White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  ac William Palmer did not become a General until 1805, and in 1786 was only a humble Major. But to avoid confusion, I will refer to him throughout as General Palmer.

  ad Not an unusual state of affairs in eighteenth-century England, where as many as a third of all births were illegitimate. See Peter Laslett (ed.), Bastardy and its Comparative History (London, 1980).

  ae For a wonderful picture of the Strachey family lined up at prayer, girls to one side, boys facing them, in descending order of age, see the cover of Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts (New York, 1976), by Elizabeth French Boyd. ‡On their return from America the Kirkpatricks apparently ceased to think of themselves as Scottish, settling in Kent and becoming church-going Anglicans.

  af The source material gives the name ‘Perrein’, but this is surely a mis-rendering of the common Indo-Portuguese surname Perreira.

  ag The word ‘seminary’ at this period did not necessarily suggest a religious establishment; and as the Kirkpatricks were Anglicans, not Roman Catholics, it is highly unlikely that the word was being used in that sense. It is much more likely that the writer meant merely ‘boarding schools’.

  ah Certainly, William comes across as a vulnerable and lonely man who craves affection, and he is especially articulate about his bouts of depression. ‘By gravity,’ he writes to Kennaway on 13 June 1779, ‘I intended to express that kind of shadow or image of calm sorrow or grief which is observable sometimes in the air, sometimes in the speech, and sometimes in the writing of a person … I have a thousand times, Jack, when low spirited, almost been blind and deaf to all around me—wholly absorbed in my painful reflections—and possibly so extravagant in my remarks and assertions as … to incur the reproach of a dull and mad fellow.’ Kennaway Papers, Devon Records Office, Exeter, B961M ADD/F2, William Kirkpatrick to Kennaway, 13 June 1779.

  ai William’s languages seem to have been merely a valuable tool that in due course would give wings to his career: in 1779 he was promoted to Persian interpreter to the Commander in Chief of the Bengal army, and in 1781, only ten years after his arrival in India, was promoted to captain. Increasingly he used his language skills to make intelligence-gathering a speciality, carefully collating Persian newsletters from the different Indian courts and forming contacts with men like George Cherry, one of the Company’s most senior intelligence officers. In time these contacts would become central to the careers of both Kirkpatrick brothers. But William’s slightly businesslike attitude to Orientalist learning is in no way complemented by the pleasure, surprise or enjoyment of India that one finds in many other letters of the period, notably those of his younger half-brother James.

  aj Shore’s official job description was ‘the senior and presiding member of the Calcutta council’, until he formally succeeded Cornwallis as Governor General of Bengal. After 1792 he was awarded a baronetcy and became Sir John Shore. In 1798 he was made Lord Teignmouth.

  ak Although not mentioned in the letters of either brother in Vizagapatam, in 1793 carpenters of the Kamsali caste were busy making some of the most beautiful objects ever to come out of the fusion of Western tastes and Eastern skills, for which Vizagapatam had quickly become internationally famous: superbly delicate furniture where ivory was inlaid in sandalwood and ebony in a dazzling efflorescence of Anglo-Indian marquetry. For a superb study of Vizagapatam furniture, see Armin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London, 2001), pp.172-221.

  al In this context, ambassador or representative, though in common usage it means ‘lawyer’.

  am The Nizam’s Minister, Ghulam Sayyed Khan, was not in fact awarded the title Aristu Jah (‘the Glory of Aristotle’) until 1796; at this point he was known as Mushir ul-Mulk (‘Advisor to the Kingdom’). But as Aristu Jah is the name by which he is almost universally known in contemporary histories, for purposes of clarity and continuity he will be referred to by this title throughout.

  an Nizam Ali Khan’s two great court painters were Rai Venkatchellam and Tajalli Ali Shah, both of whom, significantly enough, had the status of senior nobles in the Hyderabad durbar.

  ao The low arrangement of cushions and bolsters which formed the throne of Indian rulers at this period.

  ap The Hyderabadis considered themselves a semi-detached fragment of the old Mughal Empire, and always referred to their forces as ‘the Mughal army’. This is also how they are referred to in Maratha documents.

  aq A crore is ten million—so around £60 million in today’s currency.

  ar Around £4.2 million.

  as British commentators who saw the Zuffur Plutun on parade tended to make snide remarks about their ‘ridiculous appearance’. Those who saw them in action, however, were always surprised by the women’s ferocity, discipline and effectiveness: Henry Russell later quoted ‘an officer of high rank in the King’s Army [who] once said on seeing a party of them that they would put half the native corps in India to the Blush’. From ‘Henry Russell’s Report on Hyderabad, 30th March 1816’, reprinted in Indian Archives, Vol. IX, July-December 1955, No. 2, p.134.

  at Approximately £6 in today’s currency.

  au The spectacular citadel near Aurangabad that had once been the Muslim bridgehead in the Deccan and the capital of the Delhi Sultanate.

  av Say £120 million in today’s currency.

  aw William tried in vain to persuade the Nizam to reconsider the grant, reporting that ‘The Nizam was either too grateful for his recent services, or too fearful to refuse the remuneration he required. The artifices of our enemies, joined to what HH is pleased to consider our coldness with regard to his interests—manifested as he thinks by declining to meet all his unreasonable expectations [during the Khardla campaign]—have rendered him of late more unmanageable on certain points than would be wished.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/5, p.8, 17 January 1796, William Kirkpatrick to James Duncan.

  ax William was not mistaken in his estimation either of James’s gratitude or of his affection for him. As James wrote to him the following year, after laying aside ‘Rs. 10,000 a year for the use of my dear little nieces … setting aside our close connection by blood—our strong—nay, I will add, unbounded mutual affection and attachment, and the many, many juvenile obligations I owe you (and which made an impression on my heart never to be effaced) setting aside as I say all these considerations, could I possibly have done less than this to the Man to whom I am not only indebted for my present high station with all its concomitant advantages, but even for the very share of acquirements which have enabled me hitherto to acquit myself therein to the satisfaction of my superiors? Such has been my invariable attachment to you from the time that I began to know and appreciate your virtues and talents, that there was nought in my possession or power that I would not at any time have resigned most joyfully upon the smallest hint from my dearest and best beloved brother.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/11, p.112, 4 April 1799, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick.

  ay Shi’ism lay at the heart of the identity of Qutb Shahi Hyderabad. The origins of the divide between Sunni and Shi’a go back to the very beginnings of Islam in the period immediately after the death of the Prophet, when the Muslim community was split over the succession. One group, the Sunnis, recognised the authority of the Medinan (and subsequently Ummayad) Caliphs. The other major group, the Shi’as, maintained that sovereignty was a matter of divine right and resided in the descendants of the Prophet, starting with his son-in-law, Ali (Shi’at Ali meaning ‘the Party of Ali’ in Arabic). Ali was murdered in 661 AD, and his son Hussain died at the hands of the Ummayad Caliph al-Yazid at the Battle of Kerbala nineteen years later, in 680. Thereafter Shi’ites remained almost everywhere an Islamic minority until the start of the sixteenth century, when the Iranian Safavid dynasty made Shi’ism the sole legal faith of their Persian empire. Soon after this, a series of Shi’ite leaders came to power in the Indian Deccan, among them the Qutb Shahis, who dedicated their new capital, Hyderabad, to Ali, Hyder being one of his names. They also
accepted the nominal overlordship of the Iranian Safavids of Isfahan, the mortal enemies of the Sunni Mughals of Delhi.

  az The appreciation of scent was especially dear to Deccani Muslim culture, and a matter of great connoisseurship. Many texts on scented gardens, on erotic scents, on the art of incense and perfumery survive, but two in particular stand out. The ’Itr-I Nawras Shahi is a treatise on perfumery written for the great syncretic Bijapur Sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah II, which describes how to prepare volatile oils and vapours to scent bedrooms and other contained spaces, as well as the hair and the clothes; it also details the preparation of massage oils, gargles, dentrifices and breathfresheners. The other great surviving Deccani perfumery manual is the Lakhlakha, a Hyderabadi text of the early nineteenth century which goes into incredible detail on the preparation of ambergris, camphor, musk and scented candles. See Ali Akbar Hussain, Scent in the Islamic Garden (Karachi, 2000), Chapter 5.

  ba Elephant stables (and the whole establishment and paraphernalia related to the keeping of elephants).

  bb Ionian or Byzantine medicine, passed to the Islamic world through Byzantine exiles in Persia.

  bc Literally ‘twelve doors’: the open garden kiosks with arcades of three arches on each side popularised by the Mughals.

  bd A domed kiosk supported on pillars; often used as a decorative feature on top of turrets and minarets.

  be Aseels were the key figures in a zenana. Usually slave girls by origin, they performed a number of essential administrative and domestic tasks within the women’s quarters. In the Nizam’s zenana the senior aseels were important figures of state.

  bf All the younger members of the Residency seem to have suffered from severe attacks of venereal disease at different points. In June 1805, James’s then Assistant Henry Russell wrote to his brother Charles, who had gone to the coast to recover from a particularly painful bout, to tell him the news that another of the younger Assistants, ‘Bailey has proved himself, and has communicated that fashionable disease to his girl … they are now amusing themselves together with Ure’s fine [mercury] ointment.’ A week later Henry Russell himself went down with a painful attack. See Bodleian Library, Russell Correspondence, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.98, 25 June 1805.

  bg According to Hobson-Jobson: ‘Havildar: a sepoy non-commissioned officer corresponding to a sergeant.’

  bh Butler (literally ‘master of the household gear’). Today, when butlers are sadly in short supply, the word is more often used of cooks.

  bi The divan given by Mah Laqa Bai Chanda is now in OIOC, Islamic Ms, 2768. The book contains an inscription: ‘The Diwan of Chanda the celebrated Malaka of Hyderabad. This book was presented as a nazr from this extraordinary woman to Captain Malcolm in the midst of a dance in which she was the chief performer on the 18th Oct 1799 at the House of Meer Allum Bahadur.’

  bj The Ottoman Emperor. The Muslims always called the Byzantines, correctly enough, ‘the Romans’, and when the Seljuk Turks conquered ‘Roman’ Anatolia in the eleventh century, they renamed themselves the ‘Seljuks of Rum’. When the Ottomans succeeded the Seljuks and conquered Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Sultan became known across the Islamic world as the Sultan of Rum.

  bk In time, that influence would become irresistible. Tînat un-Nissa had risen from the position of Bukshee Begum’s serving girl ‘to the honour of the Nizam’s bed’. Her rise had been due as much to her intelligence and talent for intrigue as to her beauty, and as she grew older she became both more powerful and more ruthless. She also became increasingly opposed to British influence. James’s later Assistant Charles Russell found it almost impossible to win any point she opposed, and wrote to Calcutta that she was a ‘haughty, tyrannical, rapacious, cunning and officious woman’. Indeed he complained that she interfered with every arrangement of government, from the most important to the most trivial. Each Minister or noble of rank felt obliged to seek her patronage, without which his career had no hope of survival. New Delhi National Archives, Foreign Political Consultations, Charles Russell to Minto, 4 August 1810, FPC 6 September 1810, No. 23. Also Hyderabad Residency Records, Vol. 38, pp.79-90. See also Zubaida Yazdani, Hyderabad During the Residency of Henry Russell 1811-1820: A Case Study of the Subsidiary Alliance System (Oxford, 1976), p.83.

  bl One of the Nizam’s most talented and popular sons was Feridun Jah, but Kirkpatrick discounted the possibility of him succeeding his father, since ‘the Mother of this promising young Prince is probably a woman of very obscure birth, as it would not appear that she ranks amongst the Begum’s or even Khanums of the Nizam’s Mahl—that is, she is neither acknowledged as a wife, nor distinguished as a concubine’. Instead, Kirkpatrick was able correctly to predict that it would be the unpopular and mean-minded Sikander Jah, rather than one of his more charismatic half-brothers, who would eventually succeed his father on the musnud.

  bm Its voluminous archives survive in the records of the Daftar-i-Dar ul-Insha, now in the Andhra Pradesh State Archives.

  bn Also known as Kautilya. In modern New Delhi, the diplomatic quarter is named in his honour Chankyapuri; rather muddlingly, it also contains a Kautilya Marg.

  bo Imtiaz was known as the Fakir as ‘during a temporary disgrace he assumed the habit of a Fakir or holy mendicant which he still continues to wear’. For ‘the Fakir’ see James Kirkpatrick, ‘A View of the State of the Deccan, 4th June 1798’, Wellesley Papers, BL Add Mss 13582, f.38, pt 11.

  bp He was not however forced to go as far as his predecessor, his brother William’s friend John Kennaway. During the Mysore Wars, to be sure of avoiding Tipu’s agents, letters from Residents were, according to Kennaway, ‘obliged to be written on a piece of paper that might be inserted in a quill’ and then inserted into the person of the courier; and they were not even then very secure. Kennaway Papers, Devon Records Office, Exeter. Kennaway to Lieutenant Colonel Harris, 16 August 1790.

  bq In September 1798 James wrote to William saying that: ‘Considering the strict secrecy observed by Lord [Wellesley] in his communication of his plans to General Harris [the military commander in Madras], and the reserve of the latter to everyone about him on the subject, the only way I can account for the affair having got out so completely as it has done, is by supposing that General Harris entrusted Lord W’s letter to be deciphered by someone in office [in Madras], who let the secret out.’

  br A year later, at the fall of Seringapatam, carefully-made copies of much of James’s private and public correspondence were found in the Tipu’s palace. See OIOC, F228/11, p.192, 5 August 1799.

  bs Certainly it was a secret letter from the British sepoys in Hyderabad to the Nizam, brought to the Residency from the palace dustbins by one of the Nizam’s sweepers, that allowed James’s immediate successor to nip a major conspiracy in the bud in 1806. New Delhi, National Archives, Hyderabad Residency Records, vol. 71, from Neil Edmonstone to Thomas Sydenham, 14 October 1806. See also Sarojini Regani, Nizam—British Relations 1724-1857 (New Delhi, 1963), p.197. Also Delhi National Archives, Secret Consultations, Foreign Dept, 1800, No. 20, p.1.

  bt The tomb was mysteriously destroyed in March 2002. The Archaeological Society of India has promised to rebuild it.

  bu Literally ‘drinker of blood’.

  bv William Linnaeus Gardner eventually founded the Company’s irregular cavalry regiment Gardner’s Horse, which still exists in the modern Indian Army.

  bw Boyd later fell out with the Peshwa as well, and eventually returned to America, where he disgraced himself in the War of 1812 in which he led two thousand Americans to defeat at the hands of eight hundred British Canadians. His entire campaign was described as having ‘no redeeming incident’, while his character was described by one colleague in that war as ‘a compound of ignorance, vanity and petulance’. Another of his brothers-in-arms was equally withering, describing him as amiable and respectable in a subordinate position, but ‘vacillating and imbecile beyond all endurance as a chief under high responsibilities’. The Dictionary of American Biograp
hy.

  bx Even those who did not formally convert, and who retained some of their European way of life, ended up mixing it to an extent with Mughal culture. This is most strikingly evident in the Catholic graveyard in Agra where many of the mercenaries ended up. Here they lie side by side, buried in one of the strangest necropolises in Asia, filled with line upon line of small Palladianised Taj Mahals, some authentically late Mughal, but most covered with a crazy riot of hybrid ornament: baroque putti cavorting around Persian inscriptions; latticed jali screens rising to round classical arches. At the four corners at the base of the drum, where on an authentic Mughal monument you would expect to find minarets or at least small minars, there stand instead four baroque amphorae.

  by The fact that Sharaf un-Nissa returned to her father’s zenana, and that it was Bâqar Ali Khan rather than her late husband’s clan—particularly her senior brother-in-law, Mir Asadullah—who arranged the marriage of the two girls, may suggest some sort of rupture between Mehdi Yar Khan’s clan and the intelligent and independent-minded Sharaf un-Nissa.