Last Nizam (9781742626109) (28 page)

The most poignant reminders of this bygone era are hidden from the public. Coated with decades of dust in one of the reception rooms are dozens of striking black and white portraits of young men and women. In the mid-1950s, the Nizam asked the royal photographer, Raja Deen Dayal and Sons, to set up a studio in Nazari Bagh where he would pose for portraits with the
khanazads.
Unsmiling, the ageing potentate wears his rumpled cotton pyjamas and cheap plastic slippers, while the
khanazads
look uncomfortable in borrowed finery befitting their status as subjects of a man who still considered himself the premier prince in India even though he dressed like a pauper. The female
khanazads
appear on their own or in pairs, dressed in traditional clothes with gold bangles, cluster rings and pearl necklaces against a crudely painted, Aeolian-looking backdrop.

The dingy rooms of Nazari Bagh are like a museum to this strange and wonderful era when the Nizam was feared as much as he was revered. Thousands of glasses, dinner plates, bowls and pieces of cutlery are arranged in messy stacks on sagging tables. Old inkwells used in the palace school lie scattered next to yellowing notebooks, stationery and tiffin boxes. Room after room is piled high with old toys, oil lamps of every description, medicine bottles, mirrors, hat stands, uniforms, dancing shoes, slippers, clusters of keys, tennis racquets and trunks that look like they have never been opened. Nothing was thrown out. Empty beer and champagne bottles fill cupboards. Darkened corners hide broken chairs, the skeletons of chaise longues and rotting rolls of carpet.

As Osman Ali Khan's court expanded, so did his frugality. In his younger days the Nizam could afford to take his whole harem with him for a one-night visit to the small Muslim state of Rampur. At the time he was said to have remarked: ‘The ladies don't get about much. I thought this might be a nice outing for them.'
⁴⁵
But those days were long gone. The Nizam had not travelled outside his kingdom since 1936. When an invitation came from Jawaharlal Nehru to attend a conference in New Delhi of regional governors and princely heads of state in 1952, he was at first reluctant to accept. Only when the government agreed to supply the three planes needed for transporting his entourage, which consisted of 15 wives, 10 children and some 56 physicians, barbers, nurses and servants, did he relent.

The Nizam was also tradition-bound when it came to his heir apparent's future. In 1957 Jah graduated from Sandhurst as a second lieutenant and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers' Corps. He was 24 and had completed his education. As far as the Nizam was concerned it was high time he got married. From Nazari Bagh came a steady stream of photographs of ‘nice plump Muslim girls' for his approval. Jah's response was to use the photos for target practice and post back the bullet-riddled originals. Having witnessed his father's and uncle's disastrous marriages, Jah did not want the Nizam to find him a suitable bride. Eventually the pressure from his grandfather became so strong that Jah had to ask Nehru to intervene.
⁴⁶

While holidaying in Istanbul in 1958, Jah met 21-year-old Turkish beauty Esra Birgin. The daughter of a research chemist and educated at Lillesden girls school in Kent, Esra's family lived on one of the Princess Islands in the Bosphorus Straits, a favourite playground for the Turkish elite. She had been studying interior design in Florence but found the language too hard and transferred to the London School of Architecture. The pair married secretly at the Kensington Registry Office on 12 April 1959, but the news soon leaked out. Osman Ali Khan was furious; Durrushehvar was disapproving. ‘You have to imagine a man who had never travelled. He was bright but narrowminded,' Esra says of the Nizam.
⁴⁷
Like Jah, she never spoke to him directly.

Esra was more readily accepted by Jah's Indian friends. Like her mother-in-law, she learned how to wear a sari as gracefully as any Hyderabadi begum and took an active role in charitable causes. A hospital south of the Charminar still bears her name. Following the birth of a son, Azmat, in 1960, and a daughter, Shekhyar, in 1962, Esra applied her training in architecture to designing a new home for the family, the Chiraan palace, on 400 acres of land on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

The couple were frequent visitors at the house of Chandrakant Gir and his wife Lalitha. ‘Esra was outgoing, very open, there were no formalities about her. She wanted to meet as many of her husband's friends as possible,' says Lalitha Gir.
⁴⁸
During the couple's visits to Hyderabad, Jah refused to conform to the norms of the royal household. ‘I remember [Jah] coming to our house dressed in blue overalls and driving his Jeep. I once mistook him for the electrician,' says Begum Meherunnissa, whose father taught Esra to speak Urdu.
⁴⁹
Basith Nawab tells a similar story of how Jah drove ahead in his Jeep to the coastal city of Vizag, while he flew down with Esra. A government delegation waiting to receive Jah at the airport had no idea that the casual-looking man waiting on the tarmac who had turned up in an Austin Champ was the Prince of Hyderabad. When Basith stepped off the plane he was presented with a garland of flowers that he then placed on Jah, much to the embarrassment of the waiting dignitaries.
⁵⁰
Bilkees Alladin, who lived behind Jah's Banjara Hills house, remembers him spending all day and night in the garage under one of his cars. ‘He never made out he was royalty. It was frustration, probably. The set-up here was very medieval.'
⁵¹

The novelty of spending long periods in Hyderabad while her husband went off on hunting trips with friends soon wore off for Esra. She found the atmosphere arcane and oppressive. Jah demanded that she always be accompanied by a bodyguard and a ‘companion'. They rarely entertained and never went to restaurants. The only distraction from palace life was going to one of the three cinemas which in those days showed English-language releases. Jah was addicted to movies, particularly Westerns. His favourites included
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
and
The Dirty Dozen
, which he watched over and over again. Esra was missing her life in London, where her circle of friends included Sean Connery, Edmund Capon, Sophia Loren and Dorothy Lamour.

While Jah toyed with the idea of a military career, Osman Ali Khan pressed for his grandson to be groomed for a role more befitting a scion of the Asaf Jahi dynasty. But it was Nehru, who had been keeping a close watch on Jah's progress, and not the Nizam who took the initiative. Nehru invited Jah to be his honorary aide de camp, an undemanding job that involved twomonth stints in the protocol department in New Delhi. An admirer of Soviet Russia, Nehru had steered India down a socialistic path that espoused five-year plans concentrating on heavy industry, big dams, vast mines and other infrastructure initiatives. As the head of the world's largest democracy, he also took a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, comprising newly independent countries such as Indonesia, China, Burma and Egypt unwilling to side with either the US or the Soviet Union.

It was Nehru's commitment to a non-aligned, strongly secular India that attracted him to Jah. To Nehru, Jah was the ideal face of Muslim India. His grandfather had been a figurehead in the Muslim world by virtue of Hyderabad's size and importance. His grandson, as the successor of both the Ottoman and Asaf Jahi dynasties, would be treated with equal if not greater respect. ‘When you look at other Indian princes at the time, he was the best suited,' says
The Deccan Chronicle
's news editor, Mir Ayoob Ali Khan. ‘He could have served in many ways – as an ambassador, a governor, a politician or even as a vice-president. It would have strengthened India's image as a secular country, a country that did not treat Muslims badly in spite of the Police Action and the debacle of Hyderabad. Nehru treated him as one of his nephews or sons.'
⁵²

In the Protocol Department Jah learned about seating arrangements at state banquets, the procedures to be followed in welcoming foreign dignitaries and how to secretly serve scotch in tea cups to Muslim heads of state. He counts among his greatest achievements crawling behind a dais to refasten a safety pin
onto the
lungyi
of Burmese Prime Minister, U Nu, while he was giving a speech, without the audience noticing.
⁵³
He sat alongside Chou En Lai at a state dinner and was invited by the Chinese premier to visit Beijing. He travelled with Nehru extensively and became a familiar face in the Prime Minister's household, where his daughter, Indira Gandhi, was beginning to carve out a political career for herself.

Jah, however, had no aspirations to fall into any of the roles that Nehru had in mind. He hated the artificial meet-and-greet world of diplomacy and felt uncomfortable in large social gatherings. He had no interest in politics, and though he was a practising Muslim had little time for organised religion. He still saw his calling to be a military one. His ambition to join the Indian Army, however, was unsuccessful.

In 1962 there were ominous signs that the much vaunted friendship between India and China that was the centrepiece of the Non-Aligned Movement was crumbling. Six years earlier China had secretly built a road across the disputed Aksai Chin region to the north of Kashmir. In 1959 Nehru granted asylum to the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of refugees after China's forceful consolidation of Tibet. Border skirmishes and political protests by India intensified. When Nehru sent forces to consolidate India's eastern border with China, which had been laid down by the British but never recognised by Beijing, the People's Liberation Army swept down the Himalayan passes and threatened to cut Assam off from the rest of the country.

Jah enrolled for active service but his application forms were deliberately lost, probably at Nehru's instigation. ‘A senior general later told me that there was never any question of sending me to war. He told me that while they didn't so much mind the idea of a prince being killed, they were reluctant to see him taken prisoner by the Chinese. The propaganda surrounding such a capture would have been most unpleasant.'
⁵⁴

Before Jah had time to re-enlist the war was over. China's invasion was more of a demonstration of its ability to call the shots over the contentious Himalayan frontier than a full-blown occupation. Jah eventually served for a few months in the Engineering Corps repairing bridges and building roads in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. The PLA had long since withdrawn.

By now Osman Ali Khan was almost 80 and in poor health. In 1964 he developed pneumonia and was not expected to live, but to the disappointment of Azam Jah, who still cherished his ambition to become the Nizam, he recovered. From then on, the ageing Nizam rarely left his palace except to pray at his mother's grave at the Masjid Judi mosque across the road from King Kothi. He would occasionally be spotted at auctions bidding for his own portraits, which once hung from every public building in Hyderabad.
⁵⁵
On a few occasions he attended the wedding of a nobleman, his walking stick supporting a five-foot-three frame that weighed just 90 pounds. In
Highness
, her book on India's princes, Ann Morrow writes: ‘At the end of his days he was living on 7
s
6
d
a week and said he could not make ends meet. He was knitting his own socks, sleeping on a humble
charpoy
, bargaining with stall holders over the price of a soft drink, rationing biscuits to one each at tea and smoking cheap local Charminar cigarettes.'
⁵⁶

On 22 February 1967 Jah received a phone call from his mother telling him the Nizam was seriously ill and not expected to live. Jah had received a similar call in 1964 and thought it was another false alarm. Only when Durrushehvar called a second time from his grandfather's bedside did he realise that his condition was serious.

For two days and two nights Durrushehvar had stayed at the Nizam's side, together with his personal physicians. Osman Ali Khan allowed the doctors to take his temperature and pulse, but
refused all medication. Only when he slipped out of consciousness were they able to administer antibiotics. For 72 hours his condition remained stable, but then he took a sudden turn for the worse. On Friday, 24 February, at the precise moment that the
muezzin
at the Mecca Masjid mosque was calling the faithful to midday prayer, the Seventh Nizam of Hyderabad died. He was 80.

For twenty years Osman Ali Khan's kingdom had consisted of little more than a few moss-covered palaces and the dependants he clothed, fed and sheltered. But the funeral of the Seventh Nizam brought half a million people out onto the streets. After lying in state on the veranda of Nazari Bagh, covered in a Kashmiri shawl, Osman Ali Khan's body was placed on a gun carriage and taken to the Mecca Masjid accompanied by members of his Arab guard, women from the
zenana
and hundreds of
khanazads
. A reporter at the scene described how a human tide surged towards the coffin as it was carried from the mosque. ‘The satin canopy collapsed and the coffin bobbed crazily over a sea of fezzes, turbans and helmets, tilting so that mounds of rose petals that had been placed on its top slid off on the heads of the mourners.'
⁵⁷