Last Nizam (9781742626109) (17 page)

Unlike his predecessor, Barton made it clear from the outset that he would not turn a blind eye to abuses of power. Within four months of arriving in Hyderabad he set out a comprehensive memorandum detailing the internal political situation of Hyderabad that was damning in the extreme. Describing the situation as ‘infinitely worse' than in 1919, Barton wrote: ‘Distrust and apprehension have deepened; the estrangement between the Nizam and his Nobles and subjects has increased, oppression and corruption are rampant everywhere.' According to Barton, money could now buy everything:

The
nazar
has corrupted every sphere of public life. The judiciary, especially the High Court which five or six years ago had reached a respectable standard of efficiency and integrity, is now corrupt from top to bottom. The Revenue Department is honeycombed with corruption: Customs officials are a byword for rapacity: the police are more concerned to line their pockets than to suppress crime . . . The
nazar
system is poisoning public life. The Ruler is prepared to interfere in almost any matter on receipt of a
nazar
and is accessible to anyone for the purpose. Most of the important appointments are filled by men who have paid the highest
nazar
.

Concluded Barton: ‘The Nizam is a coward, physically and morally; and if the Government of India insist in this matter he will undoubtedly give way, and the Government of India will earn the undying gratitude of the people of the Hyderabad Dominions.'
⁴⁹

Barton urged Reading's successor as Viceroy, Lord Irwin, to write to the Nizam demanding that the exaction of
nazars
be limited to ‘nobles and high officials, and even from them only at the traditional rates which are little more than nominal'.
⁵⁰
He also called for abolishing the practice of accepting
nazars
from officials on appointment, which had been carried to such excess by the Nizam that ‘practically all appointments are the prize of the highest bidder'. Irwin obliged and on 8 July 1926 wrote to the Nizam that ‘certain definite measures' of a remedial nature were needed which would be duly explained by the Resident.

Armed at last with the Viceroy's sanction, Barton met with the Nizam and outlined a long list of his misdeeds which he said amounted to such a ‘state of gross misrule' that the Government of India was enjoined by duty ‘to intervene in order to secure an early improvement in the situation'.
⁵¹
Aside from curbing
nazars
,
Barton demanded the Nizam respect the powers given to the President and Executive Council and that appointments and removals from the Council be made only after consultation with the Resident. The Nizam was also told to cease interfering with the judiciary, agree to the appointment of British officers as heads of the Revenue and Police Departments and hand back to the Paigahs their confiscated estates.

Osman Ali Khan's reaction was to buy time, hoping that a change of government in England might thwart the execution of reforms and that other Muslim princes might rally behind him. He also resorted to the ploy of issuing
farmans
and then revoking them orally, while at the same time avoiding all contact with the Resident. ‘His tactics resemble those of an octopus: to smother his opponent in a cloud of inky fluid,' Barton wrote in one of his typically florid telegrams to the Political Department. ‘Interviews are an anathema, for one thing because he is a coward and not sincere; another reason is that he is desperately afraid that he will agree in conversation to proposals that he might afterwards seek to repudiate.'
⁵²

As the Nizam dithered, conceding to some demands and resisting others, the British became increasingly impatient. On 21 December 1926 Osman Ali Khan issued a
farman
on the acceptance of
nazars
in accordance with the Resident's wishes, but he continued to resist the demand to appoint a British official to oversee the functioning of the district and city police. The city was considered the private domain of the ruler and control of its police force was of utmost importance for all the Nizams. Finally the Viceroy was forced to send yet another strongly worded letter to the Nizam, this time threatening to go public with a list of abuses. Having played his last card, the Nizam gave his approval to the cabinet appointments demanded by the Resident and all outstanding reforms, including reining in the extraction of
nazars
.

For eight years Osman Ali Khan had tried unsuccessfully to assert Hyderabad's independence from British rule, believing his status as India's premier prince would afford him special treatment. His bid to restore Berar had been rebuffed, he had been humiliated into agreeing to curb the giving of
nazars
, which he had considered his birthright, and to having British officials controlling key administrative posts. Now he realised that he was no stronger than any of the other princely states. ‘In Hyderabad the British were faced with a replica of the Mughal court. They had stamped one out in 1857 and now they were determined to stamp the other out,' Mukarram Jah would reflect later.
⁵³

As for Barton, he felt vindicated by the Nizam's capitulation. For him it was further proof that the British were needed to preserve the Raj in power. ‘There can be no doubt that it [Hyderabad] owes its very existence to the British connection,' he wrote in 1926 in a cable that the Indian Government would use 22 years later to justify its invasion of Hyderabad.

The Asafia Family had not taken strong root in the Deccan in 1800; in point of fact, it may be said that it has never ceased to be foreign. Without the British, it must have relied on the handful of Muslims domiciled in the State; a forlorn hope against Maratha resurgence. Left entirely to himself it is doubtful if the present Nizam would be able to maintain himself for any length of time.
⁵⁴

E
VER SINCE
N
IZAM UL
-M
ULK
asserted his independence, the annals of the Asaf Jahi dynasty had been entirely written in India. Never had a Nizam left the shores of the sub-continent, rarely had he even travelled outside his own Dominions. To preserve the wealth and purity of the dynasty, sons of the royal family would only marry girls from the Paigah nobility. Administrative posts were jealously guarded by the landed gentry. By remaining loyal and subservient to the British, the ruling class remained intact, unlike many other parts of India where they had been uprooted and replaced. Although the British Resident kept a close watch on the affairs of the largest independent state in the empire, life within the palaces and their
zenanas
conformed to traditions developed over seven generations of introspective and conservative rule. Hyderabad remained the last bastion of the Mughal court in India. But by the 1920s the winds of change were coming, not from the politically charged cities of India, where the march towards independence was gathering pace, but from the laid-back, champagne-soused shores of the French Riviera.

In 1925
The New York Times
reported that the Riviera around
Nice had a Shah ‘bound heart and soul to a charming French actress'; a ‘very-ex Khedive' who was deposed at the outset of the war and therefore ‘has almost ceased to be of interest'; the maharajahs of Kapurthala and Pudukkottai, ‘the latter married to an Australian girl'; as well as a ‘whole troop of Egyptian and Siamese Royals'. The most pleasure-bent bunch in the whole of Europe assembled on this coast to purr in the sun, the paper observed, ‘and these Orientals love to laze in the middle of it'. Occupying the highest rung in this cacophony of uprooted royalty were the Ottoman Turks. In a cactus-sheltered villa just across the Italian border in Bordighera the last Sultan of Turkey, Mehmed VI, could usually be found in a ‘lounge suit and spats' with a small retinue of wives and attendants. Reported
The Times:
‘He exists plentifully on an income derived from money invested long ago by a predecessor known as The Damned and never enters the social whirl.'
¹

Just two years earlier Mehmed VI had fled Turkey on a British battleship with only the clothes he was wearing after Mustafa Kemal ordered the National Assembly to abolish the Ottoman Empire and to ‘put a stop to these usurpers' who had ruled by force for six centuries.
²
Kemal had become the first President of the Turkish Republic after leading a successful nationalist uprising against the foreign powers that had annexed Turkey following its defeat in World War I. The Ottoman monarchy, which had ruled Turkey since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror, was an obvious target for Kemal, who despised its autocratic power.

At its height the Ottoman Empire encompassed much of northern Africa, the Middle East and could have included most of Europe had the Turks not been turned back at the gates of Vienna in 1529. The Topkapi and Dolmabahce palaces in Istanbul, with their huge harems, ornate audience halls, throne rooms, pleasure gardens and treasuries are testimony to the
empire's influence and wealth. But by the outbreak of World War I, the Ottomans were losing their grip even over Turkishspeaking areas of their domain. The decision of Sultan Abdulhamid II to proclaim a
jihad
against the British and ally with the Germans was to prove disastrous. Apart from the successful defence of Gallipoli, led by Kemal against a combined force of Australian, New Zealand and British troops, the Turks were no match for the Allies.

In August 1920, three emissaries from the Sultan attended a ceremony at the Paris suburb of Sevres where they signed a pact drawn up by the Allies that reduced the Turkish state to a virtual nonentity. The Greeks were given the coastal lands of Asia Minor, the British controlled the zone around Istanbul, while the French and the Italians carved up most of the south between them. The Turks were left with an inhospitable tract of land in central Anatolia. ‘Turkey is no more,' the British Prime Minister Lloyd George announced triumphantly.
³

The harsh terms of the treaty, and the willingness of the Sultan to acquiesce so readily, spurred Kemal and his followers to rebel against the occupying powers and the old order. Seized with revolutionary fervour they poured out of their mountain fastness at Angora, driving the Greeks into the sea. The French capitulated without a fight, followed by the British. By 1922 Kemal had succeeded in seizing back the lands that had been taken from them and had effectively torn the Sevres Treaty to shreds. In November 1922, still savouring the fruits of victory, Kemal took the unprecedented step of ordering his rubberstamp National Assembly to abolish the Sultanate. Mehmed went into exile and almost 460 years of Ottoman rule came to an inglorious end. The Allies were delighted. Kemal had done what they never dared to do.

Kemal, however, was not prepared to abolish the Caliphate. Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Sunni
Muslims had regarded the Sultan of Turkey as the spiritual and temporal leader of Islam and paid him the same homage Roman Catholics accorded the Pope in Rome. The Caliphs were revered by Muslims as successors of the Prophet and upholders of the Holy Law. They were given the titles ‘Shadow of God on Earth' and ‘Commander of the Faithful'. Whoever served as Caliph was a governor and a leader in battle as well as in prayer. The Mughal Emperors of Delhi and the Nizams of Hyderabad styled their courts on those of the Caliphs and aspired to recreate their spiritual and political influence. To Westerners brought up on tales of the Arabian Nights, the Caliphs became synonymous with scheming viziers, harems, nautch girls, palace intrigues and blood-soaked successions.

The rise of the nationalist movement in Turkey eroded the Caliphate's political influence, but the office retained its importance as a symbol of spiritual unity. On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly passed legislation separating the Sultanate from the Caliphate, and appointed Mehmed's cousin, Abdul Mejid Efendi, to the post. Fluent in Turkish, Arabic, French and German, Abdul Mejid had kept a low profile. He preferred painting in Parisian style, composing music and writing poetry to engaging in politics or spiritual pursuits. He was also suspicious of Kemal's motives and agreed to accept the post only after being assured that he would have a proper inauguration with full Islamic rites. For his part Kemal gambled that Mejid would give his new independent national government – the first in the Muslim world – a veneer of legitimacy as it struggled to establish itself.

Mejid took up residence in the Dolmabahce palace on the shores of the Bosphorus, but his reign would be short-lived. Citing foreign intervention and attempts by Turkish monarchists to use Mejid to revive the Sultanate, Kemal, in the words of the British ambassador in Istanbul, ‘completed the revolution'. On
3 March 1924, just 15 months after Mejid's appointment, the National Assembly voted to abolish the Caliphate. Britain's
Daily Telegraph
called it ‘one of the most astonishing acts of suicidal recklessness in the history of modern and ancient times' and predicted, correctly, ‘the inevitable stirring of the Muslim world'.
⁴

That night troops surrounded Dolmabahce Palace and the chief of Istanbul police told Mejid to have his bags packed by 5.30 a.m. the next day. At the appointed hour, several cars drove up to the palace to collect Mejid's immediate family and servants. He was handed £2000 in cash, driven to Chatalja and then put on the Orient Express to Switzerland.

Despite rumours that the eunuchs accompanying Mejid and his family into exile had concealed several kilograms of gold, diamonds and precious stones beneath their cloaks as they left Istanbul, the ex-Caliph struggled to make ends meet. A Swiss businessman with interests in Turkey found lodging for the family at the Grand Hotel des Alpes at Territet on the shore of Lake Geneva. But just one month after arriving in Switzerland the financial position of the ex-Caliph ‘and half a dozen other Princes and Princesses of the ancient House of Osman, has become most serious',
The Daily Mail
reported. ‘The ex-Caliph spends his days in prayer, painting and composing music. Partly for reasons of economy and partly because of their timidity and strange surroundings, the ex-Imperial wives all sleep in the same “dormitory”. They never show themselves to anybody.'
⁵

The Red Crescent Society found that the family was living in ‘absolute penury'. In a letter to King George V asking for help, it drew attention to the ex-Caliph's wives and daughters who through no fault of their own found ‘themselves faced with beggary in a strange country' and appealed for the king to intervene. ‘If these exiles are left without means of support they will starve or die; such a consummation would justify the insolent boast of
Trotsky, the head of communist Russia, that “Islam is a rotten fabric ready to disappear at the first puff as was already demonstrated by the easy abolition of the Caliphate”.'
⁶

Today ‘His Imperial Majesty the Caliph Abdul Mejid II', as he styled himself, barely rates more than a footnote in histories of the Ottoman Empire. But Mejid never gave up his belief that he was robbed of the Caliphate and that he alone had the right to appoint the successor to the Prophet himself. After his death in war-torn Paris in 1944, British officials were shocked to find when they read his will that he had nominated his grandson Mukarram Jah, at the time a shy schoolboy in India, as the next Caliph.
⁷

In 1924 news of the ex-Caliph's precarious condition made it to Hyderabad, where Ali Imam, the President of the Executive Council, discreetly suggested to the Nizam that bailing out Mejid might enhance his standing among Muslims and fortify his claim for Berar. As well as spiritual concerns, Osman Ali Khan was motivated by a sense of guilt. Just ten years earlier he had been persuaded by the Resident to issue an appeal supporting the British against Turkey even though it meant abandoning the Caliphate. But with the war over, supporting the last in line of the Ottoman monarchy carried none of the geopolitical complications it had a decade ago. Accepting Imam's advice, the Nizam proposed paying a monthly allowance of £300 towards the upkeep of Mejid and his family and asked the British Resident to seek the Viceroy's approval.

Although approval was forthcoming, the Government of India suspected more than just charity was involved in the Nizam's desire to bail out a fellow Muslim leader. The question of who among the rulers of the Muslim world would succeed Mejid as Caliph and therefore command the allegiance of millions of Muslims had far-reaching geopolitical implications. After the outbreak of War World I, Indian Muslims under the
leadership of Shaukat Ali, whom the British branded a Syrian ‘adventurer', started the Khilafat Movement, which objected to the use of Muslim troops against their ‘spiritual leader'. When the Treaty of Sevres effectively erased Turkey from the map and with it the control of the Caliph over the holy places of Islam, the movement gathered strength. Realising the importance of the issue as means of bringing Muslims into his movement for selfrule, Mahatma Gandhi organised a program of non-cooperation that saw schools and government institutions boycotted. Kemal's abolition of the Caliphate raised fears among Indian Muslims that the office of Caliph would be given to a ruler under British influence and used to further its imperial aims. Britain's favoured candidates for the post were believed to include King Abdullah of Transjordania, King Faisal of Iraq and Ali Haider Pasha, the former Sherif of Mecca.

Following the abolition of the Caliphate, Shaukat Ali together with Marmaduke Pickthall, a British national who had been employed by the Nizam to translate the Koran into English, began working behind the scenes for Osman Ali Khan to be made Caliph and be given the title of King. With the fall of the Ottoman monarchy and the additional honours accorded to him by the British, the Nizam now considered himself to be head of the largest and most influential Muslim state in the world, even though his subjects were overwhelmingly Hindu. Inevitably, some Muslim leaders began urging him to assume the office of the Caliph. Although he rejected their calls, he did not abandon the idea outright.

The Nizam's generosity meant that Mejid and his family could move from their cramped hotel room on the damp shores of Lake Geneva to the more conducive climate of the French Riviera. Comfortable in his nineteenth-century villa in the fashionable suburb of Cimiez overlooking Nice and the Côte d' Azur, the monocled Mejid devoted himself once more to the
arts. Surrounded by a high stone wall, the villa afforded the family much-needed privacy. While Mejid could be regularly spotted on the beach ‘attired in swimming trunks only and carrying a large parasol', the women of the house were kept in strict seclusion. There was a ‘tedious absence of feminine laughter and chatter', remarked one visitor to the double-storey villa surrounded by cypress pines and cedars. ‘They just sit around all day on cushions and divans and read poetry and eat sweetmeats. Sometimes they play the piano or violin. They smoke and sip coffee. That is all. They never go out.'
⁸

Mejid's only child, Durrushehvar, was only 11 years old when the family was sent into exile. It had been a traumatic time for the young princess whose name means ‘great pearl'. When the prefect of Istanbul's police told the family that life in the West would offer them freedom, a tearful Durrushehvar said: ‘I don't want that kind of freedom.'
⁹
Durrushehvar would later confide to one of her Indian companions, Kumudini Ramdev Rao, that when her mother finally removed the scarf she had worn during her flight from Turkey her hair had turned from auburn brown to white.
¹⁰