The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  In the older bazaars, the great cusped gateways of the old Hyderabadi havelis still stand, but now they lead nowhere, except perhaps to a half-built matrix of foundations and concrete piles. The palaces of the Paigah nobility have mostly been knocked down or else taken over by the government, and have been so badly kept-up, or so unsympathetically converted into offices, that they are virtually unrecognisable.

  But look a little further, and you discover that small pools of the old world do still survive, often out of bounds to the casual visitor. The Falaknuma Palace is one such place. A huge and magnificent complex of white classical villas and mansions raised above the town on its own acropolis, the Falaknuma was the principal residence of the sixth Nizam, the father of Osman Ali Khan. But today it is the subject of a bitter legal dispute between the Taj group, who wish to turn it into a hotel, and the last Nizam’s grandson, now mainly resident on a sheep farm in Australia, who claims never to have sold it. While the buildings await the decision of the courts, they lie empty and semi-ruinous, locked by court order, with every window and doorway sealed with red wax.

  Wipe the dust from the windows and peer inside, and you see cobwebs the size of bedsheets hanging in the corners of the rooms. The skeletons of outsized Victorian sofas and armchairs lie dotted around the parquet floors, their chintz entirely eaten away by white ants, so that all that remain are the wooden frames, the springs and a little of the stuffing. Vast imperial desks, big enough to play billiards on, stand on rotting red carpets peppered with huge holes, as if they have been savaged by some terrible outsized supermoth. On one wall hangs a giant portrait of Queen Mary, on another a strange, faded Victorian fantasy of Richard the Lionheart on the battlements at Acre. Beyond are long, gloomy corridors, leading to unseen inner courtyards and zenana wings: mile upon mile of empty classical arcades and melancholy bow fronts, now quite empty but for a pair of lonely chowkidars shuffling around with their lathis and whistles. Outside stretch acres of scrub flats, once presumably soft green lawns, dotted here and there with kitsch statues of naked cupids, waterless fountains, giant silver oil lamps and paint-flaking flagpoles leaning at crazy angles.

  That this fairy-tale extravagance has always been part of the culture of Hyderabad is demonstrated by the mediaeval Qu’tb Shahi tombs, a short distance to the east of the Falaknuma. They are wonderfully ebullient and foppish monuments dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with domes swelling out of all proportion to the bases, like a watermelon attempting to balance on a fig. Above the domes rises the craggy citadel of Golconda, source of the ceaseless stream of diamonds which ensured that Hyderabad’s rulers would never be poor. Inside the walls you pass a succession of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens – a world that seems to have jumped straight out of the pages of The Arabian Nights. When the French jeweller Jean Baptiste Tavernier visited Golconda in 1642 he found a society every bit as decadent as this architecture might suggest. He wrote that the town possessed more than twenty thousand registered courtesans, who took it in turns to dance for the King every Friday.

  The romantic and courtly atmosphere infected even the sober British when they arrived in Hyderabad at the end of the eighteenth century, and the city is the location of one of the most affecting Anglo-Indian love stories to emerge from the three-hundred-year interaction of the two peoples. The old British Residency, now the University College for Women, is an imposing Palladian villa which shelters in a massive fortified garden in the south of the town. A pair of stone lions lie, paws extended, below a huge pedimented and colonnaded front, looking out over a wide expanse of eucalyptus, breadfruit and casuarina trees, every inch the East India Company at its grandest and most formal. Yet surprises lurk in the undergrowth at the rear of the compound.

  The complex was built by Lieutenant-Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Resident between 1797 and 1805. He was an unusually imaginative and sympathetic figure, whose love and respect for the people of Hyderabad was symbolised by his adoption of Hyderabadi clothes and ways of living. Shortly after his arrival he fell in love with Khair-un-Nissa (‘Excellent among Women’), a great-niece of the diwan of Hyderabad, whom he married in 1800 according to Muslim law. This caused great alarm in London, as it was thought – probably correctly – that Kirkpatrick had become a Muslim, an impression that was reinforced by the report of Mountstuart Elphinstone, who wrote that Kirkpatrick had become perhaps dangerously assimilated with his surroundings:

  Major Kirkpatrick is a good-looking man … but he wears [Indian] moustachios; his hair is cropped short, and his fingers are dyed with henna, although in most other respects he is like an Englishman … [At the durbar of the Nizam] he goes in great state. He has several elephants, and a state palankeen, led horses, flags, long poles and tassels, &c., and is attended by two companies of infantry and a troop of cavalry … Major Kirkpatrick behaves like a native, but with great propriety.

  I found a battered token of Kirkpatrick’s love for his wife in the garden at the back of the Residency. As Khair-un-Nissa remained all her life in strict purdah, living in a separate bibi ghar at the end of Kirkpatrick’s garden, she was unable to walk around her husband’s great creation to admire its wonderful portico. The Resident hit upon the solution of building her a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace, so that she could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with her own eyes. The model survived intact until the 1980s, when a tree fell on it, smashing its right wing. The remains of the left wing and central block now lie under a piece of corrugated iron, near the ruins of the Moghul bibi ghar, buried deep beneath a jungle of vines and creepers, in an area still known as the Begum’s Garden.

  As in Delhi and Lucknow, the extravagantly aristocratic culture of Hyderabad filtered down to the streets. The people of other cities say we are a little lazy,’ said a shopkeeper in the bazaar, ‘that we all behave as if we are little Nizams. That we work slowly, eat slowly, wake up slowly, do everything slowly. Many shopkeepers in Hyderabad don’t open their shutters until 11 a.m. We like to take life gently, to take lots of holidays and only to work when we have no money in our pockets.’

  Another legacy of the nobility to filter down to the streets is a fondness for witchcraft and sorcery. In the Lad Bazaar, a short distance from the Char Minar, the ceremonial centrepiece of the city, I found a shop which sold nothing but charms and talismans.

  ‘In the Nizam’s time the Hyderabad princes were always hiring a murshad [sorcerer or holy man] to make spells on their enemies,’ said Ali Mohammed, who ran the shop. ‘Now Hyderabad is famous for its magic. Everyone is making too many spells. So they must come here to get protection.’

  Ali showed me his stock: silver ta’wiz blessed by famous Sufis, special kinds of attar that deflected the Evil Eye, nails worried into the shape of a cobra to protect from snake bites. On one side of the shop were piled huge bundles of thorns: ‘Its name is babul. Put it at your gate along with a lime and a green chilli and it will take on any bad magic that someone may cast on you.’

  ‘Do you really believe such curses work?’ I asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Ali. ‘I have seen it for myself. The murshad of Hyderabad are very powerful. They can kill a man with just a look, if they want to.’

  ‘Magic? Oh yes, there was no shortage of magic,’ said Mir Moazam’s wife, the Begum Meherunissa, when I told her about my conversation in the bazaar later that afternoon. ‘What that shopkeeper said is quite true. In the time of the Nizam the Irish head of police kept an entire department to deal with bhaha mati [black magic] and exorcism. Oh yes: there were many such stories.’

  ‘Can you remember any of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember very well the most powerful murshad in Hyderabad. I came to know him quite well. But of course he had a very tragic end.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘On summer evenings the womenfolk of my family would go out for a stroll in one of the Moghul gardens. One day af
ter they had returned from a walk my aunt began to shiver and to behave very oddly. Moreover, there was this strange smell of roses wherever she went. Luckily my grandfather realised what had happened, and knew exactly what to do. He called a murshad who questioned my aunt closely. Quite suddenly she started speaking with a man’s voice, saying, “I am the djinn of the rose garden and I am in love with this woman.” The murshad performed an exorcism, and the djinn was sent off. After that the murshad became a regular visitor at the house.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he was a strange, dark-complexioned man, with a black waistcoat and white kurta-pyjamas. He never walked straight, but rocked from side to side. People said he was a qalander, a holy fool, and very close to God. Certainly he could work small miracles, some of which I saw myself.’

  ‘You saw him work miracles?’

  ‘Many times. Or rather, not him, so much as his djinn.’

  ‘He had his own djinn?’

  ‘That’s right. To master a djinn and make him your servant, you must first fast for forty days. Very few succeed. But this man succeeded, and the djinn gave him the strong powers. The children all knew him as Misri Wallah Pir [the holy man who gives sweets], and they would run after him and shout, “Pir Sahib, give us sugar.” So he would bend down and pick up a handful of mud and throw it, and before it reached us, midway in the air it would turn to sugar! It did; I tasted it myself. It was delicious – clean and white, with no sand or impurity or anything. My mother was very angry when I told her I had eaten some of Misri Wallah Pir’s sugar, and said that it would become mud or a stone again in my stomach. But as far as I was aware it never did, or if it did it never did me any harm.’

  ‘So you saw him turn mud into sugar more than once?’

  ‘It was his favourite spell. We children would follow him around and spy on him. He was like a child, talking and laughing to himself. Sometimes he would appear to be talking directly to a wall, but if you got close enough you could hear what sounded like the wall talking to him. I would sit beside him to see if the pir was making the noise himself, but it wasn’t him. It was his djinn, Mowakhal, replying to him. Sometimes he would read the Koran, and the djinn would correct him when he made a mistake. At other times the pir would reach out his hand and from nowhere sweetmeats would come, which he would feed to cows.

  ‘Once we were on the verandah watching a lady in the street walking past with a great basket of fruit on her head. Pir Sahib was walking down the road in the opposite direction, so I shouted to him, as a joke, “Pir Sahib, get me some of that fruit.” And there and then that huge basket of fruit flew from the woman’s head and came to rest at my feet! The fruit carrier was used to Pir Sahib’s tricks, and smiled and said, “Pir Sahib, give it back,” so after I had taken a banana, Pir Sahib did send the basket back to her. The banana tasted sweeter than any other I have ever tasted.

  ‘Once my friend asked Misri Wallah Pir for some biryani. Pir Sahib said, “I am a poor man. How can I afford biryani?” But she pleaded with him, and eventually he called his djinn: “Idder ao Mowakhal!” [Come here Mowakhal!] And within seconds a delicious biryani appeared before her out of the thin air. Another time a sick man begged him for grapes. It was not the season, and there were no grapes in Hyderabad, but the djinn brought them all the same.’

  There was a pause, and the Begum looked up, I think to see if I was secretly laughing at her memories. ‘It’s up to you whether you want to believe all this,’ she said simply. ‘But I witnessed it.’

  ‘You mentioned that the pir had a very tragic end,’ I said.

  ‘His djinn left him and he lost all his powers,’ she replied. ‘He died in great poverty.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘After Mowakhal left him I never saw the pir again. But the story I heard – much later, in about 1979 – was that one day a poor man had come to him and said that he had never seen a diamond. So Misri Wallah Pir called Mowakhal and sent him off to fetch the diamond necklace of the Queen of Mysore. The necklace arrived, and the pir gave it to the beggar to examine. But the man had blood on his hands, and it got on the necklace, so Mowakhal refused to take it back again. No djinn will carry anything that has been touched by blood. The pir was furious, because he didn’t want to be accused of stealing the necklace, so he began to curse the djinn, who simply disappeared, and never came back.

  ‘After that the pir took the necklace to a police station and told the constable what had happened. But of course he didn’t believe a word the pir said, and when he asked the pir to prove that he had a djinn, he couldn’t, because Mowakhal had gone. So the police beat him up and asked him how he had stolen the necklace, and what else he had taken. After he was released the pir became very sick, and his condition just got worse and worse. Eventually he died alone and penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave.’

  As we were talking, Mir Moazam had appeared from his study where he had been busily writing a lecture to deliver the following day.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ he said to me when his wife had finished her story. ‘The world we grew up in was a different age.’

  ‘Were you aware at the time that it was all about to be swept away?’ I asked.

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘Looking back now, Hyderabad during my childhood seems like it was going through a period of glorious sunset. But at the time, of course, I thought it would all go on for ever. It was only as I grew older that I realised that it couldn’t last, that the sunset must be pretty close. You could feel it coming.’

  Mir Moazam sat down in the rocking chair beside his wife and rested his chin on his palm before continuing: ‘You see, I was from the Moghul nobility. And so of course I felt a certain loyalty to that world. But I was not blind to the defects of the Nizam. As a graduate of Madras University I had been exposed to fiery speeches by Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress leaders, and I realised then that the old order could not last. What had been possible in the Nizam’s father’s time was no longer feasible. After that I was in a real dilemma: I could see both sides of the picture.

  ‘As the British prepared to leave, I think the Nizam should have negotiated realistically with Nehru. He might have got a viable deal, a treaty that would have allowed him to keep some form of real autonomy. That way a lot of bloodshed might have been avoided. In 1947 the place was already in chaos, with the [overwhelmingly Muslim] Razakar movement attacking Congress supporters, and agents provocateurs burning down the railway station and looting the district treasuries. But despite all this, the Nizam still couldn’t see that he had been sustained in power by the British, and that now they were going he had reached the end of the line. Half-hearted negotiations dragged on, until eventually the Nizam decided to declare outright independence from India. It was utter madness. Legally and constitutionally he may have had the right to do so, but it was still quite unrealistic.’

  Mir Moazam shook his head. ‘He was living in a make-believe world,’ he said. ‘I knew that, of course. But when the crunch came I realised that my loyalty had to be to the Nizam. After all, my ancestors had given everything for the throne for two hundred years. I couldn’t just abandon ship. I had to do my duty.’

  So far I had avoided the subject of the Indian Army’s 1948 invasion of Hyderabad State, then known as ‘Operation Polo’, and referred to today in nationalist historiography as ‘the Police Action’, as if all that had been involved was a few parking tickets and the odd restraining order. I had steered clear of the topic because I had been warned by mutual friends that the invasion had been an extremely difficult and painful period for Mir Moazam, who in the aftermath had been unjustly arrested and had spent several years in prison before being acquitted. But it was Mir Moazam himself who brought the matter up.

  ‘After university I had joined the Hyderabad Civil Service, and as fate would have it, on 13 September 1948, when the Indian Army finally crossed the frontier into Hyderabad, I was the Collector [the Chief District Officer] in
charge of the area facing the main Indian attack from the south. We had no tanks, no planes and virtually no artillery. Nothing: just a pile of old .303 rifles. And with those we had been ordered to take on the might of the Indian Army.

  ‘The morning of the attack I was still shaving when I heard the first shells falling near my house. We had a few platoons of civil guards, so we lined them up along the banks of the River Musi. They were facing a fully mechanised Indian Army unit, with tanks, armoured cars and field guns, and before long the Indians began picking off our men like rabbits. Our first plan was to blow up the bridge, but it turned out the soldiers didn’t have the correct equipment. As head of the district, I was sitting with the Brigadier in the staff car, trying to decide what to do, when the Indian Air Force started strafing us from the air. Our car windows exploded. I lay flat on my belly with bullets shooting over my head. In the end the Brigadier and I took refuge under an arch of the bridge we had been supposed to blow up. The rest of our troops tried to find cover behind clumps of trees along the river.

  ‘The Brigadier and I managed to escape under intense firing and strafing, and after that we just retreated and retreated. The whole resistance was completely unrealistic. There was heavy aerial bombardment on all fronts: bombs falling everywhere. Yet in all Hyderabad there wasn’t a single anti-aircraft gun. The next day I was in a jeep retreating with the army towards Hyderabad when a bus we were overtaking was blown up by a plane. I had to hide in the paddy. We managed to delay them a little by opening the sluices and flooding the roads, but that was only for a few hours. When the Emperor Aurangzeb invaded Golconda [in 1687], the Hyderabad troops managed to keep the Moghuls at bay for seven or eight months. In our case we only held them up for four days. It was a total collapse.’