Last Nizam (9781742626109)

by Zubrzycki, John

  It was Nehru’s commitment to a non-aligned, strongly secular India that attracted him to Jah. To Nehru, Jah was the ideal face of Muslim India. His grandfather had been a figurehead in the Muslim world by virtue of Hyderabad’s size and importance. His grandson, as the successor of both the Ottoman and Asaf Jahi dynasties, would be treated with equal if not greater respect. ‘When you look at other Indian princes at the time, he was the best suited,’ says The Deccan Chronicle’s news editor, Mir Ayoob Ali Khan. ‘He could have served in many ways – as an ambassador, a governor, a politician or even as a vice-president. It would have strengthened India’s image as a secular country, a country that did not treat Muslims badly in spite of the Police Action and the debacle of Hyderabad. Nehru treated him as one of his nephews or sons.’52

  In the Protocol Department Jah learned about seating arrangements at state banquets, the procedures to be followed in welcoming foreign dignitaries and how to secretly serve scotch in tea cups to Muslim heads of state. He counts among his greatest achievements crawling behind a dais to refasten a safety pin onto the lungyi of Burmese Prime Minister, U Nu, while he was giving a speech, without the audience noticing.53 He sat alongside Chou En Lai at a state dinner and was invited by the Chinese premier to visit Beijing. He travelled with Nehru extensively and became a familiar face in the Prime Minister’s household, where his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was beginning to carve out a political career for herself.

  Jah, however, had no aspirations to fall into any of the roles that Nehru had in mind. He hated the artificial meet-and-greet world of diplomacy and felt uncomfortable in large social gatherings. He had no interest in politics, and though he was a practising Muslim had little time for organised religion. He still saw his calling to be a military one. His ambition to join the Indian Army, however, was unsuccessful.

  In 1962 there were ominous signs that the much vaunted friendship between India and China that was the centrepiece of the Non-Aligned Movement was crumbling. Six years earlier China had secretly built a road across the disputed Aksai Chin region to the north of Kashmir. In 1959 Nehru granted asylum to the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of refugees after China’s forceful consolidation of Tibet. Border skirmishes and political protests by India intensified. When Nehru sent forces to consolidate India’s eastern border with China, which had been laid down by the British but never recognised by Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army swept down the Himalayan passes and threatened to cut Assam off from the rest of the country.

  Jah enrolled for active service but his application forms were deliberately lost, probably at Nehru’s instigation. ‘A senior general later told me that there was never any question of sending me to war. He told me that while they didn’t so much mind the idea of a prince being killed, they were reluctant to see him taken prisoner by the Chinese. The propaganda surrounding such a capture would have been most unpleasant.’54

  Before Jah had time to re-enlist the war was over. China’s invasion was more of a demonstration of its ability to call the shots over the contentious Himalayan frontier than a full-blown occupation. Jah eventually served for a few months in the Engineering Corps repairing bridges and building roads in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. The PLA had long since withdrawn.

  By now Osman Ali Khan was almost 80 and in poor health. In 1964 he developed pneumonia and was not expected to live, but to the disappointment of Azam Jah, who still cherished his ambition to become the Nizam, he recovered. From then on, the ageing Nizam rarely left his palace except to pray at his mother’s grave at the Masjid Judi mosque across the road from King Kothi. He would occasionally be spotted at auctions bidding for his own portraits, which once hung from every public building in Hyderabad.55 On a few occasions he attended the wedding of a nobleman, his walking stick supporting a five-foot-three frame that weighed just 90 pounds. In Highness, her book on India’s princes, Ann Morrow writes: ‘At the end of his days he was living on 7s 6d a week and said he could not make ends meet. He was knitting his own socks, sleeping on a humble charpoy, bargaining with stall holders over the price of a soft drink, rationing biscuits to one each at tea and smoking cheap local Charminar cigarettes.’56

  On 22 February 1967 Jah received a phone call from his mother telling him the Nizam was seriously ill and not expected to live. Jah had received a similar call in 1964 and thought it was another false alarm. Only when Durrushehvar called a second time from his grandfather’s bedside did he realise that his condition was serious.

  For two days and two nights Durrushehvar had stayed at the Nizam’s side, together with his personal physicians. Osman Ali Khan allowed the doctors to take his temperature and pulse, but refused all medication. Only when he slipped out of consciousness were they able to administer antibiotics. For 72 hours his condition remained stable, but then he took a sudden turn for the worse. On Friday, 24 February, at the precise moment that the muezzin at the Mecca Masjid mosque was calling the faithful to midday prayer, the Seventh Nizam of Hyderabad died. He was 80.

  For twenty years Osman Ali Khan’s kingdom had consisted of little more than a few moss-covered palaces and the dependants he clothed, fed and sheltered. But the funeral of the Seventh Nizam brought half a million people out onto the streets. After lying in state on the veranda of Nazari Bagh, covered in a Kashmiri shawl, Osman Ali Khan’s body was placed on a gun carriage and taken to the Mecca Masjid accompanied by members of his Arab guard, women from the zenana and hundreds of khanazads. A reporter at the scene described how a human tide surged towards the coffin as it was carried from the mosque. ‘The satin canopy collapsed and the coffin bobbed crazily over a sea of fezzes, turbans and helmets, tilting so that mounds of rose petals that had been placed on its top slid off on the heads of the mourners.’57

  Jah remembers seeing the gun carriage lurch wildly as it ran over the devotees who had fallen in its path, the way in which Hindus and Muslims waited silently side by side in the mosque for the funeral prayers, and the breaking of their bangles by the women who saw their Nizam go past for the last time. ‘It was as if they were mourning a member of their own family,’ he later wrote. ‘No greater tribute to the meaning of the life and the work of the late Nizam could be paid than . . . the grief of the half a million people or more who could not be restrained from surrounding the coffin, and who expressed in a manner as spontaneous as it was unparalleled in its intensity, their love and their respect for a man who still ruled their hearts.’58 Amid shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Shah Osman Zindabad’, Osman Ali Khan’s body was buried next to his mother’s at the Masjid Judi mosque.

  It was said that between writing odes in Persian, Osman Ali Khan spent much of his final months brooding over a prediction made at the time of the First Nizam. Like all legends, it metamorphosed over the centuries to suit the teller or the times. According to the most commonly told version, Nizam ul-Mulk was returning from a hunting trip in the western provinces of the Deccan when he came upon a faqir (holy man) begging for bread. Feeling sorry for the beggar, the Nizam pulled out of his saddlebag seven kulchas (flat loaves of bread). In gratitude the faqir blessed the ruler’s family for seven generations, one for each loaf. In another account it is the Nizam who feels hungry and is offered bread by the faqir. Unable to eat more than seven loaves, the holy man bestows on his ruler the same blessing for the same number of generations. In the least-often told rendering of the story, Nizam ul-Mulk is too miserly to offer the starving faqir more than seven of the loaves he is carrying. Instead of being blessed, the Nizam’s descendants are cursed to rule for seven generations only.59

  Whatever the version, the legend would turn out to be prophetic. Osman Ali Khan, the Seventh Nizam, was the last ruler of Hyderabad. Mukarram Jah, his successor, would either run out of blessings or bear the full brunt of the faqir’s curse.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Palace of the Four Pavilions

  AFTER ALMOST TWO DECADES of being groomed in the finest British public schools, universities and military academies a
nd being placed under the guidance of India’s foremost statesman, Jah was no better prepared for inheriting his grandfather’s mantle than when he was first carried through the gates of King Kothi as a six-month-old baby. He had few friends in Hyderabad, no idea of the extent of the estate that he was about to inherit and no interest whatsoever in maintaining his grandfather’s hallucinatory kingdom with its ageing concubines, khanazads, illegitimate offspring and fearsome-looking Arab guards. He was more at home listening to jazz at London nightclubs than to ghazals in the darbar hall of Chowmahalla. He spoke Urdu, the state language, but had only the vaguest notions about Hyderabad’s history. To his hundreds of relatives he was a stranger, to the hundreds of thousands of Osman Ali Khan’s followers he was revered more out of respect than for his reputation as a Nizam-in-waiting. Esra had grown used to Hyderabadi society but was more comfortable mixing with London’s A-list. Jah’s father was bitter about being overlooked for the throne. His uncles and aunts were insanely jealous of the immense wealth Jah was about to inherit.

  Like Nizam ul-Mulk, the dynasty’s founder, Osman Ali Khan had tried to lay the groundwork for an orderly succession, writing letters to Nehru, restricting the proclivities of his eldest son and promoting his reluctant grandson. He believed in ruling by example, even when his kingdom was reduced to a weird and wonderful Neverland. Jah’s mother had also hoped that her son would rise to the challenge when he became the eighth Asaf Jahi. But by wanting the best education and training, Durrushehvar had also estranged Jah from his Indian roots. For her, Hyderabad’s society was never the equal of Ottoman culture. She had done the state a great service through her relief work during the war and her patronage of hospitals, educational institutions and welfare bodies, but even now many Hyderabadis feel that she looked down on them. That Jah felt more at home in England and then in Australia than he did in India owed much to his mother’s prejudices and her insistence on sheltering him as far as possible from the tradition-bound confines of palace life.

  Even Jah’s handpicked guardians were not equipped to impart the arcane practices of medieval statecraft that still set the rules in the royal court. Whereas Osman Ali Khan rarely left the confines of the palace except to visit his mother’s grave and attend official functions, Jah would wander the world until he created his own kingdom of kangaroos and acacias. His grandfather composed couplets in Persian about unrequited love. To Jah’s ears there was nothing more poetic than the drone of a diesel engine.

  For now, Jah had more immediate priorities to attend to. The day after his grandfather’s funeral he told a press conference that the stories about the late Nizam’s wealth were exaggerated. ‘I have not heard of any hidden treasure. My grandfather never seemed to keep track of his wealth.’ Jah also announced he had appointed a board to look into the question of how to maintain and run King Kothi palace with its several thousand employees. The entire set-up would be streamlined, depending on the amount of the privy purse he was entitled to receive. ‘I will, however, have to take care of my grandfather’s family and dependants.’1

  Jah’s comments belied the complexity of the situation he had inherited and did not take into account the actions of rapacious relatives, corrupt advisors and a government bent on making princely privileges a thing of the past. Narrating the events surrounding his grandfather’s death to an interviewer a few months later, Jah described scenes of chaos as the Nizam lay dying and people helped themselves to jewellery and other valuables scattered around the palace in open boxes. Jah pitched a tent in the palace grounds, hired his own guards and had his own food brought to him. Fearing that the Nizam’s relatives would walk out with whatever they could lay their hands on as soon as the old man died, Jah asked the police superintendent to draft a document saying that he was temporarily removing keys to various safes that his grandfather always kept on his person because of the ‘condition of the patient’. ‘My next problem was how to prevent things from disappearing,’ he recounted.

  Since regular police were not allowed in, my brother, a lawyer, came up with the idea that princes are always entitled to a guard of honour on their death. I got people I could trust dressed up as guards and had them move into the room as grandfather’s body was carried out. We had matrons, too, to search the women in saris, and we relieved all of them of quite a few ‘souvenirs’.2

  The night before the funeral, Jah studied the floor plan of all five of his grandfather’s main palaces. When he gave the order, guards simultaneously entered all the main rooms and secured the valuables with Sandhurst-style precision.

  Jah then undertook an initial survey of what was inside the palaces. Armed with a blowtorch, he opened dozens of safes containing everything from old papers to priceless pearls. Guided by his grandfather’s trusted valet, he was shown rooms, some of which had been sealed for 60 years. One contained 300 cases of French champagne from the 1930s, all of it undrinkable. Another was stacked from floor to ceiling with tins of ghee that the Nizam had bought from a shopkeeper he felt sorry for and then forgotten about. Another contained suits, bought for the same reason, then never worn. ‘The old valet then pointed to a cot in front of my grandfather’s window,’ Jah recalls. ‘He said: “I slept on that cot for 52 years” and then asked, “Can I continue to do so?” I said, “Of course”.’3

  Jah’s biggest problem, he quickly realised, were the 14,718 other staff and dependants who, like the old valet, did not want anything to change. In addition to several hundred khanazads, 42 concubines and their 100 or so offspring, there were 6000 employees on the books at the Chowmahalla complex alone, 3000 bodyguards, 28 people whose only job was to bring drinking water to the Nizam and his immediate family from the traditional well outside the city (long since dried up), and 340 kitchen staff. ‘[The late Nizam’s] kitchens were feeding 2000 people a day. Every restaurant in the vicinity was being secretly supplied food from my grandfather’s kitchens.’4

  There were other irregularities. After finding out that 4000 people on the books did not exist, Jah was able to bring numbers on his grandfather’s support list down to about 10,000. He then ordered that plans be drawn up to pension off most of the rest. The palace finances were just as shambolic. The royal garage, which was costing up to $US90,000 a year in petrol and spare parts for almost 60 cars, turned out to have only four in running condition. A photographer’s bill came in for $US25,000 and a $US6000 taxi bill for taking the khanazads to attend a religious ceremony with the Nizam was waiting to be paid.

  As Jah struggled to sort out the mess, preparations were made for his formal inauguration as the Nizam. Although Jah’s succession was confirmed by the publication of orders by the President of India shortly after his grandfather’s death, the formal inauguration could not take place until the end of the 40-day mourning period. Responsibility for organising the darbar was given to Habeeb Jung. The Paigah nobleman was given a budget of 40,000 rupees, a three-week deadline and no precedent to follow.5 The installation of the Nizams on the musnud had always been done privately in the presence of a handful of nobles, close relatives, the British Resident and a couple of Muslim clerics who would read the relevant passages from the Koran to formalise the succession. The ceremony would be followed several days later by a grand darbar and procession through the city. What was being proposed for Jah was an all-in-one, Mughal-style darbar at the Chowmahalla palace complete with 1000 guests, guards of honour, gold and velvet carpets, recitals from the Koran, and Persian music to be followed by a banquet. It would be the last of its kind not only in Hyderabad but also in India.

  With 3000 servants at his disposal, Habeeb Jung set to work preparing the darbar hall of the Chowmahalla palace for the event. The ancestral home of the Asaf Jahis – Chowmahalla or the Palace of the Four Pavilions – was once a massive complex spread out over 40 acres in the heart of the old city. It was the principal residence of the Nizams from 1750 until the late nineteenth century. Having surrendered their authority to the Resident, and having lost the will to rule, the Nizams
would retreat to Chowmahalla,6 living out the rest of their days in ‘gloomy retirement and sullen discontent’, in the case of Sikander Jah, or opting for ‘a secluded life . . . associating with humble dependants’, in the case of Afzal ud-Daula.7

  Architecturally the complex was a syncretic blend of Qutb Shahi, Persian and European styles, but it lacked the grandeur of palaces of much lesser rulers of princely India. ‘On entering the Nizam’s palace we were surprised by the plainness of its style, than which indeed nothing could be more commonplace,’ reported the Resident Richard Temple in the 1860s. ‘It consisted of a cluster of modern houses, built mainly in the European fashion, without the least attempt at architectural design. The cause is this, that originally in the days of the Mogul empire the Nizam was technically considered to be encamped in the Deccan and had not established in any permanent palace. His successors still cling to that tradition and never erect any palatial structures.’8

  Each of the four pavilions was painted in a different colour: ruby red, pink, purple and green with matching coloured glass chandeliers and heavy silk curtains. The furnishing consisted mainly of French period pieces with the odd Queen Anne or Queen Victoria. ‘Harmony was farthest away from the mind of the interior decorator,’ writes D. F. Karaka. ‘If an article or a bibelot were beautiful in itself, it found a place in one of the reception rooms where it stood out of period, yet not out of place in the overall richness of its setting.’9