There had been no public pronouncement, but in the inner circle of the King Kothi palace and in the Viceroy’s office it was known that the Seventh Nizam had already decided that this grandson would become the next ruler of Hyderabad. Azam’s amorous and pecuniary indiscretions were nothing out of the ordinary, but this eldest son was already walking in the shadow of an infant who could barely crawl. It didn’t matter that Mukarram had yet to learn his ABCs, what counted was his lineage. On his Turkish grandfather’s side he could trace his descent to the first Caliph Abu Bakar, and on his Indian grandmother’s side the family tree went directly to the Prophet Muhammad himself. Osman Ali Khan believed that as the first offspring of the union of the two greatest Muslim dynasties of their time, Prince Mukarram could be groomed to become not only the spiritual leader of Islam but also the ruler of India’s largest Muslim state. The Caliphate would be there for his taking. No other man had a stronger claim. And besides, Azam Jah had already told the Nizam that he had no interest in the role.
Secretly the British had given the Nizam’s decision their tacit approval. It gave them breathing space because it signalled that the Nizam had dropped the idea of having himself appointed Caliph in the case of Abdul Mejid’s death. In May 1933 the Resident, Terence Keyes, had written to the Viceroy expressing his fears about an ‘an open revival of the scheme’ to restore the Caliphate in India through the marriages of Azam and Moazzam. ‘There can be no doubt that it would introduce into Hyderabad affairs such a communal impetus as would result in the extinction of the Asafiya dynasty.’1 Hyderabad’s Hindus, who provided up to 98 per cent of the state’s revenues, were ‘beginning to resent with increasing bitterness the large expenditure on purely Moslem institutions and Moslem personages of so large a proportion of the revenue’.2
As it turned out the British had no need to worry. Mejid’s death would be overshadowed by World War II. When the moment came for Jah to make his claim for the Caliphate if he so desired, the British Raj had long ceased to exist. And in any case the newly crowned Eighth Nizam would be so preoccupied with protecting his inheritance from capricious relatives that the idea would never cross his mind.
After spending several weeks in Bella Vista palace, Durrushehvar and Azam travelled to Delhi on the Nizam’s richly appointed private train. Lakshmi Raj, whose father was Azam Jah’s personal physician, remembers the huge blocks of ice that were placed on the floors of the compartments and covered with hessian to keep the passengers cool. Fresh ice was provided at Nagpur, the halfway point of the journey. From Delhi the train proceeded to Rawalpindi in present-day Pakistan, where cars were waiting to take the royal entourage, some 60 people strong, to Srinagar, the capital of the princely state of Kashmir.3 Along with nurses, governesses and Azam’s aide de camp was Durrushehvar’s Urdu teacher, Professor Aga Haider Hasan Mirza. Durrushehvar was an excellent student and became fluent in Urdu in less than a year. She wore saris as elegantly as any Indian begum, but in other aspects was thoroughly Westernised, especially when it came to bringing up her son. She knew enough about palace life in India to know what happened to the spoilt children of Indian princes. ‘When my father saw Mukarram crying in his cradle at a garden party, he went to pick him up,’ recalls Mirza’s daughter Begum Meherunissa. ‘But Princess Durrushehvar stopped him and said: “Let him cry, he should know that he will not always get what he wants. He should know what other people want as well.”’4
After their visit to Kashmir, Durrushehvar returned to Nice with the young Mukarram for the remainder of the summer, a routine that she would follow annually to avoid the torrid heat of Hyderabad. French, British and Turkish nannies were brought to Nice to bring up the infant, freeing Durrushehvar to pursue her writing and musical interests and look after her parents. Jah remembers little of those early years apart from the ‘always stern expression’ of his maternal grandfather. His days were spent playing hide and seek in the nearby Roman ruins. His favourite walks were through the rose gardens of the Franciscan monastery that looked down on the terracotta-tiled villas of Cimiez and the grand avenues of Nice pointing like spears towards the Mediterranean.5
Life in Hyderabad was never as harmonious. Durrushehvar’s marriage to Azam was a disaster. She towered above him in physique and in social status. She had grown up being called ‘Serene Highness’, while he was a mere prince and not nearly as well educated or sophisticated. An official history of Hyderabad published in 1934 described Azam as being ‘a Prince among gentlemen and a gentleman among Princes’. The heir apparent, as he was referred to, was: ‘Quiet, unostentatious with any assertion of self, of authority or position, he submits himself to command and authority and customs and exemplifies in himself the principle that he who wishes to command must himself first learn to obey. What does the greatest credit to the heir apparent is that from childhood he learnt to obey his august father thereby fulfilling not only a filial duty but also an Islamic injunction.’6 In reality, Azam was no gentleman. He enjoyed flaunting his wealth and paid only lip service to his father’s orders.
In October 1935 the new Resident, Duncan Mackenzie, sent a confidential cable to Delhi that Azam had ‘imported a dancing girl from Saugor’. He kept the girl in a private house in the suburbs of Hyderabad and visited her ‘from time to time’. The Nizam, through his network of spies, had also learned of the affair and wrote to Mackenzie on 6 November expressing his fears that the girl might become pregnant, which would entail ‘additional expenses’ and might damage the prince’s reputation. There was no mention of how Durrushehvar, who had also found out about the affair and was deeply upset, might feel about Azam taking a second wife or the effect that marital disharmony might have on two-year-old Mukarram. In fact, the Nizam saw nothing strange in the fact that ‘the natural desires of the prince . . . could not adequately be met by one woman’ apart from the dangers of being infected with a ‘bad disease’ or an unwanted pregnancy which could lead to the girl’s parents establishing a hold over the heir apparent, ‘which might be embarrassing in many ways’. The Nizam was more concerned that Azam had broken with palace tradition. ‘Instead of keeping a dancing girl privately she should come to Hyderabad in the same way as other dancing girls,’ he concluded in his letter to Mackenzie, the contents of which were immediately telexed to the Viceroy.7
A clearly peeved Mackenzie, who had expected a posting at the Residency to involve arbitrating on much weightier tasks such as the devolution of power under the Government of India Act, was unimpressed. The Nizam ‘has made a mountain out of what in Hyderabad would be considered a very small molehill’, he wrote in the accompanying confidential cable. He also had little time for Azam, whom he described as ‘weak and self-indulgent’. ‘His early upbringing was what you know it to have been, and ever since he was emancipated he has been surrounded by pimps and parasites,’ he reminded the Viceroy’s secretary, Reginald Glancy.
He has before him the example of his own father who has at his complete disposal some two or three hundred women, from whom he still continues to procreate children, and who at Azam Jah’s own age was the subject of far more public talk on these grounds than Azam Jah has been; and he has also the very lax standard of conduct of other personages in Hyderabad and elsewhere. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that he should ‘stand astounded at his own moderation’ or that he should scoff at his father’s admonitions on this score being due to any wish for his welfare or to a feeling of sexual restraint.8
What Azam needed, concluded Mackenzie, was a good controller to keep him from ‘a far more debauched course of life’.
After a flurry of cable traffic between the Residency and the Political Department in Delhi, Mackenzie sided with Azam. It was better that the dancing girl be kept under his supervision as there would be ‘no chance of her being able to father somebody else’s child on to him’, he wrote to the Nizam. There was also less likelihood of him contracting another bout of venereal disease:
The proposal made by Your Exalted Highness to
have a dancing girl or girls from the bazaar when the occasion arose is open to even graver objection. The girl herself would talk, the general public would know, and the Heir Apparent himself would inevitably contract fresh disease. It was in fact in precisely this way that he got his last attack in April, and presumably all the others previously.
Added Mackenzie: ‘In view of the fact that the Heir-Apparent is now suffering from gonorrhoea for certainly the third and possibly the fourth time since he grew up this is an important consideration.’9
Azam had also insisted that the relationship was not entirely sexual. ‘He was fond of good singing and dancing, and this woman was able to gratify these tastes without his having recourse to public professionals from the bazaar.’ Finally, argued Mackenzie, a second marriage would rule out any hope of reconciliation with Durrushehvar and would ‘impair public esteem for the Heir-Apparent, as his present marriage and the resultant grandson have been and still are very popular’.10
Having finished playing marriage broker, Mackenzie now found himself burdened with the problem of what to do about the debts that Azam and his brother were accumulating in India and while on shopping and gambling sprees on the Continent. A commission appointed in 1933 found that Azam and Moazzam owed 320,000 and 287,000 rupees respectively in unpaid bills. Mackenzie noted that Azam was spending more time abroad than in Hyderabad and recommended that ‘further touring should be discouraged’. ‘Neither of the Nizam’s sons have taken up the social positions which it was hoped they would fill after their marriage with educated wives,’ he complained to Glancy. ‘For this they are not entirely to blame, as the Nizam knows very little about this himself and is inclined to consider any form of social entertainment extravagant and unnecessary. He is also jealous of their attaining more popularity and influence than himself.’11
Mackenzie’s solution was to make Azam commander-in-chief of Hyderabad’s army, a post that would curb his ‘idleness’, keep him away from Europe and its ‘charms’, rein in his expenses and prevent him from incurring further debts. The plan failed. Realising that he had little chance of becoming the next Nizam after Mukarram’s birth, Azam lost all motivation for adhering to any moral or pecuniary norms.
As Mackenzie was learning quickly, the role of the British Resident went far beyond officiating at public functions and representing the interests of the Crown. In the case of Hyderabad the Resident was also regularly called upon to act as a counsellor and confidant. When it came to dealing with the concerns of his dysfunctional dynasty, Osman Ali Khan had no one else to turn to whether he liked it or not. ‘He intensely hated the manner in which the British Residents and the Crown representatives had undermined his authority and disgraced him openly, but silently put up with it,’ Hyderabad’s future Prime Minister Mir Laik Ali would recall later. ‘He had a remarkable capacity for endurance and of marking time and of adjusting himself to calmly face some of the severest trials of life.’12
A good Resident also had to be adept at sharpening the claws of his administration. More than anything else that involved obtaining timely intelligence on matters of state and the personal lives of important personalities. The Resident would have a network of spies in King Kothi and other key palaces, while the Nizam would have his informants in the Residency. In fact very little of what went on in Hyderabad remained a secret for more than a few hours.
Osman Ali Khan’s daily routine consisted of rising at 6 a.m., drinking a demi-tasse of black coffee, eating salt biscuits, reading the local papers, which then lay in a pile on the porch outside his bedroom for months, before receiving a daily briefing from the chief of police. Hyderabad had a very good intelligence network, which partly relied on the old Mughal system of using beggars because they had access to every place. This ‘Beggar’s Opera’ would report to the police chief every morning, who would then pass on the relevant information to the Nizam. ‘These reports would be meticulous. What happened between so-and-so and so-and-so. Who got married last night. Did he consummate the wedding or not. How many times does a certain nobleman sleep with his mistress. What operations were carried out at the hospital, who had been fitted with dentures and so on and so on.’13
Despite persistent demands by the British to put the police under their control to curtail corruption, the Nizam steadfastly refused to accede to the demand. As well as keeping himself informed of every intimate detail of every affair that his relatives and nobles indulged in, they kept the machinery of state well-oiled. The tasks of the police force, the Resident cabled the Viceroy’s office in Delhi, included being used as:
. . . an instrument of terrorism for sorts of irregular work such as rounding up and bringing back of palace servants (who were rarely paid) when they absconded, the keeping of nobles and relatives of the Nizam who had displeased him under restraint in their houses, the seizing of property of deceased persons, the procurement of cigarettes, ice and mineral waters for the Palace and the compulsory sales of fruit and Palace rubbish, etc.14
Osman Ali Khan had now completed the twenty-fifth year of his rule. Plans to celebrate his silver jubilee in 1936 had been postponed for a year because of the death of King George V of England. Billed as a ‘spectacle of pomp and power’ that would never be matched by any other Indian ruler,15 the world’s media now flocked to Hyderabad to observe the two-week-long celebrations and take pot-shots at guessing the wealth of the ‘Richest Man in the World’. Estimates of the Nizam’s income, The New York Times reported, varied from ‘$2,500,000 [US] to $50,000,000 a year and in his vaults below his palace he reputedly has $250,000,000 in gold bars stowed away and an additional $2,000,000,000 worth of precious stones, mostly diamonds and rubies. The combined fortunes of Henry Ford and his son, Edsel, have been estimated at $1,000,000,000, less than half the value of the Nizam’s jewels.’16
Yet the paper also noted that the Nizam was said to dislike dinner parties because of the expense they entailed and would scribble invitations on slips of paper torn from the backs of used envelopes. ‘No suit of clothes or pair of shoes, according to legend, is discarded by the Nizam until it has been inspected by him and personally pronounced beyond repair.’17 Another popular story doing the rounds of the press pack was how the Nizam once refused to pay six cents for an ice-cream and reprimanded the seller for asking such a high price.
A year earlier Mackenzie had also tried to calculate Osman Ali Khan’s wealth based on the income from his own private estate and customs and state revenue. Mackenzie put the total annual income at 21,750,000 rupees or about 27.3 per cent of the net and 19.5 per cent of the gross revenue of the state. By comparison, Mackenzie noted, the late King George V and all his family appearing on the civil list took just .091 per cent of the revenues of the state. ‘It is doubtful whether any Ruler in the world, at any rate in historic times, has ever possessed so large a private fortune; and it has to be said that the Nizam could live without difficulty on the interest of the interest of his income,’ concluded Mackenzie. ‘Moreover, apart from this income his hoards may be said without exaggeration to be almost beyond computation. He still manages to take some two lakhs a year in nazars, and a good deal more in bribes; and he has occasional windfalls which help to swell the total.’18
Time magazine put the silver jubilee on the front cover of its February 1937 edition and began its coverage by declaring that no other state in India was as ‘rich, potent and extensive as Hyderabad’. ‘Some Indian sovereigns are lecherous champagne-quaffing wastrels with a taste for French women and English horses which they spectacularly gratify from Monte Carlo to Epsom Downs and Hollywood, but decidedly the Nizam is different,’ the magazine reported. ‘By an honoured Hyderabad tradition no Nizam has ever left India no matter how good a reason might exist for doing so.’19 Time lavished praise on the Nizam’s administration. ‘Safety first is the policy of the Richest Man, and in Hyderabad this continued to mean last week the flourishing reign of probably the ablest native government in India, with its key statesman, Finance Minister Si
r Akbar Nazarally Hydari. During the cycle of Depression, his famed “Three Year Budgets” have always balanced with a surplus and Hyderabad taxes have not been raised.’20
The jubilee’s guest list was impressive. It included ‘the Empire’s No. 1 Mixed Couple: creamy onetime Mrs. Thomas Loel Guinness, formerly of the “British Beerage” and her present burnt almond husband, the Prince Aly Shah Khan, son & heir of the famed Aga Khan’, as well as numerous other Indian princes. The New York Times reported that orders had been given for 1000 oxen and 10,000 sheep to be slaughtered.21
The celebrations began with a thanksgiving at the mosque in the Public Gardens, followed by a motorcade through the city. Hundreds of thousands of people knelt in prayer beside the road as the Nizam drove past in a 1911 Rolls-Royce with its seating specially modified to resemble a ‘throne topped by a gilt dome’.22 Escorting the Nizam’s motorcade were four regiments of infantry, a detachment of native cavalry, a regiment of Arab soldiers and his personal bodyguard made up of Sidis from Africa. The Nizam then prayed at the Mecca Masjid before proceeding to the Silver Jubilee Parade at the Fateh Maidan. Kishen Pershad read an address hailing his ruler as ‘the sole relic of Mughal greatness in India’. For his part the Nizam promised: ‘I will devote the rest of my life for serving my ryots with affection and shall work for their prosperity. I shall be a servant of the people, created by God and shall consider this service as the highest title.’23
Leading the review of 5000 native troops at Fateh Maidan was Azam Jah, mounted on a ‘magnificent charger covered by a gold cloth with gilded hooves’. The ceremony culminated with the Nizam’s African bodyguards presenting arms to their ruler and chanting prayers in Arabic followed by a 21-gun salute. Images captured by the state photographer, Raja Deen Dayal & Sons, show the three-and-a-half-year-old Mukarram recoiling in terror at the sound of the cannons being fired. In one frame Osman Ali Khan has his hand protectively placed on Mukarram’s shoulders. In another, Mukarram, who is dressed like his grandfather in a traditional sherwani, looks awestruck as he nestles in his grandfather’s lap. Jah remembers the Nizam ordering the guns to stop firing midway through the thunderous ovation.
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