Last Nizam (9781742626109) (12 page)

But Salar Jung's honeymoon with the British would soon be over. In 1869 Afzal ud-Daula died suddenly, leaving as his successor his only son, Mahboob Ali Khan, who was just two years and eight months old. Seeing an opportunity for asserting their rights of paramountcy, the British insisted on assuming the guardianship of the infant and taking over the administration of the country. Salar Jung, however, pressed that the infant be
proclaimed the Nizam and that a co-regent be appointed until Mahboob Ali Khan turned 18. Under an agreement worked out with Saunders, Salar Jung and Paigah nobleman Khursheed Jah became joint co-regents with the power to manage the Crown estates. Salar Jung would remain the
Diwan
and the Resident would be consulted on all important matters. As far as the young Nizam's upbringing was concerned, it was proposed that his mother, Begum Sahiba, would be given domestic charge while his education would be conducted under the supervision of the co-regents.

The Viceroy, Lord Mayo, had other ideas. Despairing at the incompetence of India's rulers, Mayo wanted Mahboob to receive a sound liberal education under the guidance of an English tutor. Mayo also insisted that the principle of the Resident's right to offer advice on all important policy matters must be asserted. The upshot was that real power lay in the hands of the British and no new measures could ever be initiated without the Resident's approval. Hyderabad was also about to become India's first laboratory for testing Mayo's vision of westernising the native princes.

With the infant Nizam now on the
musnud
and Khursheed Jah playing only a minor role as co-regent, Salar Jung became the most powerful man in the court of Hyderabad. As his status grew, so did his questioning of the treaties that the British had imposed on Hyderabad, especially those concerning Berar. Between 1866 and 1878, Salar Jung made a dozen official requests for the restoration of the territory, including personal entreaties to Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. He looked into every legal loophole in every treaty the British had ever signed with the Nizams, searching for a precedent. He offered to buy back Berar by taking out a loan of six million pounds, and when rebuffed threatened to leak the entire proceedings of the negotiations to the press. He even tried to have the issue raised in British Parliament, again without success.

Meanwhile, the ‘Regulator of the Realm', to give him just one of his many titles, was a precocious seven-year-old whose favourite pastimes were riding around on his little grey Pegu pony and annoying his guardians by escaping into the
zenana
at every opportunity. ‘The Nizam is delicately made, as most Indian lads are who have been born and bred in the air of palaces; but he is as agile as a kitten and as wiry as a little animal,' the
Pall Mall Gazette
reported. ‘He is certainly not a tame lad; he has many of the faults of a spoilt child; he is, no doubt, only next to Allah and the Prophet in his own eyes . . . His Royal Highness dislikes castor-oil and likes
pilau
, and once expressed his mature conviction that all English doctors were humbugs.'
¹⁷

In the interests of ‘taming' the young Nizam, Saunders was instructed to appoint on the recommendations of the co-regents an ‘English gentleman of learning and ability' to oversee the Nizam's education and select other tutors.
¹⁸
Salar Jung, however, was against the arrangement, fearing that a European tutor would bring him under British influence and interfere with his religious observances. An ultimatum from the new Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, settled the matter. Realising it was better to have his own choice of Englishman rather than the government's, Salar Jung asked friends in England to form a selection committee to pick a suitable candidate. The choice fell ultimately on Captain Claude Clerk, who was appointed with Northbrook's approval.

If Salar Jung was piqued about losing the battle over the Nizam's education, he soon got his revenge. The Prince of Wales was to visit India in early 1876 and Northbrook wanted all India's princes, including the eight-year-old Nizam, to form a grand reception committee in Bombay. Salar Jung turned down the invitation, claiming that Mahboob was not well enough to make the journey. A tendency to be ‘nervous and scrofulous' topped the list of his supposed maladies. ‘His brain is liable to suffer from slight causes. He cannot keep awake for a long time,
or if obliged to do so becomes ill. Even the exertion of the
darbar
affects him physically, and after every trip to the country some complaint follows. Thus to take him out any distance would be “like walking on the parapet of a bridge”.'
¹⁹
Salar Jung suggested a deputation be sent instead.

Northbrook rejected the excuse as ‘insufficient' and instructed Saunders to warn Salar Jung that unless he retreated from his position he would be following a ‘course of policy which might prove . . . detrimental to the interests of His Highness the young Nizam'.
²⁰
Unfortunately the correspondence between Salar Jung and the Resident was leaked to the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which on 27 October 1875 ran copious extracts under the headline: ‘A Storm in an Indian Tea Cup'. ‘A wider, a mysterious, and an overwhelming influence prevails in the Court of the Nizam, something akin to that which controls imperial movements and policy in China,' the paper surmised. ‘Sir Salar Jung, though an influential Minister, is no more autocrat at Hyderabad than is Prince Kung at Pekin. So strong runs the current of official and popular feeling against the Prince of Wales for not visiting its capital that the Nizam dare not, if he would, go to Bombay.'
²¹

According to the leaked letters the visit also posed potential psychological danger. ‘His Highness's attachment to his mother is so great that nothing but actual force would compel him to go without her,' the paper reported Salar Jung as telling Saunders. ‘Any such force would cause the greatest excitement in his palace and outside, accompanied by great crying in the
zenana
; and this would make His Highness himself cry as he is much given to crying when anything puts him out or his feelings are hurt, which might prove injurious, beside the after-effect of separation from his mother.'
²²

The English-language press was not buying Salar Jung's excuses either. Smarting at what it saw as an insult delivered to the Prince of Wales, the
Deccanensis
hit back by calling
Hyderabad India's ‘filthiest city', ‘a sink of iniquity' and a refuge for all the cut-throats in the country. ‘The
Feringhee
cannot unto this day walk in its streets, even by daylight, without being openly insulted by lawless armed ruffians who threaten them.' The paper went on to accuse ‘the nobles of Hyderabad' of being ‘petty kings within their own walls. They can hang, shoot, torture or flog at their own sweet will, and give protection to any ruffians who may fly to them for refuge against vengeance or justice. They are without education or worldly knowledge, spending their lives in debauchery.'
²³

Salar Jung eventually agreed that the Nizam would go, provided the Residency doctor gave him a clean bill of health. In the end the storm in the teacup proved to be just that. As preparations were being made for the Nizam's journey to Bombay, he suddenly became genuinely ill and the doctor advised against the trip.

The rift between the
Diwan
and the Resident was now developing into a chasm. The chances of reconciliation were not helped by Salar Jung's visit to Britain in 1876 to press Hyderabad's case for the restoration of Berar and to receive a number of honours. The ease with which Salar Jung mixed with Britain's high society, his aristocratic appearance and manners, won him praise wherever he went. One columnist described the
Diwan
as the quintessential Oriental enigma: ‘Noble, thoughtful, calm and deep', Salar Jung had a face ‘which in repose would baffle the most acute physiognomist, but which lights up wonderfully when it smiles . . . As he talks with you, you feel that he is learning about you, and that he is reading your thoughts, while you are learning nothing whatever about his.'
²⁴

Within a few months of his return to Hyderabad, however, Salar Jung went from being princely India's poster-boy to public enemy number one. Irked by Salar Jung's ‘impudent utterances' on Berar and convinced that he wanted to set up a strong
independent Muslim power in the heart of India, Northbrook's replacement as Viceroy, Lord Lytton, began looking for ways to unseat him. Lytton considered Salar Jung ‘the most dangerous man in all India; and like a horse or a woman that had once turned vicious, thoroughly irreclaimable'. His removal was ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished'.
²⁵

Richard Meade, who replaced Saunders as Resident in 1876, turned his attention to the progress of the young Nizam. Mayo's experiment in making proper men out of India's pampered young princes was having mixed success. ‘His Highness appears to have a fair ability to learn where the subject interests him, but where this is not the case, he is undoubtedly slow and his progress is backward,' Meade reported to his superiors in Calcutta. ‘He is gradually acquiring a colloquial knowledge of English and his pronunciation is unusually good.' The main impediment to Mahboob's progress, his tutor complained, was an excess of female company. ‘After twelve the Azure retires to the
zenana
, and tyrannises over 400 women, who spoil and pet him as a matter of course.
Zenana
influence is the principal thing against which the tutor of one of these boys has to contend.'
²⁶
His progress had improved, Meade explained, after the 12-year-old was removed from the
zenana
to a separate quarter of the palace where he had only male attendants and companions. ‘The measure was rendered very desirable by circumstances into which I need not enter, and was certainly attended with benefit to the young Nizam.'
²⁷

At the end of 1879, Mahboob's report card showed he was doing well in Geography, Arithmetic and Urdu. In English he had finished reading all of
Little Facts for Little People
, all but the last 18 pages of
Odd Stories about Animals
, and was up to the chapter on verbs in his
Grammatical Primer
. ‘His Highness can
read and translate these books pretty fairly with a little help. Besides these His Highness had learnt by heart Wordsworth's
We are Seven
,' Clerk's assistant tutor J. F. Dowding noted. The main problem area was History, which was of little interest to Mahboob, ‘not even when in connection with events that have affected the fortunes of his own country'.
²⁸

In order to give the young Nizam a semblance of an English schoolboy's education, a few classmates were selected from among the sons of nobles to attend the special palace school. As it was unthinkable to lay a hand on the Shadow of God, a few lesser noblemen's sons attended as whipping boys to take the blows due to Mahboob according to the Victorian educational philosophy that knowledge entered a boy's brain through the seat of his pants.
²⁹

Mahboob's progress started to stall when he turned 14. The Government of India's Political Secretary wrote to Meade in December 1880 expressing concern that once again the young Nizam ‘has been indulging in dissipation, which has altered his appearance. Although you have urged upon the Minister the imperative necessity of taking steps to protect him from the influences and temptations which are so prejudicial to His Highness, you have little confidence in Sir Salar Jung's ability to assert his authority in the matter.'
³⁰
Meade responded by declaring he would urge Mahboob's ‘instant removal from the
zenana
and to his entire separation from it'.
³¹

With less than three years to go before Mahboob turned 18, Salar Jung also began taking steps to prepare him for the administrative responsibilities that he would shoulder. For the first time Mahboob was taken on a procession through the city seated on the
howdah
of a richly caparisoned elephant and accompanied by the entire army. Early in 1883, Salar Jung and Clerk accompanied him on his first official tour of his Dominions and plans were discussed for a visit to England.

The plans never materialised. After picnicking on canned
oysters, Salar Jung was taken ill on 8 February 1883 and died the same day. Officially the cause of death was cholera, but as no one else who had eaten the oysters had died, a rumour quickly spread that he had been poisoned. There were many people in Hyderabad and Calcutta who would have been glad to see him go. For nearly a third of a century he had guided Hyderabad along its slow transformation from a Mughal-style fiefdom into a modern state, but in the process had alienated large sections of the nobility and the British establishment. Whatever his faults, finding someone of similar stature, experience and, above all, honesty to carry on his work would be difficult. Unlike Chandu Lal, who corruptly amassed a huge fortune during his three decades in office, Salar Jung died a pauper, leaving behind a debt of 2.4 million rupees.