White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  et These winged horses were images whose artistic ancestry goes back to the images of flying horses and winged bulls in ancient Assyria and Persia. They were sanctified in Islam as being images of the mount who took the Prophet Mohammed on his night journey from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to heaven and back again. They are usually shown with crowns, a woman’s head, a deer’s feet and a peacock’s breast and tail. In an image of the Muharram processions in Patna at this period, now in the India Office, pairs of huge flying horses support the ta’ziya shrines, and are themselves carried on poles by teams of devotees turned for the day into voluntary palanquin-bearers.

  eu Fanny was later sent to England to be educated, which means she must almost certainly have had some English blood, and so was in all probability William’s daughter—as would seem to be implied by James calling her ‘your darling little Fanny’. OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.73, 10 December 1802, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.

  ev Mir Jehangir Ali Khan, Rais ul-Mulk, Sulaiman Jah, was born in 1793 and died in 1862. He was the Nizam’s seventh son, out of eight. (Nizam Ali Khan also fathered twelve daughters.)

  ew Adoption was a common practice in princely India, and rulers without an heir frequently adopted one. It was however unusual for a princely ruler to give his son for adoption to a non-royal, and a measure of the deep trust and affection felt by the Nizam for his oldest and closest adviser, Aristu Jah.

  ex Kirkpatrick’s descendants also own a second Venkatchellam image, of the young Prince Sulaiman riding out with a company, perhaps on a hunting expedition.

  ey Sahib Begum was the title given to Fyze by the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam.

  ez The dak (as it is usually spelled) was the Indian despatch system, adopted by the British from the Mughals. It comprised a network of interlocking runners and horses. ‡James’s former Assistant (later Sir John Malcolm, though he was at this period usually referred to as ‘Boy’ Malcolm), now the Governor General’s Private Secretary, was passing through Hyderabad on his way to Bombay. His feelings at being turned into a purveyor of Mughal women’s bangles and trinkets are not recorded. He did however remain friends with Fyze after the delivery, and many years later, on a visit to Hyderabad in 1818, recorded: ‘I paid a visit to Fyze Begum, the celebrated lady of the late General Palmer, and was received with Oriental magnificence.’ See J.W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Sir John Malcolm GCB (2 vols, London, 1856), Vol. 2, p.163.

  fa James was beginning to suspect—correctly as it turned out—that two members of his own staff, Thomas Sydenham and Captain William Hemming, the commander of his bodyguard, were not as loyal as they professed to be, and these appear to be the characters ‘about yourself’ that his brother William is referring to in this letter. On 17 December 1801 James had written to William in cipher: ‘A variety of concurring circumstances compel me, however reluctantly, to doubt the sincerity of Sydenham’s professions of regard for me. He is at all events, to say nothing more, a young man whose self-sufficiency & presumption keep full race with his abilities … My worthy friend Brunton cautioned me long ago to be wary of him, and I wish I had paid more implicit attention than I have done to his friendly caution … ’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.292.

  fb In other words, Vigors was buying supplies cheaply in the bazaar and charging the Nizam for them at a much higher rate, so grossly inflating his expenses claims, and his personal profits.

  fc The Commercial Treaty of April 1802 laid down that free transit of all goods was now permitted between Company territory and that belonging to the Nizam, all local duties were to be abolished, and a flat rate of 5 per cent would be paid on all goods imported into the territories of either party.

  fd Nothing at all is known about where William was sent to school prior to Woolwich; but when his Anglo-Indian cousins—the children of his aunt Nur Begum (Fyze’s sister)—arrived in London a little later, they attended two small private schools in London: Miss Eliza Barker’s School in Hammersmith for the girls, and Mr Clarke’s for the boys. It is quite possible that Mr Clarke’s was where William was educated, and that Nur placed her son Charles in the school following recommendations from her sister Fyze. General Palmer’s mother, his first wife Sarah, and his two daughters from his first marriage were all living at Greenwich at this time, intermittently supported by the General, and as Woolwich is immediately adjacent to Greenwich it seems unlikely that they would not have looked after William while he was in London, in the same way as the Handsome Colonel took in all his Indian grandchildren, legitimate, illegitimate, English and Anglo-Indian. If so, it is interesting to speculate how the General’s Creole first wife, Sarah, treated the son of his Indian second wife, Fyze. The Royal Military Academy was founded in the Woolwich Arsenal buildings in 1721. Vanbrugh’s celebrated domes—once regarded as the epitome of Englishness—have recently been shown to have been heavily influenced by the Mughal domes of the Muslim-style mausolea built for Indianised East India Company factors at Surat, where Vanbrugh worked for two years as a young man, and where, in his spare time, he would go off to sketch the tombs and local palace architecture. (For Mr Clarke’s school, see the box ‘London Receipts’ in the de Boigne archive, Chambéry. For Sarah in Greenwich, and William’s attempts to get David Anderson to send her some money, see Anderson Papers, BL Add Mss 45,427, p.203, March 1792, Gualiar. For Woolwich Military Academy and the Royal Arsenal see Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (eds), The London Encyclopaedia (London, 1983). For Vanbrugh in Surat see Christopher Ridgeway and Robert Williams (eds), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England (London, 1999).

  fe Michael Finglas (see Chapter Three) was an ineffective Irish soldier of fortune whom Aristu Jah brought back from Pune to found a European brigade in Hyderabad as a counterbalance to that of Raymond. His brigade was made up of a roguish bunch of European and American vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells, as well as a fairly sizeable contingent of Anglo-Indians. Finglas himself was ‘possessed of very little talent or education’, according to James, but Aristu Jah liked him and gave him the inappropriate title of Nawab Khoon Khar Jung, ‘the Falcon’. He died on 7 July 1800.

  ff James also worked strenuously to keep William rising in the ranks. On 10 December 1802, for example, he wrote to the General: ‘Your son William is just now on command somewhere. When he returns, which I believe will be soon, I shall exert myself strenuously to get him placed near [the Crown Prince] Secunder Jah.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/58, p.73, James Kirkpatrick to William Palmer.

  fg Wellesley seems to have begun philandering even before he reached India, apparently seducing Anne Barnard’s cousin ‘the fair Anne Elizabeth’ on his stopover at the Cape. His gargantuan sexual appetite became a major problem after his return to London, where there was a series of semi-public incidents with prostitutes. Moreover, after his break-up with Hyacinthe he employed a live-in accoucheur who provided ‘useful’ services to his seraglio of concubines. It was partly rumours of this sort of thing that in due course blocked Wellesley from becoming Prime Minister: his younger brother Arthur firmly believed that it was his ‘fornication rather than indolence that has kept him out of office … I wish that Wellesley was castrated; or that like other people attend to his business and perform too.’ See Iris Butler, The Eldest Brother (London, 1973), pp.157, 230, 386.

  fh This was an arrangement not uncommon among Indophile Europeans of the period: the chief general of the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh, Claude Auguste Court, built his residence inside the walled formal garden enclosing Asaf Khan’s tomb by the river Ravi on the edge of Lahore. (A picture of the house is reproduced in Jean-Marie Lafont, Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Lord of the Five Rivers (New Delhi, 2002), p.99.) Just outside the walls of Delhi at the same time, Sir David Ochterlony was building a very similar spread of neo-classical bungalows amid the rills of Shah Jehan’s beautiful Shalimar Gardens, the spot where Aurangzeb had been made Mughal Emperor in 1657. Towards the end of his life Ochterlony also began to cons
truct an extraordinary garden tomb in the Mughal garden he had had built for his most senior wife, Mubarak Begum, a short distance from Shalimar Bagh. The Ochterlonys’ tomb is a wonderfully hybrid monument, whose central dome was modelled on that of the Delhi church, St James’s, and was surmounted by a cross, while the side wings are enclosed in a forest of small minarets—the perfect architectural expression of the religious fusion Ochterlony seems to have achieved in his marriage. In the event, Ochterlony died away from Delhi and was buried in Meerut, and the empty tomb was destroyed during the Mutiny, in which Mubarak Begum, by then remarried to a Mughal nobleman, fought on the Mughal side. It is an extraordinary and completely forgotten moment in architectural history: the last of the great Mughal garden tombs—a tradition that reached its finest moment in the Taj Mahal—being built not by the last of the Mughals, but by a Scottish-American general. There is a picture of the tomb in Emily Bayley’s The Golden Calm: An English Lady’s Life in Moghul Delhi (London, 1980), p.181.

  fi The sanguinello or blood orange is not in fact any relation to the pomegranate.

  fj General Claude Martin (1735-1800) was General Palmer’s old friend from Lucknow and the founder of the La Martinière schools in Lucknow, Calcutta and Lyon. See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (New Delhi, 1992).

  fk A lack of good-quality china seems to have remained a consistent grouse of the English in India throughout the nineteenth century. During the Raj it became a custom in the remoter stations to invite guests to dinner ‘camp fashion’, which meant they had to bring not just their own servants and their own chair, but their own plates, cutlery and glasses. In 1868 an anonymous army officer wrote in Life in the Mofussil that ‘it was amusing to see three pretty girls, daughters of an indigo planter of a remote part of the district, drinking champagne out of three-pint pewters, which they had brought with them as safer than glass. They were clearly accustomed to camp fashion.’

  fl Dr William Roxburgh (1751-1815), a Scot from Edinburgh, started his career on the Andhra coast and published The Plants of the Coast of the Coromandel from his time in the vicinity of Hyderabad. In 1793 he was appointed the East India Company’s Chief Botanist and the first Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens. He was the first botanist to attempt to draw up a systematic account of the plants of India, published posthumously as Flora Indica.

  fm i.e. They would probably be rotten by the time they arrived, but it would be possible to plant the stones.

  fn Writing to his brother’s old friend (and his own former patron) Sir John Kennaway a little later, James mentioned how the park had been constructed from areas outside the original garden perimeter: ‘These in your time were all Paddy Fields, but are now partly converted to the aforementioned use and partly covered with handsome bungalows, regular sepoy barracks for my escort, stabling and farm yards, while a lofty and well constructed Flag Staff which I have erected in a centrical and appropriate spot serves at once to convey an idea of Security and Grandeur.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/59, p.31, 24 October 1804, James Kirkpatrick to Kennaway.

  fo The English word ‘paradise’ derives from the walled Eastern garden, or enclosed hunting park—specifically from the Persian words pairi (around) and daeza (a wall). The word passed into English via the Greek paradeisoi. See Elizabeth B. Moynihan, Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India (New York, 1979).

  fp The mulsarry (or maulshree in Sanskrit) was unusual in the Deccan, though it was extensively used by the Mughals in Delhi and Agra as its neat crown lent itself to formal planting arrangements. (I would like to thank Pradip Krishen for his help with this intriguing tree.)

  fq Indeed, in the Imperial Mughal court, the wetnurses of the Mughal emperors often became important figures of state: Maham Anaga, Akbar’s wetnurse, was one of the most powerful figures in sixteenth-century India, and her eldest son, Akbar’s foster-brother, the cruel and unprincipled Adham Khan, grew so influential and unruly that he became a major threat to the stability of the Empire. Adham Khan eventually became so uncontrollable that in 1561 he killed the Mughal Prime Minister, Atagha Khan, before being himself despatched by Akbar, who in a fit of anger following the murder knocked him out and then threw him from a second-floor palace window. Filled with remorse after the event, Akbar did penance and built a magnificent tomb for Adham Khan that still stands above the Qutb complex and the walls of Lal Kot in south Delhi. See Abu’l Fazl, Ain i-Akbari (Calcutta, 1873-94), Vol. 2, pp.269-71.

  fr This name is corrupted in the source document which is almost illegible at this point.

  fs Modern Indian doctors frown on the practice, which can lead to breast abscesses forming. Full-term babies, both male and female, have palpable mammary glands and breast engorgment can occur after three days, leading to the secretion of a milky substance called ‘witch’s milk’ by modern doctors. This is due to maternal hormone withdrawal. (I would like to thank Dr Prita Trehan for help on this matter.)

  ft Sharaf un-Nissa refers to James as a practising Muslim in her evidence to Dr Kennedy published in the Clive Enquiry, where she mentions that ‘the Resident had for the Six months past become a real Mussulman’. This is corroborated by Munshi Aziz Ullah, who in a Persian letter to Sharaf un-Nissa after James’s death prays for his soul using a very specific construction that would only be used of a pukka Muslim, ‘may Allah illumine his dust and grant him abode in heaven’. Letter from Munshis Aziz Ullah and Aman Ullah to Sharaf un-Nissa, 25 August 1810. The letter is in a bound volume of Russell’s Persian correspondence in the Bodleian Library. These letters somehow became detached from Russell’s well-catalogued English correspondence and languished uncatalogued in a box in the library’s Persian Department. I am extremely grateful to Doris Nicholson for finally locating the vital folder of correspondence.

  fu Whatever his own views, James was however quite clear—both in a letter to his father and in his will—that his children should be baptised ‘as soon as possible after their arrival in England’, just as General Palmer had had William baptised before his English schooling, and without which both fathers must have feared—probably correctly—that their children would never be accepted in Britain. See OIOC, F228/84, ‘The Last Will and Testament of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, and Kirkpatrick Papers. See also the fascinating letter (F228/59, p.27) of 24 October 1804, James to William Kirkpatrick, where James seems to imply that it would not be possible to baptise the children on a trip to Madras as Khair un-Nissa would be there (and, implicitly, either she would not allow it, or he did not want to offend her by performing the ceremony in her presence).

  fv According to custom, it also marked the moment that the child could be placed in a gahwarah (swinging cradle).

  fw Known as the kanchhedan ceremony. Sahib Begum’s ears were pierced by July 1805 when, at the age of three, she was painted by George Chinnery wearing a pair of large pearl earrings. ‡Known as the bal gunthan.

  fx In some families it was a tradition to celebrate the bismillah on the fourth day of the fourth month of the child’s fourth year.

  fy One of the advantages for Khair in marrying James was that she would never have had to contend with the will of a mother-in-law, as would almost certainly have been the case had she married within Hyderabadi society. Instead, at the age of sixteen she found herself mistress of her own zenana. See p.140n.

  fz That the model was once a dolls’ house was also the conclusion reached independently by preservationist Elbrun Kimmelman and her student team. In the summer of 2001 they began work restoring the model, and reached their conclusions partly by comparisons with other eighteenth-century dolls’ houses of similar dimensions. The fact that Kirkpatrick was ordering dolls from Europe at the same time as he was building the replica—a fact unknown to Kimmelman—can be taken as clinching evidence of their speculations. Intriguingly, in Palaces of the Raj, Mark Bence-Jones notes that ‘the miniature palace, complete with portico and balustrade, remained a feature of the Begum’s
Garden, a delight to future generations of Residency children who were, however, discouraged from playing with it since it harboured snakes and insects’. That the model predates the completed building is clear from various differences between the two, and a number of small architectural features included on the model that were never actually constructed on the Residency proper. Work conducted by Kimmelman on the dolls’ house resulted in a successful application to the World Monuments Fund for the entire Residency complex to be selected for the Fund’s Hundred Most Endangered Sites list in 2001.

  ga Perhaps £150,000 in today’s currency.

  gb Perhaps £3.8 million today.

  gc In 1761, for example, he led the army of Hyderabad into battle against a vastly superior Maratha army, telling his troops, ‘In this life, which is like a bubble of water and which vanishes like the scent of a flower, to leave behind a reputation for cowardice is against all honour. He who does not mind losing his life and wants to sacrifice himself, can come with me and meet the challenge of the swords. Otherwise everybody is permitted to go … ’The victory which followed was one of the greatest ever won by the Hyderabadis. See Gulzar i-Asafiya, pp.121-34.