Last Nizam (9781742626109)

by Zubrzycki, John

  Jah insists he became the heir apparent due to his father’s poor health. Azam Jah was a diabetic and died a lonely death in 1970, calling out in his final moments for ‘Joe’, the nickname he had given his son.31 Jah was in England and neither he nor Durrushehvar attended Azam’s funeral. Only in death did Azam regain some of his lost pride. The Prince of Berar lies alongside the graves of five other Nizams in the Mecca Masjid, while Osman Ali Khan is buried separately in a small mosque across the road from King Kothi palace.

  As Azam was being sidelined, his son was being groomed for the responsibilities he would ultimately have to shoulder. In September 1952 Jah began reading English and History at Peterhouse, Cambridge University’s oldest residential college. Once again, Jah used his princely connections to avoid being a boarder and instead found a flat a few blocks away from the college, which he shared with Hamid Beg.

  Perth doctor George Hobday, who knew Jah at Harrow and at Cambridge, says he was courteous and generous, but never flaunted his wealth. ‘Kids at school and later his friends at university knew of his grandfather’s legendary wealth but it didn’t mean anything to us.’32 The two men became close friends and would drive Jah’s Bentley to London to listen to Louis Armstrong at the Humphrey Lyttelton Club on Oxford Street. They also joined the university’s Army Training Corps. ‘He was very fond of explosives. I remember going fishing once and Jah pulling out a grenade saying “this is how you do it”. There was this big explosion and all these dead fish floated to the surface.’33 On another occasion he blew up one of Hobday’s anatomy skeletons as a joke, but then offered to replace it.

  It was while Jah was attending Cambridge that he developed a passion for boats. In 1955 he bought an ex-navy E-Class torpedo boat for £7000 from Harry Pound’s shipyard in Portsmouth and refitted it with two aircraft engines he bought for £100 at a breaker’s yard. Jah sailed it to Gibraltar with his brother Muffakham and then brought Hobday along to join the crew. ‘We were mistaken for being smugglers from Tangiers at one point and I nearly ran the boat into a tanker,’ Hobday recalls.34

  Weekends were often spent with his aunt, Niloufer, who had moved to Paris in 1948 after obtaining the Nizam’s approval to divorce Moazzam. Childless, she had always treated Jah like her own son. For his part, Jah grew closer to his fun-loving, extroverted aunt than his own mother, who was always aloof and disapproving of her son’s predilection for fiddling with motors rather than concentrating on his studies. Convinced that Jah led too sheltered a life, Niloufer found him a holiday job as a bouncer at a nightclub near Pigalle. ‘If I came home before 3 a.m. I had to go to sleep in the bathtub with a pillow and a blanket as punishment. My aunt would always tell me, “Your mother hasn’t brought you up properly, my boy”.’ Jah remembers coming home late one night and being mugged by two Algerians. ‘I pushed one onto the road and the other through the plate-glass window of a shop. I’d seen it done in the movies and always wanted to try it out myself.’35

  After Jah graduated from Cambridge with third-class honours in 1955, he joined the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst as an officer cadet. Jah’s old friend from Harrow, King Hussein of Jordan, had already passed through Sandhurst by the time Jah began his 15-month training course. ‘We were treated more like gentlemen cadets rather than raw recruits who would get shouted at the first five days or so of their stay,’ says John Friedberger, who had a room next to Jah’s in the Old College.36

  The arrangements at Sandhurst suited Jah. The accommodation was comfortable and there were plenty of opportunities to indulge his favourite pastimes of shooting, gymnastics, swimming and riding. There was one batman, usually a veteran of World War I, for every six cadets. Students had to clean their boots and rifles, but the batman did most of the other chores.

  All cadets were given training in military matters such as the functions and organisation of the army, the laws of combat, strategy and tactics as well as personnel management. There was a heavy emphasis on drill and duties – the so-called characterbuilding aspect of military training. Sandhurst historian Simon Raven describes the restrictions on private times and personal activities of cadets at Sandhurst during the 1950s as ‘ruthless’. ‘Their routines of compulsory games, compulsory dining in or compulsory private study would make the average undergraduate, or indeed a very private soldier of the same age, hysterical with rage and frustration . . . Fitness is a paramount consideration, self-control is even more so.’37

  Though of average height, Jah was strong enough to lift a Jeep off the ground by lying on his back and pushing upwards with his feet. Since leaving Harrow he had added underwater diving and water-skiing to his list of physical pursuits. He had no problem adjusting to the rigours of training Sandhurst expected of its non-commissioned officers. ‘The amount of time cadets spend in performing complex (and very beautiful) drill movements, with perfectly timed co-ordination of feet and weapons is scarcely credible,’ continues Raven. ‘The slightest piece of inattention would send you wheeling off the square under escort to await inevitable and heavy punishment, even though you drilled for hours on end until the stink of sweat and exhaustion hovering over the massed cadets was like the brimstone over Sodom.’38

  Now in his seventies, Jah has not lost the uprightness and military bearing entrenched in him by those Drill Square parades. But at the time it was still not clear where all the years spent at Harrow, Cambridge and Sandhurst were leading.

  In 1956, Hyderabad as a state ceased to exist. The States Reorganisation Committee, set up by the central government to sort out the new boundaries of the Indian Federation, had wiped 232 years of history off the map. The bulk of the old state of Hyderabad became Andhra Pradesh and the remainder was hived off between Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The post of Rajpramukh was also wound up. If Jah had picked up a copy of The Times on 19 July 1957 he would have seen a headline that read, ‘Indian Princes Threatened with Extinction’. The effects of ‘new wealth and expenditure taxes, now well on their way to becoming law, will be to hasten, if not to precipitate, the disappearance as a distinct social class of the former Indian ruling princes and their families’, the paper reported. While there had been no reaction from the former rulers at the apparent breach of the government’s guarantee that their privy purses would remain tax free, there would be ‘little sympathy for their predicament’, the paper noted. ‘Many princes still command popular affection and respect in their territories, but their failure as a class to play a prominent part in the building of a new India has left them with few admirers among the people and fewer still among the politicians.’39

  Almost overnight, becoming the next Nizam looked increasingly unattractive. The kingdom that his ancestors had built had been reduced to a handful of palaces. Titles bestowed on them by the Mughal Emperor could be used on letterheads but little else. His grandfather’s vast private estate was being chipped away by taxes. Shortly afterwards, India’s socialist government introduced a new Death Duty Act that would cut into Jah’s inheritance. Whether it was learning how to build a Bailey bridge or lay a minefield, watching movies or listening to jazz at Humphrey Lyttelton’s, Jah was determined to make the most of his time as a free man. ‘It is something that is going to happen, there is nothing special about it,’ he told his school friend, Rashid Ali Khan, when asked what he thought about becoming the next Nizam.40

  His grandfather was equally determined to make the most of his life as a ruler, even though he had now lost his status and his kingdom. After working tirelessly for the development of his state and the welfare of his subjects for more than four decades, he felt betrayed by the Indian Government’s actions. Deprived of his princely realm, he created a darbar-in-exile. Within the flaking plaster walls of King Kothi arose a royal court that was unparalleled in the annals of princely India. The old Nizam was shrewd enough to realise that once he ceased being Rajpramukh he would need to keep Hyderabad’s Muslim population on side. He also believed that in order to safeguard his wealth he needed to surround himself with peo
ple who would be absolutely loyal. His plan for achieving these objectives was as ingenious as it was unique. In an extraordinary move that was part alliancebuilding, part paternal affection, he suddenly added 300 new members to his family.

  In 1953 advertisements appeared in the local press calling for anyone who wanted to be adopted by him to come forward. Thousands of families offered their sons and daughters to the custody of the Nizam. Most candidates were the children of the Nizam’s Arab guards. Almost overnight, several hundred khanazads, as his adopted children were known, came under his care. The khanazads were not entitled to inherit Osman Ali Khan’s wealth, but their education, accommodation and welfare would be looked after for as long as their ruler remained alive. In return the khanazads became loyal subjects of a make-believe kingdom, which nonetheless retained snatches of its Mughal majesty.

  The Nizam presided over their weddings, offered homespun advice on domestic matters, mediated in disputes and summoned Hyderabad’s best doctors in case anyone so much as sneezed in his presence.41 From the royal garages a fleet of old Humbers, Fiats, Fords and Hindustan Motors Ambassadors were put at the khanazads’ disposal. In a catering exercise of unbelievable complexity, thousands of specially cooked meals were distributed daily to every family, every concubine and courtier. Each portion was weighed and graded according to the recipient’s position in the palace. At the palace dispensary, ground almonds were mixed with opium and made into small pills that were distributed to whoever wanted them. Those who preferred alcohol were given pegs of whisky or brandy. ‘Some of them were tramps and beggars, but he set them up with wives and fine suites,’ reported The Times, referring to the khanazads. ‘When local enemies charged that he was keeping men and women in slavery, police investigated and found that everyone was living happily around the old man in his feudal dream world.’42

  From the porch outside his bedroom in Nazari Bagh, the residential wing of King Kothi, Osman Ali Khan would scribble notes on the column of the portico where he always sat or issue farmans written on the back of cigarette packets. ‘He pretended his writ existed, but it only existed here and nowhere else,’ explains the chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate, Dr Aminuddin Khan. ‘In the end he was issuing royal farmans for marriages between his staff or for trivial matters such as moving an item from one part of the palace to the other.’43 Tethered next to him was a pet goat ‘looked after by the best hakims and doctors’ that the Nizam had adopted after his Humber Snipe ran it over while he was returning from Friday prayers. On most afternoons the khanazads would gather around the porch to be lectured by the Nizam on the importance of working hard, being thrifty and remaining united.

  Mansoor Ali, who now runs a shop hiring out bicycles at three rupees an hour across the road from King Kothi, became a khanazad at the age of 18. His father had found employment as one of the Nizam’s bodyguards after migrating from Hadramut in the early 1900s, but was by then too old to work. Mansoor Ali was given the job of massaging the Nizam’s feet for two hours every night until the old man fell asleep. ‘His room was very ordinary, there would be bugs in his bed. For him it was important that the general public should be happy, his condition didn’t matter,’ recalls Mansoor Ali, who considers himself a grandson and the Nizam a saint. ‘First there is God and then there is Osman.’44

  What little is left of King Kothi today hardly explains how a man most outsiders dismissed as an eccentric commanded such reverence until his death. The army of servants that once maintained these rooms has been reduced to a handful of clerks. The Arab bodyguards have been replaced by Indian security guards who protect the property against treasure hunters attracted by legends of vast quantities of jewellery still buried in the palace grounds.

  The most poignant reminders of this bygone era are hidden from the public. Coated with decades of dust in one of the reception rooms are dozens of striking black and white portraits of young men and women. In the mid-1950s, the Nizam asked the royal photographer, Raja Deen Dayal and Sons, to set up a studio in Nazari Bagh where he would pose for portraits with the khanazads. Unsmiling, the ageing potentate wears his rumpled cotton pyjamas and cheap plastic slippers, while the khanazads look uncomfortable in borrowed finery befitting their status as subjects of a man who still considered himself the premier prince in India even though he dressed like a pauper. The female khanazads appear on their own or in pairs, dressed in traditional clothes with gold bangles, cluster rings and pearl necklaces against a crudely painted, Aeolian-looking backdrop.

  The dingy rooms of Nazari Bagh are like a museum to this strange and wonderful era when the Nizam was feared as much as he was revered. Thousands of glasses, dinner plates, bowls and pieces of cutlery are arranged in messy stacks on sagging tables. Old inkwells used in the palace school lie scattered next to yellowing notebooks, stationery and tiffin boxes. Room after room is piled high with old toys, oil lamps of every description, medicine bottles, mirrors, hat stands, uniforms, dancing shoes, slippers, clusters of keys, tennis racquets and trunks that look like they have never been opened. Nothing was thrown out. Empty beer and champagne bottles fill cupboards. Darkened corners hide broken chairs, the skeletons of chaise longues and rotting rolls of carpet.

  As Osman Ali Khan’s court expanded, so did his frugality. In his younger days the Nizam could afford to take his whole harem with him for a one-night visit to the small Muslim state of Rampur. At the time he was said to have remarked: ‘The ladies don’t get about much. I thought this might be a nice outing for them.’45 But those days were long gone. The Nizam had not travelled outside his kingdom since 1936. When an invitation came from Jawaharlal Nehru to attend a conference in New Delhi of regional governors and princely heads of state in 1952, he was at first reluctant to accept. Only when the government agreed to supply the three planes needed for transporting his entourage, which consisted of 15 wives, 10 children and some 56 physicians, barbers, nurses and servants, did he relent.

  The Nizam was also tradition-bound when it came to his heir apparent’s future. In 1957 Jah graduated from Sandhurst as a second lieutenant and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers’ Corps. He was 24 and had completed his education. As far as the Nizam was concerned it was high time he got married. From Nazari Bagh came a steady stream of photographs of ‘nice plump Muslim girls’ for his approval. Jah’s response was to use the photos for target practice and post back the bullet-riddled originals. Having witnessed his father’s and uncle’s disastrous marriages, Jah did not want the Nizam to find him a suitable bride. Eventually the pressure from his grandfather became so strong that Jah had to ask Nehru to intervene.46

  While holidaying in Istanbul in 1958, Jah met 21-year-old Turkish beauty Esra Birgin. The daughter of a research chemist and educated at Lillesden girls school in Kent, Esra’s family lived on one of the Princess Islands in the Bosphorus Straits, a favourite playground for the Turkish elite. She had been studying interior design in Florence but found the language too hard and transferred to the London School of Architecture. The pair married secretly at the Kensington Registry Office on 12 April 1959, but the news soon leaked out. Osman Ali Khan was furious; Durrushehvar was disapproving. ‘You have to imagine a man who had never travelled. He was bright but narrowminded,’ Esra says of the Nizam.47 Like Jah, she never spoke to him directly.

  Esra was more readily accepted by Jah’s Indian friends. Like her mother-in-law, she learned how to wear a sari as gracefully as any Hyderabadi begum and took an active role in charitable causes. A hospital south of the Charminar still bears her name. Following the birth of a son, Azmat, in 1960, and a daughter, Shekhyar, in 1962, Esra applied her training in architecture to designing a new home for the family, the Chiraan palace, on 400 acres of land on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

  The couple were frequent visitors at the house of Chandrakant Gir and his wife Lalitha. ‘Esra was outgoing, very open, there were no formalities about her. She wanted to meet as many of her husband’s friends as possible,’ says Lalitha Gir.48 During th
e couple’s visits to Hyderabad, Jah refused to conform to the norms of the royal household. ‘I remember [Jah] coming to our house dressed in blue overalls and driving his Jeep. I once mistook him for the electrician,’ says Begum Meherunnissa, whose father taught Esra to speak Urdu.49 Basith Nawab tells a similar story of how Jah drove ahead in his Jeep to the coastal city of Vizag, while he flew down with Esra. A government delegation waiting to receive Jah at the airport had no idea that the casual-looking man waiting on the tarmac who had turned up in an Austin Champ was the Prince of Hyderabad. When Basith stepped off the plane he was presented with a garland of flowers that he then placed on Jah, much to the embarrassment of the waiting dignitaries.50 Bilkees Alladin, who lived behind Jah’s Banjara Hills house, remembers him spending all day and night in the garage under one of his cars. ‘He never made out he was royalty. It was frustration, probably. The set-up here was very medieval.’51

  The novelty of spending long periods in Hyderabad while her husband went off on hunting trips with friends soon wore off for Esra. She found the atmosphere arcane and oppressive. Jah demanded that she always be accompanied by a bodyguard and a ‘companion’. They rarely entertained and never went to restaurants. The only distraction from palace life was going to one of the three cinemas which in those days showed English-language releases. Jah was addicted to movies, particularly Westerns. His favourites included The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Dirty Dozen, which he watched over and over again. Esra was missing her life in London, where her circle of friends included Sean Connery, Edmund Capon, Sophia Loren and Dorothy Lamour.

  While Jah toyed with the idea of a military career, Osman Ali Khan pressed for his grandson to be groomed for a role more befitting a scion of the Asaf Jahi dynasty. But it was Nehru, who had been keeping a close watch on Jah’s progress, and not the Nizam who took the initiative. Nehru invited Jah to be his honorary aide de camp, an undemanding job that involved twomonth stints in the protocol department in New Delhi. An admirer of Soviet Russia, Nehru had steered India down a socialistic path that espoused five-year plans concentrating on heavy industry, big dams, vast mines and other infrastructure initiatives. As the head of the world’s largest democracy, he also took a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, comprising newly independent countries such as Indonesia, China, Burma and Egypt unwilling to side with either the US or the Soviet Union.