White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  hk ‘Punch’ being of course an Indian word, arriving in the English language via the Hindustani panch (five), a reference to the number of ingredients for the drink, which traditionally were (according to Hobson Jobson) ‘arrack, sugar, lime-juice, spice and water’.

  hl Blunt was part of a long tradition of dubious English clergymen exported to India after failing to find a living at home. The curate of Madras in 1666, for example, was described as ‘a drunken toss-pot’, while his counterpart in Calcutta twenty years later was ‘a very lewd, drunken swearing person, drenched in all manner of debaucheries, and a most bitter enemy of King William and the present Government’. Back in Madras, Francis Fordyce, padre to the Presidency throughout the 1740s, turned out to have fled his post as chaplain at St Helena after having debauched a planter’s daughter. In Madras he fared little better, quarrelling with Clive and being called before the Council to justify his conduct. He refused to attend, but it was declared in his absence that he vowed he would ‘pull off his canonicals at any time to do himself justice’. See Henry Dodwell, The Nabobs of Madras (London, 1926), pp.19-20.

  hm So comely was Blaquière’s appearance that when Zoffany came to paint a Leonardo-style Last Supper for the altarpiece of St John’s church in Calcutta he chose him as the model for the traditionally effeminate-looking apostle John (‘the apostle Jesus loved’), and posed him with his long blond tresses tumbling over Jesus’ breast. Jesus himself was modelled by the ‘worthy Greek priest, Father Parthenio’, while according to Mildred Archer, the auctioneer William Tulloh, who had disposed of James Kirkpatrick’s Electrifying Machine, ‘was far from pleased to find himself as Judas’. It is certainly an unusual reworking of the familiar scene: as a contemporary critic pointed out, ‘Peter’s sword hung upon a nail on the wall is a common peon’s tulwaar [scimitar]: the water ewer standing near the table is copied from a pigdanny [a Hindustani spittoon]: and there is a beesty bag full of water lying near it.’ See Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770-1825 (London, 1979), p.158.

  hn The Begums brought at least one slave girl with them, by name Zora. She appears in Henry Russell’s letters as she became pregnant while in Calcutta, and stayed there to give birth to her child, rejoining the Begums the following year. It is unclear from the surviving letters who the father was, though Russell’s daughter-in-law Constance, who bound, edited and censored his papers, clearly believed that it might have been Russell. See Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.219, 26 January 1807.

  ho This was a great honour, which Muslim women in purdah were free to extend only to the most honoured family friends, as for example when the Emperor Jehangir decreed that his father-in-law, Itmad ud-Daula, had become such ‘an intimate friend’ that ‘the ladies of the harem [were] not to veil their faces to him’. See Tuzuk i-Jahangiri, Vol. 1, p.351. One way of getting around the stricture of purdah was for a woman or a group of women formally to adopt the man in question as their ‘brother’. Tipu’s widows did this to the officer at Vellore who was deputed to look after them following the fall of Seringapatam in 1799, and there is some evidence that this was what Khair did with the Russells: certainly on 29 May, a month after the Begums had arrived in Calcutta, Henry instructs his brother Charles that when writing to Khair, ‘you must address her as your elder sister’. Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.138.

  hp Sydenham had briefly served under James at Hyderabad before being transferred to Pune. James (who called him ‘Pontifex Maximus’ in his letters) had always been suspicious of him, and speculated that he might have been behind the ‘leak’ confirming the existence of his child by Khair un-Nissa which, relayed to Calcutta via the Subsidiary Force, had resulted in the 1801 Clive Enquiry.

  hq This was something James was well aware of, and his extreme admiration and affection for Aziz Ullah is clear throughout the Kirkpatrick Papers. During his time as Resident James wrote constantly to Calcutta demanding pensions, pay rises and honours for his munshi, and in his will left him an especially generous bequest: ‘Unto my Moonshy, Meer Uzeez Ullah, in Testimony of the high value which I set on his zeal, fidelity, talents and long tried personal attachment to me, I will and bequeath the sum of ten thousand sicca rupees, and my emerald ring with my titles from the King of Delhi engraved in Persian. To his worthy brother Amaun Oollah I bequeath two thousand sicca rupees in testimony of my high approbation of his able and faithful services.’ Ten thousand rupees is around £60,000 in today’s currency. For James’s will see OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/84. For a succession of James’s letters asking for pensions and pay rises for Munshi Azeez Ullah in view of his exceptional success at negotiating treaties, see OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/12, pp.74, 168, 183, 216 and finally p.259, when on 14 November 1800 James finally exploded over Calcutta’s continuing neglect of his munshi, writing to his brother William: ‘So! In return for the highly important services rendered by Uzeez Oolah, and which in conformity to your own express declaration, I encouraged him to expect would be rewarded, for the first treaty [alone], by a pension of five hundred rupees per month, his salary is to be increased by only one hundred rupees per annum!!! with the pleasing prospect of being a drudge in the office for nearly the remainder of his days. If this really be meant as a favour, I am certain it is one that Uzeez Oolah will humbly beg leave to decline, and in such case, I shall consider myself—after the reiterated and positive assurances I have given him—most sacredly bound to make him full compensation from my private purse, for the disappointment of his just and well founded expectations in the above score … You have met my suggestion with regard to this most invaluable man, in the most extraordinary manner indeed; in a manner that I must say was altogether unexpected; and no less impolitic than unhandsome.’ James’s constant concern for the well-being of his Indian staff, demonstrated throughout his letters, is one of his most attractive traits and always shows him at his most generous and honourable.

  hr Lieutenant Samuel Russell of the Madras Engineers, the son of the Royal Acadamician John Russell, was (oddly enough) no relation to the brothers Henry and Charles Russell. At this period Samuel Russell was busy finishing off the construction of James’s great Residency House.

  hs According to his friend William Prinsep, John Palmer was ‘called the Prince of Merchants from his unbounded liberality, amiability and wealth. He had married a very handsome woman of an Armenian cast of countenance … his house was always open and a dinner table for nearly twenty always spread and nearly always filled. No stranger arrived then in Calcutta without dining there as a thing of course … ’ Prinsep adds, however, that anyone who arrived for dinner wearing silk stockings could never forget ‘the torture they suffered under the table’ from the mosquitoes. Palmer’s style was not to everyone’s liking, and the straitlaced Lady Nugent was alarmed to discover that after dinner the women all withdrew from the men only to begin smoking an especially noisy selection of hookahs, ‘some deep bass, others a bubbling treble’. She was eventually persuaded by Mrs Palmer to try it out, ‘as she assured me it was only a composition of spices, but I did it awkwardly, swallowing the smoke and the consequence was I coughed all night’. See OIOC, Mss Eur D1160/1, ‘Memoirs of William Prinsep’, pp.251-3. Also Lady Maria Nugent, Journal of a Residence in India 1811-15 (2 vols, London, 1839).

  ht Russell was not able to write well in Persian, which implies that the elder two Begums corresponded in the Hyderabadi vernacular, Deccani Urdu (sometimes called Deccani), a close cousin to Hindustani, in which Russell was fluent. Khair un-Nissa on the other hand seems to have been literate only in Persian, something that later caused Russell enormous difficulties when he wished to write to her from Madras and could not find a confidential Persian letter-writer there—even though he was clearly quite capable of writing letters himself in Hindustani or Deccani Urdu.

  hu Unlike Khair, Sharaf un-Nissa seems to have been illiterate and to have been forced to use the services of letter-writers—including, in this instanc
e, Henry Russell.

  hv Charles Russell’s career was from the very beginning less spectacular than that of his elder brother. It had started badly when Sir Henry had failed—despite his best efforts—in his attempts to obtain a writership for Charles, and he had to be content to remain a military ensign. In 1803 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and as such joined Henry at Hyderabad. But even here he rose no higher than Acting Assistant Secretary. Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C152, 31 July 1803, Henry Russell to Charles Russell. See also Peter Wood, ‘Vassal State in the Shadow of Empire’ (unpublished Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981), p.103.

  hw Or alternatively, Bâqar could be dead. It is unclear when he died; possibly it was in 1808, when there was a dispute over his lands, which the government was attempting to resume.

  hx Another famously strong-willed Mughal beauty who succeeded in remarrying to great advantage was of course Nur Jehan: it is often forgotten that Jehangir was her second husband. See Ellison Banks Findly, Nur Jehan: Empress of Mughal India (New Delhi, 1993).

  hy What Ure had decided to do was apparently a perfectly legal practice, though it was usual only for professional lawyers, and not close friends, actually to claim a commission for acting as executor of a will. Moreover Ure, like the Munshi, received a very generous bequest from Kirkpatrick: ‘Mr. George Ure surgeon to the Residency fifty pounds sterling as a token of my esteem and regard … and unto my surgeon George Ure Esq I bequeath the [further] sum of five thousand sicca rupees as some reward for his frequent attendance on me in sickness and for all the trouble which I have at times given to him’ (OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/84). In modern currency, the bequest totalled around £33,000. Russell tells Charles exactly what he thinks of Dr Ure’s decision to pocket his commission: ‘when a man appoints a private friend to be his executor and even bequeathes to that friend a legacy … it appears to me that, to burden the estate by demanding a percentage, is an act which may be justly reprobated as shabby and rapacious … I told Ure very candidly what my sentiments were; but he seemed resolved to maintain and exercise his Right.’

  hz Effectively Chancellor of the Exchequer to Mir Alam’s Prime Minister. ‡When the child was born, Russell explicitly called her ‘my little girl’. If this is the case, the cause of his anger was not the woman’s possible infidelity so much as her failure to employ proper contraception—something Indian prostitutes and courtesans were famously skilled in. See B.F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge, 1983), p.94.

  ia The baby, a little girl, died soon after her birth the following year, and Russell wrote when he heard the news: ‘If the girl had lived she was to have been brought up by the Begum.’ Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.213, 27 April 1807. In a note attached to this letter, Constance, Lady Russell, Henry’s daughter-in-law and the family historian, has scribbled: ‘Sir Henry Russell alludes to the death of his little girl and says he shall take the boy [his earlier child by the bibi] with him to Hyderabad. These apparently are all the children of Zora, the slave of the Begum.’ Is this correct? Almost certainly not. Russell’s bibi may well have had some connection with the Begum, as we know Khair intervened on the girl’s behalf when she first became pregnant, but Zora is in Calcutta with the Begums on p.219, where she becomes pregnant, while Russell’s ‘girl’ has apparently remained throughout in Hyderabad. It is quite possible nonetheless that Russell’s ‘girl’ may originally have been a slave of the Begum, before entering his zenana. If so, as she was already the mother of his little boy, she must have been given to Russell by the Begum during the lifetime of James. It is all very intriguing. But very unclear.

  ib Barlow (1762-1847) was the senior member of Wellesley’s Council, and enthusiastically supported the latter’s aggressive policy, writing: ‘No native state should be left to exist in India which is not upheld by the British power, or the political conduct of which is not under its absolute control.’ Sir Penderel Moon describes him as ‘by nature a time server’ and ‘lacking in breadth of vision’. The British Conquest and Dominion of India, p.347.

  ic In other words, Russell hoped that Sydenham might die young, as James (and indeed, that very month, Sydenham’s English wife) had just done, so allowing Russell to step into his shoes as Resident.

  id The first half of this letter has been cut out with a pair of scissors and appears to have been deliberately censored, either by Russell himself or by his daughter-in-law Constance.

  ie The 1806 Vellore Mutiny was in fact caused by the Madras sepoys’ suspicions that there were plans afoot forcibly to convert them to Christianity. Their fears were provoked by a new set of army regulations designed to regularise the appearance of the men, requiring them to shave their beards, trim their moustaches and to give up wearing earrings or painted marks on their foreheads. They were also required to wear a new type of turban, very much resembling a hat, an object closely associated with Europeans and Indian converts to Christianity. The mutiny was quickly put down and the Madras authorities, in an attempt to cover up their own blunders, advanced the theory that it was part of a widespread ‘Muhammedan Plot’ to expel the British, a claim that was later shown to be an invention (not least because most of the mutineers were Hindu); but thanks to the confusion caused by the idea of the Plot, the new regulations were never rescinded, and similar orders spread across the Company’s army. The fear of conversion to Christianity among the Company’s sepoys was one of the principal causes of the Great Mutiny (or, to Indians, the First War of Independence) in 1857. The new regulations, incidentally, galvanised ‘Hindoo Stuart’ into action for the first time when he defended the sepoys’ right to appear on parade with their brightly painted caste-marks and full Rajput moustaches. Indeed he had already, in 1798, published a tract calling for all Company troops in India, British and Indian, to adopt a turban, Mughal-style jama and curved scimitar as their uniform, as well as growing a proper display of facial hair: ‘I dare not yet propose, that our Officers should wear Mustachoes, though they certainly give a very manly air to the countenance;—but as Malborough’s are now become very fashionable in the army, I do not despair of soon seeing the hair upon the lip. How often, when passing along in my palankeen, have mendicants supplicated me for charity by the appellation of Beeby Sauheb—mistaking my sex, from the smoothness of my face.’ The issue was eventually taken up as high as the commander-in-chief, who criticised Stuart for his ‘peculiar notions’ and for allowing his men to effect a ‘preposterous overgrowth of facial hair of Cheek Moustaches and immoderately large whiskers or Malboroughs’, which, he maintained, undermined discipline and multiplied the religious prejudices of the sepoys, which ‘were already numerous enough and sufficiently embarrassing to the Publick service’. See Hindoo Stuart’s anonymously published tract Observations and Remarks on the Dress, Discipline, &C. of The Military By a Bengal Officer (Calcutta, 1798). For his rebuke by the commander-in-chief see OIOC, IOR/P/Ben/Sec/253, Fort William, 17 December 1813, No. 39, Re. Regimental Orders By Lt. Col. Stuart, Futtyghur, 2 July 1813. For the Vellore Mutiny see Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, pp.359-61.

  if Dustee Ali Khan is not mentioned in any other source, and the Nagaristan i-Asafiya explicitly speaks of Sharaf un-Nissa having only two daughters. He was therefore probably Khair un-Nissa’s half-brother—in other words Mehdi Yar Khan’s son by a different wife or concubine.

  ig Shushtari once made the journey by the government dak, and was astonished: ‘The Governor, as a token of respect, arranged for me to travel by Dak post-horse from Calcutta to Machlibandar. At every 2 farsakhs [leagues] 14 escorts were waiting ready: 8 to carry the litter on their shoulders, travelling faster than a rapidly trotting horse; 2 to carry the food; 2 to carry torches which they lit after dark; 1 guide; and 1 drummer. I reached Machli-bandar from Calcutta in the space of 15 days, a journey which would otherwise have taken two and a half months. In truth, the miracle of taiy al-arz [instant global travel] ascribed to
the Sufis in the books is to be found here and only in this manner! We travelled mostly at night, but even by day we never stopped, so I found out little about the country through which we passed. Only when the drum sounded did we stop for a picnic, but the movement of the porters had upset my stomach and I had no taste for food, especially not for meat or anything cooked. Everywhere we reached, by day or by night, the Company’s servants were ready to welcome us and offer us repose.’ Abdul Lateef Shushtari, Tuhfat al-’Alam, pp.564-70.

  ih And as such, the scene of some of the earliest and wildest English debauches in India. For example, in December 1619 William Methwold reported from Masulipatam that the Company’s staff had broken into a series of toddy shacks and port-side bordellos and generally ‘behaved [so much] like barbarous outlaws that I feare our nation, formerly well reputed of, will suffer a perpetuall scandal for their most intolerable misdemeanours’. Seven years later, President Hawley, Methwold’s successor, finding his Masulipatam staff equally intractable, called for the factory to be ‘maintained with civill, sober men’, and ordered that ‘negligent or debauched persons or common drunkards should be discarded’. See William Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India (13 vols, London, 1906-27), Vol. 1, p.153.