Last Nizam (9781742626109) (14 page)

The Nizam's fondness for the bottle soon became more than a whisper and would eventually kill him, but this and his other
indiscretions failed to dent his popularity. Mahboob Ali Khan's generosity was legendary, even if it contributed to sending the state bankrupt for the third time in a century. When word came to him that a well-known Parsi merchant in the city had fallen on hard times he visited the man's shop, said he liked his merchandise and, waving his cane around the shelves, commanded his attendants to buy the entire contents. He forgave a palace servant for stealing his jewels, secretly filled the bowls of beggars with gold coins and invited an old man who had lost everything in the flood of 1908 to his home, saying, ‘How can you say you are homeless when your slave has homes that are waiting for you to come?'
⁴³
Like Harun al Rashid, the Abbasid Caliph whose fabulous court was immortalised in
The Book of One Thousand and One
Nights, the Nizam wandered the streets at night in disguise to see how people lived and to find out what they thought of him. Local folklore was swamped with stories of his frequent trances and long periods of silence, his mystic power for curing snake bite and his astonishing feats of physical endurance. Among Mahboob Ali Khan's favourite pursuits were shooting 12-foot alligators on an artificial lake from a specially imported steam yacht and releasing panthers on the
maidan
and then hunting them on horseback with his spear. He was also one of the finest shots in India, a reputation he once proved to the doomed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by repeatedly hitting a silver rupee coin spinning in the air.
⁴⁴

Beneath his Western veneer, Mahboob Ali Khan remained an Oriental ruler and his
darbar
retained all the trappings of a Mughal court. His reign became known as ‘The Days of the Beloved' and is looked upon even today as Hyderabad's golden era. By the second half of the nineteenth century Hyderabad had become the greatest cultural centre in India, blending Mughal, Persian and Central Asian traditions with those of its Hindu, Sikh, Parsi and Christian communities. Calligraphy, music, painting, poetry and the sciences flourished. Nobles competed to attract
the best poets and Qawwali singers to the palaces, calligraphers were commissioned to inscribe the walls of mosques and religious events were patronised. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was the most important centre for Urdu literature in India.

Hyderabad's Deccani culture had its distinctive dress, food, manners and architecture. The hills around the capital were dotted with palaces, the grandest being those of the Paigah nobles which were often modelled on the great edifices of European royalty. Palace life strictly adhered to etiquettes of dress, diplomacy and manners unchanged for centuries. Hyderabad's nobles were richer and ruled over larger estates than most other Indian princes, but ostentation in public was frowned upon, and great importance was placed upon conduct towards the poor. ‘Nowhere in India is nobility so much cherished as at Hyderabad,' remarked one visitor. ‘Nowhere is the aristocratic feeling so real, or the devotion of the people to their own Chiefs so thorough. It is manifested on all sides and on all occasions, and it forces itself upon the attention of a visitor as a special characteristic of the people and the place.'
⁴⁵

Communal harmony was another feature of Mahboob Ali Khan's reign. Although 90 per cent of Hyderabad's population was Hindu and its Muslim minority was a potentially explosive mix of Sunnis and Shias, religious tension was almost unheard of. Even today it is difficult to differentiate Hindus and Muslims by their dress or their names. They ate the same
pilaus
and
biriyanis
and attended each other's festivals. During the devastating flood of 1908, when the Musi broke its banks and inundated the old city, killing as many as 40,000 people, the Nizam took the advice of Hindu Pandits, donned a sacred thread and made an offering to appease the river goddess. His Hindu
Diwan
, Maharajah Kishen Pershad, married Muslim as well as Hindu wives. The revenue administration of half the state was looked after by two Parsis.

The British remained ambivalent about Mahboob Ali Khan's obvious popularity. David Barr, who took over as Resident in February 1900, found the Nizam ‘by nature, and by long habit, indolent, reserved, reticent and vain; he has an exaggerated idea of his own importance and power . . . But he is popular with his people, and is held in reverential awe by them not only on account of his position, but also from their readiness to accept his eccentricities as virtues.'
⁴⁶

Aside from his eccentricities, Mahboob Ali Khan developed a reputation as a reformer. In 1893 he promulgated Hyderabad's first Constitution which demarcated the power of the Nizam, the
Diwan
and the newly formed Cabinet Council. But the council had no administrative role and could only tender advice. There was little accountability and by 1900 the state was 14.5 million rupees in debt. Barr took a dim view of the situation, telling his superiors that the powers the Nizam had reserved for himself under the new Constitution were the cause of much delay and confusion. ‘Procrastination is the watchword of the Nizam, and the delays are not due to deliberation upon the merits of the cases under reference, but rather to a weak yielding to the criticism and wishes of certain persons . . . who are His Highness's favourites and self-constituted advisors.'
⁴⁷

Remembering that the role of a good Resident also included steering princes away from hedonistic excesses, Barr added a long note to his telegram on the state of the Nizam's mind and body:

Whether from pride, shyness or suspicion, he avoids the company of all but a few persons who, I am afraid, pander to his vices, or flatter his vanity. He makes companions only of his menial servants. His ministers, his officials, even his relations, are all forbidden to approach him; he has nothing in common with them, and does not
permit them to offer him advice; he has no intellectual tastes or pursuits, and is losing such interest as he formerly used to take in sport. I should say that he has exhausted his energies by his devotion to the sensual life of the
zenana
, and that he is prematurely losing his nerve and physical strength.
⁴⁸

Drinking and drugs were also taking their toll, continued Barr:

The only time I had an opportunity of seeing him ride or shoot he was so nervous that he had to dismount from his horse when it swerved at a small jump; and his shooting was a ridiculous failure. This year also his tiger shooting was a fiasco, he was in a camp for about a fortnight, tigers were plentiful, but Afsar Dowla told me he could never get the Nizam to go out, nor even to leave his
zenana
tents. I have been told the Nizam drinks to excess, but I have never seen the slightest sign of this though I think his eyes and manners betray his addiction to opium, and I am afraid there is no doubt that he doses himself with this drug.
⁴⁹

But it was the state of the Nizam's finances rather than his physique that was uppermost in the mind of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, when he arrived in Hyderabad in 1902. For Curzon, India was the jewel in Britain's imperial crown. ‘For as long as we rule India,' he told his Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, ‘we are the greatest power in the world.'
⁵⁰
Curzon was determined to bring to India a new sense of purpose and lead it into the modern world. He wanted the princes to be treated ‘not as relics but as rulers; not as puppets, but as living factors in the administration', but he was dismayed at their immorality and indolence.
⁵¹
He considered Mahboob Ali Khan to be ‘utterly ignorant of, and
completely indifferent to, the administration of his State or the welfare of his people'. He cared only ‘for the gratification of his personal whims and desires', and was ‘surrounded by a horde of venal scribes and bloodsuckers of the worst description'.
⁵²
As for the rest of the princes, he concluded that they were not unlike ‘a set of unruly and ignorant and rather undisciplined schoolboys'.
⁵³

Just what Curzon thought of the Nizam's schoolboy prank when a flock of birds flew out of a pie being served at the state banquet – one landing on Lady Curzon's tiara and another on his own noble head – is not known.
⁵⁴
But it seems to have broken the ice for what happened next. After the banquet, Curzon offered the Nizam a solution to all his financial problems. All he had to do was sign a letter leasing Berar in perpetuity to the British for 25 million rupees a year, agree to limit his personal expenses to five million rupees and accept the advice of a specially appointed British financial expert. The icing on the cake would be the disbanding of the Hyderabad Contingent, which was to be absorbed into the Imperial Services Troops – its services available to the Nizam if necessary.

To the horror of those present, Mahboob Ali Khan did what his father and grandfather swore never to do: he signed away Hyderabad's sovereignty to Berar forever. ‘I venture to assert that at this moment he is the most contented man in Hyderabad,' Curzon later told the Secretary of State, Lord Hamilton, smoothing over the fact that the Nizam had been secretly threatened with deposition if he refused to sign and was so broken-hearted after the event that he refused to eat for four days.
⁵⁵

‘Marinated in alcohol', as one writer described him,
⁵⁶
Mahboob was not a well man. He had suffered two severe bouts of cholera, including one in 1887 when fears of his death prompted the state to recognise his two-year-old son, Osman Ali Khan, as his successor, a choice that was reconfirmed by Curzon in 1902.

The question of succession, however, was not to be settled so
easily. In late August 1911, Rahat Begum was stalking Mahboob Ali Khan through the corridors of the Purani Haveli insisting that her son Salabat Jah should be the next Nizam on the grounds that she was his legal wife. Picking out a selection of women from the
zenana
, Mahboob Ali Khan stormed out and moved to the Falaknuma where he went on a three-day drinking binge.

On 28 August, a messenger from Falaknuma arrived at the Residency with the news that the Nizam had been taken ill. By the time the Resident, Alexander Pinhey, reached the palace the Nizam had suffered an epileptic fit that had left him in a coma. He had only a few hours to live. The Residency doctor arrived at midnight and managed to administer some medicines ‘in spite of great opposition on the part of the
hakims
and the
zenana
ladies who were crowded together behind a
purdah
near the bed'. But as Pinhey reported, ‘the patient was already in a state of collapse, meningitis had set in, and it was too late to effect any permanent cure'.
⁵⁷

News that the Nizam was seriously ill spread quickly throughout Hyderabad. The
Diwan
, Maharajah Kishen Pershad, his deputy Fakhr ul-Mulk and other senior nobles began arriving at the palace. A little after 11 a.m., Osman Ali Khan came to his father's bedside. Mahboob Ali Khan ‘opened his eyes wide for one last look around and closed them forever'.
⁵⁸
At 12.30 the women of the
zenana
began to break their bracelets and the gates of the old city were closed, a signal for the people of Hyderabad to begin mourning their ‘Beloved'.

T
HE ‘DAYS OF THE BELOVED'
were over, but to early twentiethcentury travellers the mystique of the Nizams remained. ‘The city of Hyderabad seems to have been dropped to the earth from an Oriental dream,' wrote Elizabeth Cooper in her classic account of life behind the veil,
The Harim and the Purdah,
written just after Mahboob Ali Khan's death. ‘It is the most Eastern city in this most Eastern land and you are filled with a sense that it is not at all real, but especially staged and set for your amusement, and when you leave, it will all disappear.' Hyderabad, she continued, was a city of goldsmiths making bracelets, nose-rings and necklaces ‘for dark-eyed women within the
zenanas
', of shopkeepers with their ‘great wreaths of white flowers . . . marigolds and garlands to be hung about the necks of friends, or to curtain the doorways at some feast or wedding', and of the elephant ‘swaying in the street, looking with keen, twinkling eyes at the people who make way for him'. To Cooper it all seemed ‘a part of a pantomime, or a mirage caused by the brilliant sunshine of this Southland'.
¹

Stepping uneasily into this very Eastern pantomime was ‘a quiet, serious-minded young man, well-disciplined, polite, unostentatious and self-effacing'.
²
Osman Ali Khan was 24 when
the minister of police, Nawab Shahab Jung, climbed the steps of the Charminar in the centre of the old city, removed his turban, placed a white handkerchief on his head and called out: ‘The state belongs to God and the grace and the power to Mir Osman Ali Khan Asaf Jah VII.'
³

In Hyderabad the investiture of a new Nizam on the
musnud
was always a brief and largely private affair. After sending a telegram to the Viceroy's representative informing him that Mahboob Ali Khan had died, Alexander Pinhey looked in vain through the Residency records to find what protocol should be followed now that there was no longer an Emperor in Delhi to issue a
farman
confirming the title on the new Nizam. He concluded that a special ceremony would have to be invented for the state if there was to be a full-blown investiture, but ultimately warned against it. ‘Any innovation of this kind would, judging from innate conservatism and adherence to every form of ancient customs of the Hyderabad State, give rise to many difficulties and I cannot recommend it.'
⁴

The day after Mahboob's burial, Pinhey attended the condolence
darbar
at the King Kothi palace, which the Sixth Nizam had given to his son. King Kothi had earlier been ‘offered' to Mahboob Ali Khan by a nobleman known as Kamal Khan after the Nizam hinted rather loudly that he liked the buildings. Instead of changing the initials of the owner, which were embossed as ‘KK' all over the building, the name was changed to King Kothi. Today the few remaining habitable rooms of the palace house the office of the Nizam's private estate. The others have been sealed to prevent thieves carrying away whatever remains of value. Stray dogs bark at strangers from behind piles of bricks. Vast cracks have appeared in the walls of those buildings that somehow have withstood decades of monsoonal downpours. In the reception hall stands a lonely stuffed tiger, its glass eyes staring vacantly across a room full of abandoned furniture and rotting curtains. The timberwork
is infested with white ants and water occasionally seeps up through the granite floor. Only a fraction of the original palace complex remains; the rest has been sold off to pay tax bills, or has been encroached upon by shops, marriage halls and housing complexes.

Entering the Majli Begam-ki-Haveli, where the condolence
darbar
was being held, Pinhey was struck by how dilapidated and unkempt much of the palace was even then. The
haveli
, he wrote, ‘consists of an untidy, not to say squalid looking, courtyard with a fair-sized hall at one side where the
Darbar
was held'. The whole place looked like it had been ‘unoccupied for years'. ‘In spite of these uncompromising surroundings, so characteristic of the simple habits and attachment to old customs inherent in the ruling family, the proceedings of the Darbar were most impressive,' Pinhey recorded in his notes. ‘His Highness conducted himself with great dignity and self-possession.'
⁵

The next day Pinhey attended the installation
darbar
at the Khilawat in the Chowmahalla palace. Once again he was struck by how low-key both the ceremony and the surroundings were compared with the prominence and wealth of Hyderabad. ‘Though picturesque, [the Khilawat] cannot compare in size and grandeur with buildings set apart for such purposes in many less important States.'
⁶
After the Nizam was presented with
nazars
by the nobles of the state, Pinhey gave a speech in which he underlined the debt the Nizam owed the British for being put on the throne in the first place. ‘I know it is unnecessary for me to refer to that policy of friendship and loyalty towards the Paramount Power and the confidence in the British Resident, which has been pursued with such conspicuous success and advantage by all your ancestors,' he told his audience. ‘The continuance of this policy in your Highness' case may be taken for granted.'
⁷

It was not just a case of toeing the line. The British genuinely believed that without the Raj to guide him, Osman Ali Khan,
like all his predecessors, would be unable to rule effectively. The new Nizam ‘has been kept very much in the background owing to his differences with his father, and has consequently had little experience in dealing with affairs of the State. A great deal will therefore depend upon such personal influence as may be exercised over him by the Resident,' Pinhey informed his superiors.
⁸

One week after the low-key installation, a traditional
darbar
was held at Baradari House accompanied by pomp and ceremony more in keeping with Hyderabad's position in the hierarchy of India's princely states. Osman Ali Khan wore a muslin cloth
dastar
(turban) with ‘a golden crest, wrapped in front with a jewelled ornament set in gold, a brocade
sherwani
designed in vertical stripes, jewelled armlets round the arms and jewelled bracelets on the wrists, a string of pearls, bedecked with glittering diamonds in the neck'.
⁹
After a cock was sacrificed, 18 prisoners released and
nazars
presented by the invited nobles, he mounted a royal elephant and led a procession through the packed streets of the old city.

The suddenness of Mahboob Ali Khan's death had caught the Residency by surprise. When Osman Ali Khan was proclaimed his successor, urgent telegrams arrived from the Viceroy's office asking for information about the new ruler. Pinhey conceded that records ‘bearing on the life and character of the new Nizam' were ‘very meagre'. ‘We have never received any information in any way disparaging to his character.' Nevertheless, Pinhey added, ‘he is necessarily a very unknown and untried individual'.
¹⁰

Official histories of Hyderabad published during his lifetime state that Osman Ali Khan was born in Purani Haveli on 6 April 1886, but they become vague after that. In reality, he was born out of wedlock to a concubine from his father's well-stocked
zenana
. Mahboob Ali Khan was only 16 when he met Osman's mother, Amat-uz-Zehra Begum. One of the several hundred women in the
zenana
, she was a Shia Muslim and was said to be
the granddaughter of Salar Jung and one of his temporary Hindu wives. Osman was the second union of Mahboob's nocturnal liaisons with Amat-uz-Zehra. The first child died soon after it was born. Pinhey, however, omitted these details in his response to his superiors and instead focussed on the new ruler's suitability for the tasks ahead. ‘The present Nizam seems, as far as education or training is concerned, to have been much neglected as a boy. The matter caused anxiety to several residents and Viceroys but the [late] Nizam was hard to move.'
¹¹

Mahboob Ali Khan was initially opposed to the appointment of an Englishman as the superintendent of his eldest son after being persuaded by his
peshi
secretary, Sarwar Jung, that such an arrangement would strengthen the hand of the Resident against the Nizam and that his salary would be a burden on the treasury. Instead, Sarwar Jung proposed a scheme whereby several ‘native tutors', a gentleman-in-waiting and a physician would be hired to bring up the boy. While the presence of an English superintendent was considered essential to balance out the corrupting influence of the palace, British policy at the time was against Indian princes being educated entirely on European lines. ‘We want ruling chiefs in touch with their people, not absentee landlords who race and drink and get into the hands of low Europeans. They are worse than useless,' Foreign Secretary Mortimer Durand argued in 1894.
¹²

Eventually, after the personal intervention of the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, the Nizam was persuaded to make Brian Egerton, an ex-officer in the Punjab police, his son's tutor in 1899. Egerton was well qualified. He had tutored the Maharajah of Bikaner and had a reputation for ‘turning proper men out of the pampered heirs of princely India'.
¹³
Writing to Egerton before he took up his appointment, the Resident described Osman Ali Khan as ‘very shy and dull looking, stoutly built but not attractive. If anything is to be made of him there is literally no time to
lose I venture to think . . . The late Nizam has kept him very secluded and has given him no opportunities of travel or of learning experience even in Hyderabad state.' Apart from Egerton, Osman Ali Khan had Indian tutors to give him lessons in Urdu, Arabic, Persian, theology and Islamic jurisprudence. ‘Instruction in riding, shooting and other manly exercises was not neglected,' observed his official biographer, D. F. Karaka.
¹⁴
He was excellent at tent pegging, riding and at sheep cutting, a sport that involved using a sword while galloping on a horse to slice in half a sheep hanging from a pole. On ‘graduating' from the palace school, Egerton described Osman Ali Khan as ‘an accomplished gentleman of good family and suave manners'. But for all the stress on developing ‘proper English habits' such as polo playing, hunting and shooting, Osman Ali Khan preferred to spend his time reading and composing Persian poetry.
¹⁵

Though he was brought up in virtual seclusion, Osman Ali Khan was aware of how the conspicuous spending habits of his father and the nobility had bankrupted the state. He developed a strong dislike of the ostentation and indolence of the court and recognised early on the damaging effect of the Sixth Nizam's hands-off approach to government. He would prove to be a very different ruler from his father both in style and substance. Instead of appearing on a jewel-bedecked elephant at his wedding in 1906, he threw the assembled dignitaries and soldiers off-guard by entering in a battered old car. Every time Mahboob Ali Khan passed through the gate of Purani Haveli he would be showered with artificial flowers made of gold and silver, which were released from a specially constructed box. The entrance to Osman Ali Khan's palace King Kothi, by contrast, was known as the ‘Purdah Gate' because it was hidden by a heavy canvas curtain. The curtain still hangs there, mouldy and forlorn. The gate rusted shut decades ago.

Like all previous Nizams, Osman Ali Khan quickly established
a sizeable
zenana
. Behind Nazari Bagh, the residential wing of King Kothi, stand two buildings, both of which are now sealed. The largest, a two-storeyed structure with more than 30 rooms on each floor radiating from a central communal bathroom, was for his concubines. The smaller one was better appointed and meant for his favourite wives. It was linked to the first floor of the main palace by what was dubbed the ‘Bridge of Sighs'. Mukarram Jah remembers how his grandfather would inform the woman he wanted to spend the night with by entering the garden outside the
zenana
quarters where the wives would gather in the late afternoon and placing a white handkerchief on the chosen one's shoulder. ‘That way she would know she had to report to his bedroom at nine o'clock.'
¹⁶

Surrounded by weeds, blackened by mould, their balconies in danger of collapsing, the
zenana
quarters today resemble a disused barracks rather than some kind of pleasure garden where soft breezes would bring scents of mimosa and jasmine through latticed windows. A somewhat romanticised account written in the mid-1920s describes Osman Ali Khan's wives and concubines living in luxurious quarters protected by beefy amazon guards. ‘The women lie on couches of brocade and silk, eating sweetmeats and drinking perfumed coffee. Some of them play musical instruments, some of them sing, all of them gossip. A few of them read poems . . . their eyes holding longing or resignation.'
¹⁷

Osman Ali Khan's first wife, Dulhan Pasha Begum, was the daughter of a nawab from a side branch of the Nizam's family. The Nizam had three other official wives, including the niece of the Aga Khan (who spent much of the twenties cooling his heels in Nice on the French Riviera). The number of his wives varied from around 200 in the 1920s to 42 at the time of his death in 1967. By then the number of children and grandchildren had swelled to nearly a hundred. In 2005 the number of direct descendants of Osman Ali Khan had crossed the 500 mark, with
almost all of them involved in some form of litigation against Mukarram Jah for a share of the late Nizam's wealth.

Once described by one British aide de camp as resembling a rat, Dulhan Pasha was given her own quarters across the road from King Kothi in a separate palace complex known as Eden Gardens. In her early years she was an accomplished poet and grower of roses, but in her later years she became infamous for wandering around the city half-naked and watching her servants copulate. ‘She would beat up the Nizam when she saw him, throw her slippers at him she was that mad,' recalls Habeeb Jung, a Paigah noble who was a close confidant of both the Seventh Nizam and Mukarram Jah. ‘She used to call him a
chaush
– a highly offensive term which means Bedouin Arab.'
¹⁸