‘Sir, I have been much gratified since the result of my recent painful trial, to receive so many expressions of sympathy from the public generally,’ Jacob began. He thanked those who had given him support and ‘the gentlemen of the jury for their patient and independent consideration during the protracted proceedings in the High Court’. Despite the strength of the legal professionals arrayed against him, he had always maintained confidence that the English love of fair play, ‘which, in a contest, generously leans to the weakest side’, would win the day. He ended the brief letter by wishing ‘one and all a Happy New Year and many of them’.18
Jacob’s letter suggested that all his troubles were over. And for the briefest of moments, they had appeared to be. When the applause in the court finally died down, Inverarity had applied for the return to his client of the diamond and the monies held by the court. Justice Wilson read a short order stating: ‘With the ending of the present trial, every other order in connection with the case is, of course, dissolved. The diamond must be returned to Mr Jacob.’
It never was. The prosecution had been anticipating just such an outcome. Addressing the judge, Woodroffe said that, earlier that morning, a civil suit had been filed against Jacob in connection with the diamond transaction, and an injunction had been served upon him and the bank authorities, ordering them to keep the stone. Wilson had no option but to agree that the civil court order take effect.
In the confusion that had followed his acquittal, Jacob had remained sitting in the dock listening intently as the opposing legal camps tussled over his fate. It was only after Wilson stood up to leave the court that one of the defence team drew his attention to the fact that he had forgotten to discharge the prisoner.
To everyone but the prosecution, Jacob’s acquittal always seemed a certainty. Despairing at the ‘lame ending’ to what was otherwise the most important case to come before the High Court for many years, the Englishman said that the criminal trial should have been abandoned back when the Nizam’s evidence to the commission was disallowed.19
The Civil and Military Gazette said the prosecution had been as ill-advised. ‘It has cost the Nizam an enormous sum of money, it has not only exposed the intrigues of the palace, the friction between him and his minister, and the antecedents and practices of the chamberlain, but it has exposed him further to the ridicule of the outside public, and more particularly to that of the other native Princes in India. For all this, he has to thank his legal advisers who, alone, have derived any benefit from a prosecution which should never have been launched.’ It took pity on Jacob who had suffered greatly as a result of his house being searched and his business closed. ‘For all this, it would seem he has no remedy, as the Nizam is a foreign Prince and cannot be sued, except with the sanction of the government; and Mr Jacob must, therefore, rest content with the unanimous verdict of acquittal pronounced in his favour by the jury after a protracted and useless trial, coupled with such satisfaction as the knowledge that he has the sympathy of the public can give him.’20
The Times of London was also disappointed in the outcome but for other reasons. For all the vague hints that, ‘startling disclosures would be made regarding the Nizam’s entourage’, he emerged from the trial ‘without a stain on his character’. The trial nevertheless confirmed certain facts about Indian potentates. That the Nizam had even considered buying the Imperial Diamond for the equivalent of £250,000 showed the Princes could not be relied ‘to indulge their fancies in an economical manner as ordinary mortals’.21 The Los Angeles Times was perhaps the most disparaging, calling the Nizam a ‘josh mark of large and bulging proportions’ for being prepared to waste the equivalent of $1 million on a single glittering stone.22
There is no record of how Jacob marked Christmas in Calcutta. Although he had been acquitted in the criminal court he did not have much to celebrate. He was, as his defence team had argued, a man of ample means with well-stocked shops in Simla and Delhi and a rich and varied clientele. But fighting the Imperial Diamond Case had hit him hard.
His legal fees were astronomical. The cost of retaining Inverarity had run into tens of thousands of rupees. As for the transaction itself, he had fared badly. If not for the exchange rate tipping in his favour, he would have been nearly 200,000 rupees out of pocket. He still owed Tremearne his 100,000-rupee commission. After paying the insurance money and the cost of bringing out the stone, he had barely broken even.
His business was also suffering. For the better part of half a year, he had been so preoccupied with selling the Imperial and then defending himself in court, he had had little time left over for trading in jewellery and antiques. Making up that shortfall was almost impossible. His best customer was now his worst enemy and other Princes would be wary of dealing with him.
He was also bitter about his treatment by the British. He had not seen Fitzpatrick’s description of him as ‘low life’, but he sensed the hostility towards him in the prosecution’s case. Now he was determined to recover not only his missing profit but also his dignity.
On December 29, he instructed Morgan & Co. to write to the Governor General requesting permission to lodge two suits with the Calcutta High Court on his behalf: one for breach of contract and the recovery of the 1.7 million rupees from the Nizam and a second, suing the ruler for malicious prosecution.
Bringing a suit against a native Prince required the Government’s permission and among the senior officials following the case there was little appetite to grant it. According to the advice of the Government Solicitor, there was justification for granting a suit for breach of contract, but a suit for malicious prosecution was ‘ridiculous’. The Nizam had acted upon the advice of the most cautious and soundest lawyers he had ever met. ‘The object of the suit is simply to “hustle” the Nizam, and the Government should refuse its consent peremptorily.’23
In the end, A.M. Jacob vs H.H. the Nizam of Hyderabad never went beyond a lawyer’s brief. On March 11, 1892, the case was settled in an out-of-court agreement. Under its terms, Jacob was to hand over the Imperial Diamond to the Nizam who was to pay him 150,000 rupees.24
Though the Nizam would be able to ‘feast his eyes by gazing on the costly treasure’ for almost two million rupees less than he had originally agreed to pay, he didn’t see it as a bargain. The diamond was considered manhoos (unlucky), a cursed gem that had brought him only unhappiness and misfortune.
For the next three years, Hyderabad’s ruler kept the Imperial in the Bank of Bengal with instructions to sell it, but there were no takers. In 1895, the stone was returned to the state treasury where it remained locked away until Mahboob’s successor, Osman Ali Khan, withdrew it in 1911. But he too lost interest in it even though the disgrace the Diamond Case had brought down on the House of Hyderabad was never forgotten.
In 1944, in response to an inquiry from the Gemmological Association of Great Britain, Sir Arthur Lothian, the British Resident at Hyderabad, called on Osman Ali Khan to ask if he still had the diamond and whether he could furnish some technical details about the stone. ‘I had not however finished explaining things when the Nizam flared up in the most extraordinary way, and said he thought such interference and meddling in his private affairs was most objectionable, and he had the gravest suspicions as to its object. He asked how the British Government would like it if he inquired about the King’s private possessions.’
The Nizam told Lothian his father had already had enough trouble over the stone and he ‘would rather throw his diamonds into the gutter than have to suffer such an insult’. Lothian wrote that he kept on repeating ‘this absurd phrase about throwing his diamonds into the gutter, and was literally shaking all over. I realized then that I had unwittingly started off a brain storm.’
Lothian tried to calm him down by reassuring him that his was an innocent inquiry, but he wouldn’t listen. ‘From first to last I should say it took about twenty-five minutes for him to simmer down, and I regard the episode as one more piece of evidence that in certain matte
rs the Nizam is not entirely sane.’25
Legend has it that the stone would have been mislaid forever had it not been accidentally found inside the toe of a smelly old slipper that the miserly Nizam fortunately insisted on keeping. It was eventually mounted on a filigree stand and used as a paper weight.
When Hyderabad lost its Independence in 1948 after a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Indian army, Osman Ali Khan decided to set aside the most prized pieces of jewellery from his enormous collection and place them in several trusts.26 Thrown haphazardly together in cheap cardboard containers in a special safe-deposit box at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Bombay’s Fort district, was perhaps the most valuable single collection of jewellery in the world. It included 25,000 diamonds, 2000 emeralds and Basra pearls the size of quail’s eggs. The stand-out piece was the Imperial Diamond which, by then, had been renamed the Jacob to remove the stigma of its colonial connotations.
Osman Ali Khan’s motivation was partly to shield the Crown Jewels from the prying eyes of India’s tax officials. It was also to ensure that his grandson Mukarram Jah would inherit them, rather than have them squandered by his wayward eldest son, Azam Jah, who had disgraced himself by his endless whoring, gambling and massive debts. The plan went horribly wrong.
When the seventh Nizam died in 1967, the thirty-four-year-old Mukarram was tasked with sorting out what was, at the time, the largest inheritance in the world. Born in Nice, educated at Harrow and Cambridge before attending Sandhurst military college, he had spent very little time in India. Due to his father’s arranged marriage to Princess Durrushehvar, the daughter of Turkey’s Abdul Mejid, the last Caliph of Islam, he was revered by many Muslims as a spiritual leader. Yet he was more at home listening to jazz in Humphrey Lyttelton’s club in a basement on Oxford Street than he was in the marbled surrounds of the Chowmahalla Palace or attending prayers at the Mecca Masjid. Unable and unwilling to manage the vast estate he had inherited with its 14,700 servants, hundreds of ageing concubines and inestimable quantities of jewels and antiques stashed away in dozens of decaying palaces, he bought a half-million-acre sheep station in Western Australia where he could indulge in his real passion—driving bulldozers through the desert.
Mukarram Jah’s eccentricities did not end there. He abhorred the outward trappings of wealth, preferring to dress in overalls and insisting that he be called plain ‘Mr Jah’ by his station hands. While he tinkered with his machines at Murchison House Station, his advisers were milking his fortune dry. By the early 1980s, he was in serious financial trouble, but the pieces—including the Jacob Diamond—his grandfather had put away to guard against such an eventuality, were out of reach. The trustees had decided to give the Indian government first option at buying the Crown Jewels. Not surprisingly, it was offering only a fraction of the estimated 6 to 7 billion rupees the 173 pieces would fetch on the open market.
When the government made its final offer of 2.2 billion rupees in compensation, in 1995, after a lengthy court battle, Jah was to receive a mere 800 million rupees, the rest being divided between his brother and some 2000-odd relatives spawned from his forebears’ zenanas. No sooner had the settlement been finalized, however, than Jah’s children from his first marriage put a stay on the government’s payment, declaring their father was mentally incompetent to manage his financial affairs.
It would not be until 2002 that Jah would pocket the proceeds of the sale but, by then, it was too late. In 1996, he had fled Australia fearing he would be jailed as a debtor and gone to Turkey. In a bizarre twist of fate, he wound up as a recluse in a two-bedroom flat in Antalya just a few hundred miles west of Jacob’s birthplace, Diyarbakir. Today, the diamond that bears Jacob’s name is the centrepiece of the Jewels of the Nizams exhibition that is shown periodically in Hyderabad and New Delhi.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE GHOST OF THE
CHOWMAHALLA PALACE
RAMON Novarro was always going to look great in a turban. The dark-skinned, swashbuckling idol of the silent screen was touted as the new Rudolph Valentino. Women swooned over his boyish good looks—as did men. Novarro never admitted to his homosexuality, but he did little to quash the rumours flying around Hollywood. In 1925, he shocked the film world by appearing ‘as nearly in the nude as the censors would allow’1 in Ben Hur. Louis B. Mayer of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios demanded that he marry to prove his sexuality. Novarro refused.
Casting the gay son of a Mexican immigrant with a heavy Latino accent as an Indian diamond dealer who falls in love with an American girl played by Madge Evans was the inspiration of Jacques Feyder. The Belgian director of classics, such as, The Kiss starring Greta Garbo, had a talent for bringing exotic locations to the screen and he found the perfect vehicle in Son of India. The first Hollywood talkie set on the subcontinent, the film was replete with clichés of the exotic East—springing cobras, leaping tigers, and lusty Princes living in jewel-encrusted palaces.
The film’s opening shots show Novarro’s slightly camp character Abdul Karim and his father Hamid, a wealthy Hindu gem merchant travelling across India. As they make their way through the jungle, their caravan is ambushed by bandits. A Hindu holy man saves Karim’s life by burying him in sand and giving him a straw pipe to breathe through—a trick still used by Indian street magicians today.
Just before the ambush, Hamid gives his son his most precious possession—a large diamond—and tells him that gratitude is the most important virtue one can possess. The bandits murder Hamid but Karim escapes. Dressed in rags, he travels to Bombay where he offers the diamond to a Bombay jeweller. When Karim refuses the jeweller’s stingy offer, he is accused of stealing the diamond from the merchant’s shop. He is arrested, brought to trial and is about to be convicted when a wealthy American, William Darsey, steps forward as a witness to the fact that the jewel belonged to Karim. Freed from custody, Karim offers Darsey the diamond, but the American refuses. Instead, Karim sells it to a wealthy Indian whom he meets in the street. The film fast-forwards ten years and we see Karim as a wealthy gem merchant, who mixes with the élite of Anglo-Indian society and even makes it to the captaincy of the local polo team. At a polo match, he meets Darsey’s sister Janice. The two fall in love but there is fierce opposition from Janice’s aunt.
During a tiger hunt, Karim chances across the bandit who had killed his father and, while the two are fighting, Janice gets bitten by a cobra. Karim saves her life by removing the poison from her body at considerable risk, of course, to himself. The two decide to get married, but when Darsey finds out, the classic ‘east is east and west is west’ theme intervenes. Karim finds himself under pressure not to go through with the marriage as Janice would forever be ostracized by her friends and family. When William reminds Karim of his father’s dying words regarding the importance of gratitude, he finally relents and returns to a life of solitude.
With Novarro cast in the lead role, Son of India blossomed at the box office. But reviewers weren’t kind, dismissing the film as ‘midsummer saccharinity’, a ‘marshmallow romance’ and a ‘servant girl’s dream’. There was disappointment that Novarro sang only one song and that he had ‘nothing of the glamour of The Prisoner of Zenda’.2 The Times of India reviewer sniggered at the film’s anachronisms pointing out that a Hindu could never be named Abdul Karim and that, while camels were a common sight in Delhi they were never seen on the streets of Bombay.3 Strangely, no one mentioned how Novarro’s fake Anglo-Indian accent reverted to its Latino roots after just a few scenes.
Though it paved the way for a slew of other Hollywood movies set in South Asia, such as The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Gunga Din, the original print of Son of India lies forgotten in a vault at MGM studios in Los Angeles. Most of Novarro’s biographers give the movie only a cursory mention in the star’s long and rather turgid life story.
Forgotten, too, is the man who inspired the character of Abdul Karim and the film’s fantastic tale of diamonds, deceit, love and devotion. Alexander Jacob did not l
ive to see Son of India hit the screens, but he would have recognized himself immediately. Like Karim, he was a trader in gems, whose rags-to-riches story began in Bombay. A diamond was to prove his undoing, a chance meeting with an American would be life-changing and his days would end in solitude.
Adapted from Francis Marion Crawford’s Mr Isaacs, the movie was just one of the many attempts to fictionalize the story of Jacob’s now-infamous life. His position as India’s pre-eminent trader in gems, jewellery and antiques, and as its most notorious practitioner of the magical arts may have been checked by the Imperial Diamond Case, but his notoriety was blooming.
He had achieved the status of a legend—‘standing out with the Taj (Mahal) as a wonder of the East’, as one of his many admirers wrote. ‘The only difference is that, whereas the Taj is an architectural mystery, Mr Jacob is a human mystery. No one has ever read the amazing riddle of his personality, or given any satisfactory explanation of the remarkable things he has done. Like many other men of the East, his character baffles analysis, and evades solution. Only a part of him, and that a very small part, can ever be seen; in the whole, he escapes one entirely.’4
The mere mention of Jacob’s name was guaranteed to sell newspapers, magazines and books. There was much to draw on: his powers of magic, his skills at mesmerism and telepathy; his supposed missions for the Secret Department; his mysterious establishment on Simla’s Mall, brimming with priceless jewels and antiques, smokey with incense, the rendezvous point for agents and spies. It didn’t matter that the diamond case revealed him to be a hustler and shrewd trader who exploited the gullibility of his clients. The image of a wizened man, muttering incantations while sorting through a pile of precious stones in his Aladdin’s Cave-like shop, was inspiration enough.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 21