived. Sharaf un-Nissa’s letters have survived, however, although they somehow became detached from Russell’s well-catalogued English correspondence and languished uncatalogued in the store of the library’s Persian Department. I am extremely grateful to Doris Nicholson for finally locating them all. Khair un-Nissa’s letters may have been deliberately destroyed, either by Russell himself or by his daughter-in-law, Lady Russell, who became the family historian. The English correspondence also shows signs of being discreetly pruned, especially of correspondence that might have implicated Russell in the scandal surrounding the collapse of Palmer’s bank, about which Russell had to face a formal investigation by the East India Company and which led to his early retirement from India.
10 See previous note. Russell’s letters refer to his worries that Palmer might use the matter of ‘the Begum’ against him in the East India Company inquiry into the collapse of Palmer’s bank, and it may have been at this stage that he took the precaution of destroying Khair’s letters.
11 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/57, p.8, 8 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
12 Both notes are now in the private archive of their descendants.
13 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.23, 6 May 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
14 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/57, p.24, 1 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
15 Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, Seaforth Muniments, GD46/8/1, Henry Russell to Lady Hood, Hyderabad, 5 November 1813.
16 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.8, 8 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
17 Ibid., p.24, 1 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
18 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.73, 10 December 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
19 Durba Ghosh discusses this letter eloquently in her thesis ‘Colonial Companions’, op. cit., p.124.
20 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/18, p.30, 31 October, William Kirkpatrick to James Kirkpatrick.
21 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, p.280, 6 December, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
22 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/18, pp.20-3, from Maula Ali, 23 November 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
23 Ibid., pp.11-13, John Malcolm to William Kirkpatrick, Patna, 19 October 1801.
24 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.265, 28 November 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
25 Ibid., p.222, 19 October 1801, Vigors to James Kirkpatrick.
26 Probably because of this incident, James later wrote a code for etiquette connected to the reception of the British Resident which laid down in minute detail exactly what should be done on the occasion of a visit, including the number of guns which were to make the salute and the size and make-up of the guard of honour with which he was to be met. See New Delhi National Archives, Foreign Department, Secret Consultations, 16 May 1805, No. 89-90.
27 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.238, 9 November 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
28 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.15, 24 July 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.
29 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.282, 7 December 1801, William Palmer to James Kirkpatrick.
30 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/11, p.192, 5 August 1799, William Kirkpatrick to James Kirkpatrick.
31 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/56, p.9, 8 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Close.
32 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/18, p.48, 30 November 1801, John Malcolm to William Kirkpatrick.
33 Ibid., pp.24-7, 20 January 1802, William Kirkpatrick to James Kirkpatrick.
34 Ibid., pp.33-7, 20 April 1802, John Malcolm to William Kirkpatrick.
35 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.27, 25 March 1802, N.B. Edmonstone to James Kirkpatrick.
36 William Palmer’s authorship of the letter is clear from its style, its contents, the handwriting, and finally James’s remarks on it to William Palmer’s father, the General.
37 For William Palmer’s stay with his brother John, see the letter from General Palmer to his brother-in-law Benoît de Boigne, Pune, 13 December 1799, in the de Boigne archive at Chambéry.
38 From James Baillie Fraser, Military Memoirs of Lt. Col. James Skinner C.B. (2 vols, London, 1851), Vol. 2, p.162.
39 Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,178, pp.240, 254-5.
40 Hawes, op. cit., pp.102-3.
41 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/57, p.1, 14 March 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Ebeneezer Roebuck.
42 East India Company, ‘The Hyderabad Papers: Papers Relative To Certain Pecuniary Transactions Of Messrs William Palmer And Co With The Government Of His Highness The Nizam’ (London, 1824), letter from William Palmer to Henry Russell, p.2.
43 The Resident Charles Metcalfe, quoted in Hawes, op. cit., p.106.
44 OIOC, HM 743, ‘The Affairs Of Messrs Wm Palmer & Co Vol. 2 Extract From Bengal Pol Cons 7th Oct 1825’, Point 61-2, (18).
45 Anon., Sketches of India … , op. cit., pp.325-6.
46 Certainly, William Palmer seems to have been trading in a modest way from at least 1802, when James bought a consignment of camels from him. See OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.22, 8 September 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Charles Farran.
47 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/83, ‘The Letter from Philothetes’.
48 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/57, p.27, 25 March 1802, N.B. Edmonstone to James Kirkpatrick.
49 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/27, p.19, 27 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick
to N.B. Edmonstone.
50 See J.W. Kaye., op. cit., Vol. 2, p.162.
51 OIOC, Mountstuart Elphinstone Papers, Mss Eur F88, Box13/16[b], Elphinstone’s diary, f.92, 23 August 1801.
52 J.W. Kaye, op. cit., p.162. Holland initially resided in the royal palace until he rented the Residency site several months later. See Ashwin Kumar Bakshi, ‘The Residency of Hyderabad 1779-1857’ (unpublished Ph.D., Osmania University, 1990), p.97.
53 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, p.163, 29 August 1800, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.
54 OIOC, Bengal Political Consultations, P/117/18, 19 October 1800; 3 June 1801, No. 1: The Residency, Hyderabad.
55 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.117, 15 August 1801, for Shumsair Jung.
56 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, p.143, 30 August 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick. For James’s request for peach trees see F228/57, p.33, 27 May 1802.
57 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.30, 12 September 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Fawcett in Bombay.
58 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/54, p.8, 9 September, James Kirkpatrick to Trail.
59 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/53, p.21, 25 September 1800, James Kirkpatrick to Trail.
60 Ibid., p.31, 25 September 1800, to Richard Chase.
61 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/57, p.16, 29 April 1802, James Kirkpatrick to an unnamed Madras jeweller.
62 Ibid., p.25, 9 May 1802, James Kirkpatrick to Barry Close.
63 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/59, p.31, 24 October 1804, James Kirkpatrick to Kennaway.
64 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.44, 18 October 1802, to Fawcett.
65 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/59, p.31, 24 October 1804, James Kirkpatrick to Kennaway.
66 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.67, 3 December 1802, James Kirkpatrick to T.G. Richardson in Madras.
67 OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.77, 21 December 1802, James Kirkpatrick to T.G. Richardson.
68 Anon., The Chronology of Modern Hyderabad from 1720 to 1890 AD (Hyderabad, 1954), p.55.