Last Nizam (9781742626109) (25 page)

More than half a century on, it is difficult to find a member of Hyderabad's Muslim nobility who does not feel a sense of betrayal about the Police Action and the loss of independence. Mukarram Jah keeps a framed letter from King George VI written on 29 July 1948, in which he declares ‘that it is my earnest hope and prayer that a peaceful solution of the difficulties which have arisen may be found' as a reminder of British perfidy. He also keeps on his coffee table a copy of Lord Birkenhead's
biography of Walter Monckton, whom he considers to be one of the few people who remained loyal to Hyderabad's cause to the very end.

In the mid-1950s, while he was attending Cambridge, Jah remembers Monckton patting him on the shoulder at a party and saying: ‘We should never have done it, my boy.' Around the same time he ran into Mountbatten at a function he was attending with his mother. With Durrushehvar's steely gaze fixed upon him, the only words the mighty earl could find to mutter were: ‘Sorry, ma'am.'
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J
AH WAS NOT IN
H
YDERABAD
to witness its humiliating defeat or to hear stories about the massacres that occurred in its aftermath. Just days before the Indian invasion, Durrushehvar with her two sons, their guardian and a medical advisor boarded a private Dakota, flew to Karachi and then boarded a commercial flight to London. ‘I felt like a Hungarian refugee,' Jah later recalled.
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In the autumn of 1948, Britain was still feeling the after-effects of war. Butter, eggs, cheese, meat and sugar were rationed. Durrushehvar and her sons, however, were hardly aware of the hardships the average Londoner was experiencing. The family moved into a suite at the exclusive Savoy Hotel, where they would live for the next two years. Acting on her own initiative, Durrushehvar enrolled Mukarram at Harrow and Muffakham at a prep school nearby. As far as she was concerned, returning to Hyderabad was out of the question and the education of the boys became her top priority. Osman Ali Khan did not see it that way and sent Durrushehvar a telegram demanding the return of his grandsons to India. Philip Mason described what happened next. ‘She was furious. She strode to and fro, flashing with emeralds. She looked magnificent.' Showing the telegram to Mason,
she cried: ‘Imagine the vulgarity of my in-laws. He says he will pay my bill at the Savoy if I bring the children back!' As always, Durrushehvar refused to give in. She flew to Delhi, where she met with Nehru before confronting the Nizam. ‘She had her way,' Mason wrote. ‘She was a gallant woman and I wish she had been an Empress before democracy became the fashion.'
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Located on London's outskirts, Harrow on the Hill was founded in 1572 under a Royal Charter of Queen Elizabeth I granted to local farmer John Lyon. Over the centuries it grew to become the second most famous school in the English-speaking world. Carved on the wall of the Fourth Form Room, the original classroom, are the names of Lord Byron, Robert Peel and Winston Churchill. Other Old Harrovians whose names are etched into the tops of desks, the backs of chairs and on the wooden panelling of boarding houses include some of Britain's most eminent statesmen, soldiers, writers, scientists and civic leaders. Harrow had been closely associated with empire-building, producing a steady stream of administrators, planters, merchants, soldiers, proconsuls, clergymen and lawyers who became the bedrock of British imperialism.
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Durrushehvar chose Harrow over other public schools such as Eton because it had a stronger tradition of taking in students from Britain's colonies. According to the school's biographer Christopher Tyerman, Harrow had attracted the ‘numerous sons of African or Indian potentates striving to associate themselves with this nursery of upper-class Englishness, from relations of the Khedive of Egypt, the Sultan of Zanzibar, the King of Siam or Indian maharajahs to the clever, ambitious conformist son of the very rich Indian lawyer, Motilal Nehru'.
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By far the largest number of Oriental potentates sending their sons to Harrow were Indian. Between 1890 and 1947 more than a dozen rajahs and maharajahs enrolled their heirs at Harrow, including three princes from the state of Kapurthala. The roll
call of Indian royals contained such eminent personages as Rajah Maharajah Singh, who went on to become the Prime Minister of Kashmir, Prince Ajit Singhji of Morvi, Prince Jaishinghrao of Baroda and Prince Jagadipendra Narayan, whose father was the Maharajah of Cochin. When Jah arrived at Harrow, he was in the company of Prince Kumar Bhawani Singh and his brother Prince Kumar Jai Singh, the sons of the Maharajah of Jaipur, but Jah felt more at home with King Faisal of Iraq and his cousin King Hussein of Jordan. Jah formed long-lasting friendships with Faisal and Hussein, spending summers sailing and water-skiing with the two men on the Bosphorus after he graduated from Sandhurst.

Jah's name is carved on the wood-panelled wall of West Acre, one of the school's 12 boarding houses, even though he never spent a night there. Durrushehvar was able to convince the Principal, Ralph Moore, to bend the rules and allow her son to be a day student, since his guardian, Hamid Beg, would be looking after him out of school hours. Moore had been only too happy to oblige. The school had been bombed during the war and enrolments had fallen to their lowest level in decades.

As Jah sat down in the speech room for the first time, the portraits of Byron, Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru and a score of other notables stared down at him. Harrow pupils were expected to conform to its upper-class, Anglocentric culture. The school was known for racism and its excessive snobbery, but what Jah disliked was the strict discipline, the emphasis on drama and singing and above all being forced to participate in organised sports. ‘They told me I had to stop any player coming through, but they didn't say that the player had to be carrying a ball,' Jah says of learning how to play Harrow Football, a cross between rugby and football played with a large leather ball. ‘So I tackled the first guy I saw running towards me and broke two of his ribs.'
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Academically, Jah had a lot of catching up to do. No longer could he rely on a palace tutor completing a maths equation. He also had a tough guardian to contend with. Hamid Beg was a slightly stooping ex-colonel of the Hyderabad Army with a receding chin and a reputation for being a champion horse-rider. ‘My guardian was absolutely Edwardian in his attitude to life,' says Jah. ‘It was this aspect that most influenced my upbringing.' A bachelor, Beg took orders from no one except Durrushehvar and occasionally even overrode the Nizam. ‘He was the only man who stood up to grandfather,' says Jah. ‘He was sacked twice on the same day and brought back twice.' Durrushehvar instructed Beg to be tough on her son and he willingly implemented her brief. ‘If you don't do this you'll be walking the pavements of Hyderabad one day,' he warned the young prince whenever he slipped in his estimation. ‘Up to the age of 21 you'll do what I say, after that I'll do what you say.'
⁶

As Jah adjusted to school at Harrow, India's princes were struggling to come to terms with their new status. In independent and democratic India, the personal extravagances of the princely rulers could no longer be charged to the state, but had to be paid for out of their privy purses. As royal households scrambled to sell off unwanted assets, the price of a ceremonial elephant fell to 200 rupees. Dancing girls and court musicians who once entertained the royal
darbars
were suddenly unemployed. Palaces and guest houses were being turned over to state governments and converted into hotels or guest houses for visiting officials.

Hyderabad was no exception. Towards the end of 1949, the city's bazaars were suddenly flooded with antique furniture, chandeliers, old paintings and bric-a-brac.
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In the absence of savings, investments or cash, a nawab needing a bottle of scotch for the night would pawn off his belongings at throwaway prices to an Arab middleman known as a
chaush
. The trigger for the bear
market had been the announcement in August 1949 that all
jagirs
in Hyderabad were to be taken over by the state. Nawabs and lesser nobles who had relied on the income of their vast estates, which covered almost a third of Hyderabad, were suddenly deprived of their main and often only source of wealth.

Jah's grandfather was also coming to terms with the harsh reality that after almost 230 years the Asaf Jahi dynasty's independence had been forever extinguished. Nehru had wisely opted for a policy of magnanimity rather than oppression when considering how to treat the Nizam. A ‘farseeing and generous approach' to Hyderabad, India's first Prime Minister argued, could strengthen the country by reducing communal tension and giving greater security to minorities. ‘It would undermine the policy which Pakistan continues to pursue against us and I think that it would improve our position in Kashmir. Abroad it would be a feather in our cap.' As for the Nizam, he ‘continues to be the ruler of Hyderabad with all his old powers, but he cannot exercise these powers in view of the military situation that has arisen. Though in law and theory he is still the fountain of authority, in fact he is powerless and can only function within the limits we lay down.'
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Those limits, laid out in a letter written on 1 February 1949 by the military governor of Hyderabad, Major General J. N. Chaudhuri, would have a crucial bearing not only on the status of the Nizam but also on the life of Mukarram Jah. The affairs of Hyderabad state, its ruler and the Asaf Jahi dynasty, Chaudhuri's letter declared, would henceforth be determined by the people through a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. While promising to give every assistance to ‘His Exalted Highness' in matters concerning his privy purse, status and titles, privileges and dignities, Chaudhuri stated that ‘as regards his successor, the Government of India will enter into fresh and fair agreements with him'.
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Midway through his first dreary English winter, Jah was blissfully ignorant of the agreements his grandfather was
about to enter into that would change his life forever. All that concerned him was how to avoid being selected into Harrow's football team.

The full text of the agreement that Osman Ali Khan signed with the Government of India on 25 January 1950 has never been made public, but key elements were published by the Nizam's financial advisor, Khan Bahadur Cooverji Taraporevala, in an official booklet titled
Ruler to Rajpramukh (Ruler to Governor
) a few years later. Under Article One the Nizam was to hand over his own feudal estates worth 25–30 million rupees in lieu of an annual compensation of 2.5 million rupees. The agreement also provided for an annual privy purse of 5 million rupees from 1 April 1950, free of all taxes for the rest of his life. Article Two guaranteed to the Nizam ‘the full ownership, use and enjoyment of all jewels, jewellery and ornaments, shares, securities and other private properties, movable as well as immovable belonging to him on the date of this agreement'.
¹⁰

With regard to the all-important question of who would inherit this estate, the agreement left most of the Nizam's rights and privileges intact. The Third Article stated that: ‘His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad and the members of his family shall be entitled to all the personal privileges, dignities and titles enjoyed by them whether within or outside the territories of the State immediately before the fifteenth day of August 1947.'
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The Fourth Article guaranteed the succession to the
musnud
would be in accordance with the laws and customs governing dynastic succession that were peculiar to Hyderabad state. This article was crucial. When it came to dividing up his private estate, the Nizam and the Indian Government had in effect agreed that the usual Muslim law of inheritance and intestate succession would not apply. Rather than having to share that estate with his immediate family, Mukarram Jah would become the sole heir to his grandfather's immense fortune.

No one, with the exception of the Nizam, knew the actual value of that fortune. As in all princely states, the rulers of Hyderabad seldom furnished more than the barest details of their wealth, though they were not averse to flaunting it. After Independence the Indian Government attempted with varying degrees of success to establish the actual amounts of jewellery and other assets in the possession of India's ruling princes and tens of thousands of lesser nobles in order to raise much-needed revenue through wealth and inheritance taxes. While palaces were impossible to hide, jewels were not. Whatever declarations were made tended to vastly undervalue their worth.

Hyderabad was probably the most extreme example of this trend. What the Nizam put on display at royal occasions or showed off to visiting dignitaries was only a fraction of what he possessed. During Osman Ali Khan's reign the treasury at King Kothi was described as ‘a long rectangular room approximately 120 feet long and 40 feet wide'. The room was never cleaned as the Nizam believed the thick layer of dust covering everything was the best security against theft. Scattered around the palaces were safes of various sizes and steel trunks fitted with fiveshilling locks containing pearls and precious stones. Bags of bullion lay under the portico where he received guests. In one of the palace gardens were parked several wagons that the Nizam had ordered to be loaded with gold bars. They remained there for years ‘like forgotten piles of kindling wood'. When someone plucked up the courage to ask him what to do with them it was discovered that the weight of the gold had caused their wheels to sink into the ground.
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Apart from vast quantities of precious and semi-precious stones, gold and silver, each of the Nizam's many palaces was crammed full of antiques. The Jade Room at Falaknuma contained one the world's most valuable private collections of the rare pale green stone. On the walls of King Kothi hung Picassos
and Constables. In the vaults of Purani Haveli were stored hundreds of gifts the Nizam had received for his silver jubilee – each item was made of the precious metal.

According to his official biographer, Osman Ali Khan's personal wealth in the early 1950s stood at 1.35 billion rupees (£100 million). ‘Of this, Rs. 350,000,000 is in liquid cash, Rs. 500,000,000 is in jewellery and a like amount in real estate. These figures are only approximate, for those who are close to the Nizam are not very communicative on the subject.'
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In 1949
The New York Times
reported that ‘the Nizam's wealth cannot be calculated, but has been estimated at something in excess of two billion dollars. It is said that his pearls alone would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, or pave Broadway from Times Square to Columbus Circle.' In 1952 the paper revised that estimate down to US$200 million, but added it was still ranked ‘as one of the world's great fortunes – and it is tax free'.
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