The first hint that Jah’s financial problems were too real to ignore came in 1988. Jah’s biggest toy was his 260-tonne wooden-hulled, ex-mine sweeper, the Kalbarrie. ‘The old Kalbarrie is his little workhouse,’ one of Jah’s associates was quoted as saying. ‘He likes things to go wrong on it so he can fix it.’30 Since purchasing the yacht in 1978, however, his greatest problem was keeping his hands on it. In September 1981 customs officials threatened to seize the boat because it had been imported without permission. The boat was allowed to remain in Fremantle Harbour until repairs were completed in August 1982. Jah then sailed it to Port Moresby, only to be intercepted off Broome by customs, who searched the boat and charged one of its crew members with possession of cannabis. From Papua New Guinea the boat went to Townsville where it stayed until August 1984, while Jah’s office manager in Perth, Richard Howell, tried unsuccessfully to get worker’s compensation insurance for the yacht’s six-member crew. Howell eventually had to obtain expensive personal accident cover for each appointed crew member.31 The boat sailed for Fremantle on 15 August 1984, picking up additional crew on the way. One of those crew members, Gary Wynn, drowned on 9 September while the boat was making its way down the Western Australian coast. Howell had sent Wynn’s name to the insurers before the drowning, but it was received only after his death. Cover was denied.
Jah’s problems with his ‘little workhorse’ did not end there. In early 1987 the Kalbarrie was hoisted onto a slipway in Fremantle to repair its hull, which had been chewed by sea worms, and to fix a damaged keel. A year later it was still there. Franmarine, the company that carried out the repair work, said it would not release the boat until the A$100,000 it was owed had been paid in full. Jah had refused to pay, claiming he had been overcharged for substandard work. Franmarine was prepared to take the dispute all the way to the Supreme Court, when in June 1989, Howell sent the company a letter saying that Hebros (Australia) Pty Ltd would be prepared to set aside a certain matter regarding the standard of work if the amount still owing could be paid in $25,000 lots. The letter revealed that there was more to the non-payment than a disagreement over workmanship: ‘As explained at our recent meeting our Australian funds situation is totally dependent upon us receiving funds from our Principal’s overseas connections. Steps are being taken to ensure that requirements of this office are met. We do not reasonably believe that these funds will not be forthcoming. However, we must advise that their failure to arrive could seriously curtail our above suggested funding dates.’32
The cash-flow problems alluded to in Howell’s letter stemmed in large part from Jah’s failed attempt, two years earlier, to auction off the largest and most valuable coin in the world. The 1000-mohur solid gold sovereign was minted in 1613 during the reign of Mughal Emperor Jehangir. Twenty centimetres in diameter and 2.5 centimetres thick, the coin weighed 11.9 kilograms. Also up for auction was a smaller 100-mohur coin, weighing in at 1.1 kilograms, which was minted in Lahore in 1639. Though researchers had seen historical references to such coins, it was assumed that most had been melted down for bullion. It was the first time the legendary sovereigns had been sighted in public for more than 350 years.
The auction, set for 9 November 1987 in Geneva, created enormous interest among collectors. Auctioneers Habsburg Feldman SA refused to disclose either the vendor or the provenance of the coins other than to say that they were used for presentation purposes by the Mughal Emperors. ‘I can’t reveal the owner, but the coin is so fantastic it would not occur to anyone to fake it,’ Dr Gera von Habsburg told London’s Sunday Times, referring to the larger sovereign. ‘Nobody knows its early provenance after it was made in Agra, and nobody in the West knew about it at all before two years ago.’33
The Indian Government was even slower in finding out that a part of its national heritage was on the block. It was only after the Sunday Times contacted the Indian High Commission in London that New Delhi swung into action. On the morning of the auction, Habsburg Feldman received a telex from the Indian Embassy in Berne asking for the postponement of the coins’ auction to allow time for investigations into their origin. Habsburg Feldman’s lawyers replied that they had verified the origin of the coins and that the Indian Government could incur heavy expenses if the auction was postponed. The government even considered putting in a bid until it was told that bids were expected in the range of US$12 to $25 million.34 Though it failed to stop the auction, India’s attempted intervention had succeeded in dampening the enthusiasm of potential buyers. The highest bid for the 1000-mohur coin was US$8 million, well short of its $10 million reserve. Bidding for its smaller cousin reached $2.8 million compared with the reserve of $4 million.
On 13 November 1987 a First Information Report was registered with the New Delhi Police stating that: ‘Reliable information has been received that the Giant Mughal Gold Mohurs belonging to the former Nizam of Hyderabad have been stolen from the Nizam’s Trust, and through a network having International ramifications in several countries including Switzerland were removed from India in a clandestine manner.’35 The police, however, had little hard evidence to go on. Records from the court of Jehangir mentioned two such coins, but said they had been presented to visiting Persian ambassadors. The list of movable property furnished by the Seventh Nizam to the Indian Government in 1950 made no mention of them. Police enquiries, however, revealed that Jah’s legal advisor Habeeb Ansari and the then chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate, Sayeed Hussain, had been in Geneva when the auction took place. Had they probed deeper they would have found that Jah had sold millions of dollars’ worth of jewellery through Habsburg Feldman in the past four years. Police also interviewed Nadir Ali Mirza, the son-in-law of Jah’s late uncle, Moazzam Jah. Mirza claimed that the coins had been in the possession of the Seventh Nizam.
In late 1989, Jah was visited by Australian Federal Police and Interpol at Murchison House Station to discuss the whereabouts of the coins. A year later Jah told India’s Central Bureau of Investigation that he had received the two coins after the death of his aunt, Princess Niloufer, who had settled in France after divorcing Moazzam. He also told the police that he had given the coins to his Geneva-based advisor, Jean-Paul Crozier, to arrange for their sale by auction.36 Subsequent investigations conducted by the National Museum in New Delhi revealed references to the two coins being presented by Aurangzeb to Firuz Jung, the father of Nizam ul-Mulk, the First Nizam. But there was still nothing to link Jah with having smuggled the coins out of India after 1947, when exporting such items became an offence.
Jah’s failure to auction the coins, however, had other more immediate ramifications. The coins had been used as collateral against a US$6 million loan from the Banque Indosuez in Geneva. In September 1989, lawyers acting on behalf of the bank filed a writ in the Hyderabad civil court demanding 10 million Swiss francs plus interest. The bank also issued a writ to freeze Jah’s assets in Switzerland and India.37
Jah’s stoush with Banque Indosuez was just one of the disputes he had to deal with. Shortly afterwards Jah found himself embroiled in a failed property deal over the sale of a hectare of land adjoining Nazari Bagh. Jah received A$400,000 as a deposit for the sale of the land from a Hyderabad businessman, Mohan Reddy, but the sale fell through after it was discovered that his aunt, Fatima Fauzia, had a caveat on the property. Jah was also being sued in a Perth court by his own lawyer, Rajapalan Balasubramanian, for non-payment of expenses and professional fees associated with the failed land deal. Jah admitted spending the $400,000 in two weeks to pay outstanding bills, but promised to return it with interest as soon as possible.38
Not all such property deals were being done with Jah’s approval. His Indian advisors were standing by and watching as land-grabbers bulldozed their way onto palace grounds, taking possession of land by force or paying a pittance of its value to the Nizam’s private estate. Slums were closing in on the Falaknuma palace. The Chowmahalla complex had shrunk in size from 45 acres to just 12 acres. An investigation by India Toda
y magazine revealed that 1800 square metres of the palace’s land had been handed over to a local thug on the basis of fake documents stating it had been a gift from Osman Ali Khan. In 1981 Jah’s staff had signed an agreement with the government to sell off 250 acres of the Chiraan palace grounds. Several hundred acres of property in Mahabaleshwar, Ootacamund and Aurangabad had been taken over illegally or without proper compensation. ‘Jah’s staff cashed in on his trust and virtually locked up his major properties in development deals which have not been put through,’ the magazine concluded.39
An Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly inquiry into the encroachment instituted in 1991 confirmed India Today’s findings. Committee chairman, Congress Party MLA Gade Venkat Reddy, found that land with a market value of four to five billion rupees had been encroached on ‘without a single paisa being paid either to the Government or the Nizam’. The committee’s interim report, recommending that the encroachments be regularised to enable the government to start charging rates and other taxes, was never implemented. The committee was disbanded in 1995 following a change of government.40
Jah was also losing ground on another front. Lying just beyond his reach in an account in London’s Westminster Bank was £20 million. In September 1948, only days before the Indian Army invaded Hyderabad, Osman Ali Khan had deposited £1,007,940, nine shillings and one pence at the bank ‘for the purchase of machinery’. Sensing that Hyderabad was about to fall, the Nizam’s finance minister, Moin Nawaz Jung, took matters into his own hands and signed over the money to Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London, Habib Ibrahim Rahimatoola. The Indian Government saw the transfer as ‘a carefully thoughtout plan [that] had been laid to make Hyderabad a financial dependent of Pakistan to be followed by other kinds of vassalage’.41 Under pressure from India, the Nizam asked the British Government to freeze the account. It complied. In 1953 the Pakistan Government asked for the money to be transferred to its High Commission in London. The bank refused and the matter had sat with the courts ever since. Jah found himself up against both the Indian and Pakistani governments over money he considered to be his. In the meantime, the original deposit had multiplied twenty-fold.
‘Life’s not supposed to be easy, even for the Nizam of Hyderabad, but I’m not used to having financial problems,’ he admitted to Hugh Schmitt of The West Australian in February 1990. ‘I’m supposed to have good advisers. But even my late grandfather had his financial hiccups through not being advised properly.’42
Jah’s off-the-cuff remark was a gross understatement. He was being hounded by creditors in Australia and India. Swiss bankers had frozen his assets. Indian police were trying to nail him on smuggling charges. For the first time in his life he was running out of ready cash. He was, however, still the Nizam, and his grandfather had made contingency plans for the day when his heir might need to draw on the trust funds in order to maintain the ‘dignity of the House of Asaf Jah’. The only problem was that the funds were in the form of jewellery the trustees had tried unsuccessfully to sell abroad and then to the Indian Government. The A$50 to A$100 million Jah thought he stood to gain once the government acquired the jewels would not only pay off his debts, but maintain his current lifestyle for years to come. After 18 years of negotiation and litigation, a resolution appeared to be imminent. In fact, the saga of the Nizam’s jewels had just passed the halfway mark.
CHAPTER 13
Like Discs of the Setting Sun
IN THE CENTRE OF Hyderabad’s old city is a short laneway known as Peshab Gali. The Street of Urine, to give the potholed stretch of road its literal translation, is lined with a mix of grandlooking showrooms and small open-fronted shops selling pearls, gemstones and gold ornaments. It is several centuries since the mines around Golconda produced a seemingly endless supply of diamonds, but the city has retained its position as the most important jewellery centre in India. When the Qutb Shahi Sultan, Muhammad Quli, laid out his plans for his new capital in 1590 he ordered 14,000 shops as well as schools, mosques, caravanserais and baths to be built on both sides of the old city’s main street Patthargatti. Today the number of shops selling diamonds from Antwerp and cultured pearls from China and Japan has probably tripled and the market is set by traders monitoring international price movements by email and SMS rather than word of mouth.
In Vithaldas’s showroom at the end of Peshab Gali, however, little has changed. Hyderabad’s nobility still comes here to buy jewellery for dowries and wedding trousseaus as it has for the past 200 years. Many of the pieces are antiques. For particularly choosy customers there are master craftsmen who can copy a hansli (necklace) with foiled diamonds set in gold and surrounded by gemstones, or a gold dastband (bracelet) set with emeralds and diamonds, or any other piece of jewellery once worn by the most favoured wives and concubines of the Nizams.
Behind the showroom in the Vithaldas family mansion Ghahshyam Das sits cross-legged on a large gaddi (raised platform), while half a dozen dairy cows tethered in a small stable munch on freshly cut hay. Now too old to work behind the counter, Das is sorting through a small box of cat’s-eyes that a customer has brought in to sell. In the monsoon-soaked shadows of the late afternoon, the pale grey-green gemstones are luminous against the white cloth-covered mattress. Four hundred years ago, the Vithaldas family fled the Sunni-led Mughal invasion of Gujarat and came as diamond merchants to Golconda, whose Shia rulers were tolerant of other religious communities and connoisseurs of precious stones. Das, who gives his age as ‘80 running’ has appraised millions of rupees’ worth of diamonds and pearls, sapphires and rubies, coral and peridot. But the patriarch of the Vithaldas family says he has never seen anything approaching the quality of pieces in the Nizam’s private collection. ‘People say that there are even better pieces than in the Nizams’ jewels that have been smuggled out of the country, but we have no proof. But undoubtedly the emeralds were the best I have ever seen, and of course the Jacob diamond.’1
Hyderabad’s top jewellery houses, among them the Vithaldas, Mukandas and Tibarumal families, served the Nizams of Hyderabad as dealers, manufacturers and appraisers. In the early years of his rule, Osman Ali Khan often bought several million rupees’ worth of jewels in one purchase and would take delight in being told that his were the best and most valuable gems in the world. On becoming the Eighth Nizam, Jah called Das and other jewellers to appraise a collection so valuable it was said to be worth more than all the jewels of India’s other princely states put together. ‘I used to suggest to Mukarram Jah that he should call some foreign firms such as Christie’s to auction the jewellery,’ says Das. ‘They would give him a fantastic price, but he did not believe my words. It was very costly jewellery. He could have got ten times what he was paid.’2
When Jah returned to India to check on his affairs in 1990, Das’s words would haunt him. Many of his most precious pieces of jewellery had been peddled for a song because he needed cash and wasn’t prepared to wait for a better price. Other pieces had been sold from under his nose by unscrupulous advisors who pocketed a large share of the proceeds and passed the remainder on to him. It was getting harder to find people he could trust to conduct his business affairs in India and abroad. His cash-flow problems were mounting.
Until now, Jah could have been forgiven for thinking that the treasuries his ancestors built up would never be exhausted. Osman Ali Khan’s biographer, D. F. Karaka, wrote that the gems belonging to the Seventh Nizam were so valuable that ‘if they were put on the market all at once, they would wreck it’.3 Jayant Chowlera, the Bombay-based jeweller who valued the 173 pieces in the Nizam’s jewellery trusts, equated putting a price on them with trying to determine what the Taj Mahal would sell for on the real-estate market.4
The jewels that Jah inherited included pieces once flaunted by Mughal emperors, Persian kings, Ottoman sultans, French royals and Russian czars. Some had come from the mines of Mogok in Burma, others from Muzo in Colombia. But by far the greatest number had been unearthed in the Nizam’s own Dominions. The D
eccan had attracted treasure seekers since the days of the Roman Empire. The thirteenth-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo wrote of sinister snakes and vicious eagles guarding giant gems that lay in riverbeds and on mountainsides. In Vedic myth, pearls were thought to grow in cloudbanks, cobra hoods, fish mouths, elephant temples, boar tusks, conch shells and the nodes of bamboo stalks. Only those that grew in oyster shells were visible to humans.5
Describing the treasures seized during Sultan Alauddin Khalji’s conquest of the Deccan in 1310, court poet Amir Khusrau wrote:
If a description of the boxes of jewels were attempted there is no breast in which it could be contained, nor any heart that could appreciate its value. There were five hundred mans of precious stones, and every piece was equal in size to the disc of the setting sun. The diamonds were of such a colour that the sun will have to stare hard for ages before the life of them is made in the factories of the rocks. The pearls glistened so brightly that the brow of the clouds will have to perspire for years before such pearls again reach the treasury of the sea. For generations the mines will have to drink blood in the stream of the sun before rubies such as these are produced. The emeralds were so fine, that if the blue sky itself broke into fragments, none of its fragments would equal them.6
When the French traveller Jean de Thévenot visited the legendary diamond mines in 1666 he wrote that the King of Golconda ‘hath six thousand men continually at work there, who daily find near three pound weight, and nobody digs there but the King. The Prince wears on the crown of his head a jewel almost a foot long, which is said to be of inestimable value, it is a rose of great diamonds three or four inches in diameter; fashioned like a palm-tree branch but is round . . . In short, that King hath many other considerable pieces of great value in his treasury, and it is not to be doubted but that he surpassed all the Kings of the Indies in precious stones.’7
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