White Mughals (101 page)

Dustee Ali Khan is not mentioned in any other source, and the
Nagaristan i-Asafiya
explicitly speaks of Sharaf un-Nissa having only two daughters. He was therefore probably Khair un-Nissa’s half-brother—in other words Mehdi Yar Khan’s son by a different wife or concubine.

Shushtari once made the journey by the government dak, and was astonished: ‘The Governor, as a token of respect, arranged for me to travel by Dak post-horse from Calcutta to Machlibandar. At every 2
farsakhs
[leagues] 14 escorts were waiting ready: 8 to carry the litter on their shoulders, travelling faster than a rapidly trotting horse; 2 to carry the food; 2 to carry torches which they lit after dark; 1 guide; and 1 drummer. I reached Machli-bandar from Calcutta in the space of 15 days, a journey which would otherwise have taken two and a half months. In truth, the miracle of
taiy al-arz
[instant global travel] ascribed to the Sufis in the books is to be found here and only in this manner! We travelled mostly at night, but even by day we never stopped, so I found out little about the country through which we passed. Only when the drum sounded did we stop for a picnic, but the movement of the porters had upset my stomach and I had no taste for food, especially not for meat or anything cooked. Everywhere we reached, by day or by night, the Company’s servants were ready to welcome us and offer us repose.’ Abdul Lateef Shushtari,
Tuhfat al-’Alam
, pp.564-70.

And as such, the scene of some of the earliest and wildest English debauches in India. For example, in December 1619 William Methwold reported from Masulipatam that the Company’s staff had broken into a series of toddy shacks and port-side bordellos and generally ‘behaved [so much] like barbarous outlaws that I feare our nation, formerly well reputed of, will suffer a perpetuall scandal for their most intolerable misdemeanours’. Seven years later, President Hawley, Methwold’s successor, finding his Masulipatam staff equally intractable, called for the factory to be ‘maintained with civill, sober men’, and ordered that ‘negligent or debauched persons or common drunkards should be discarded’. See William Foster (ed.),
The English Factories in India
(13 vols, London, 1906-27), Vol. 1, p.153.

Masulipatam was always a notoriously pestiliential place, and the records of its early factors are full of sad tales of new arrivals dying within weeks of landing: ‘This is so sickly a place,’ we read, ‘that it is very rare to have all of us well at the same time.’ Or again: ‘The Council taking into consideration the unhealthfulness of the place and the uncertainty of man’s frail life and duration in this world, doe order that those who are in perfect health doe negotiate and carry on the business for those that are indisposed.’ See Dodwell,
Nabobs of Madras
, p.109.

Masulipatam is now officially known as Machlipatnam, which is the name (alternating sometimes with Machlibandar) by which it appears to have been called locally since at least the eighteenth century.

There were a few Mughal and Persian merchants, generally descendants of old trading families who had lived in Masulipatam for centuries, and who still combined a little Haj traffic from Hyderabad with some textile trade to Jeddah and a few of the Persian ports. See Sinnappah Arasaratnam and Aniruddha Ray,
Masulipatam and Cambay: A History of Two Port Towns 1500-1800
(New Delhi, 1994), p.116. Also Shah Mazur Alam, ‘Masulipatam: A Metropolitan Port in the Seventeenth Century’, in Mohamed Taher (ed.),
Muslim Rule in the Deccan
(New Delhi, 1997), pp.145-63.

Though Madras was certainly not a completely innocent place. There were darker corners of town, such as the Griffin Inn (‘Griffin’ being eighteenth-century slang for a newcomer to India), where a ‘sneaker of grog’ could be obtained for as little as three fanams and a bowl of punch for five, and where the Madras press regularly complained about the landlord’s ‘stale beer, sour claret and rotten hams’. See Dodwell,
Nabobs of Madras
, pp.217-20.

Russell was especially pleased by the improvements he noticed in his own dancing skills: ‘My dancing (though I say it who ought not to say it) appears to me to be as much improved as my manners, and I believe I was as much astonished as everyone else by my own performance. So many fine speeches have been made by the ladies about the acquisition I am to their party, that Gould & Mrs Dal propose to call me “Acquisition Russell”.’ Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C156, p.21, 21 April 1808.

Russell was very saddened by Aman Ullah’s death, writing to his brother Charles of the ‘sudden and melancholy death of poor Amaun Oolah … I never thought of him as an ailing man, or doubted that he had many prosperous years to live. Poor creature! He was as faithful, as honest, as affectionate, as unassuming a being who ever lived, very sincerely, I believe attached to me, and possessed of many qualities. How I shall supply his place I do not know, and I question therefore whether it would be best not to fill it at all … It was very kind of you to write immediately to Uzeez Oolah, and to attend his brother’s funeral. I shall write to Uzeez Oolah myself in few days.’ He concludes by saying that he is glad he did not see Aman Ullah again, ‘as after seeing my old faithful friend again I should have felt his loss even more deeply than I do now; and my nerves are already so much shaken that I dread anything which would have disturbed them more.’ Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts D152, p.72, October 1810. Aman Ullah’s Persian letters to Russell written on his journey from Benares survive uncatalogued in the Persian Department of the Bodleian.

Lady Hood wrote a long letter to Mountstuart Elphinstone describing her meeting with the Begum, but it was sadly destroyed, along with much of the rest of Elphinstone’s correspondence, when the Pune Residency was burned down during the Pindari Wars. Elphinstone’s reply survives however among Lady Hood’s letter books in Edinburgh, and gives an indication of what she had written, implying that the Begum had not only impressed her, but that she was reputed to have totally entranced her late husband James Kirkpatrick. As Elphinstone wrote in his characteristically superior fashion: ‘Your account of the Begum is very interesting and new even to me. Her fairness however is owing to her Persian blood. All the native women have good manners to some extent, and some are said to be possessed of great wit, and it would appear, of great powers of fascination, but they have none of the dignity of English women and I fancy very rarely much mind, so that I am astonished when I hear of any of them gaining an ascendancy over a man as the one in question appears to have done.’ Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD46/17/42, The Letters of Mountstuart Elphinstone to Lady Hood, 1813-14, p.8, 1813.

Dr Ure had died in January 1807. Mrs Ure had returned to India from placing her son in school in England to find that her husband was dead and buried, and that she was a widow. She caught the next ship back home.

These riches presumably belonged to the children, or were presents for William Kirkpatrick and the Handsome Colonel.

Although much of this part of Exeter was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, Southernhay House remains. The house once backed onto a deer park, but the land was sold off sometime in the 1980s to be converted into an office development. The house itself now belongs to a group of chartered accountants, and a line of BMWs stand parked in the carriageway from which William Kirkpatrick used to set off to see Kennaway or to take the children on seaside picnics.

Though James had apologised to William and admitted he had thrown out most of the material that had been salvaged from Tipu’s burning palace after Munshi Aziz Ullah had complained that the Residency
daftar
was becoming too crowded, and he had ordered a clear-out. See OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, Eur Mss F228/13, p.158, 11 September 1801, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick. Among the documents he burned, he says, was a list of the agents Tipu ‘employed at this durbar’. He offers to copy others out from the Residency copybooks, but says it will take time ‘with such few and indifferent copyists as I have now at my command’.

The advertisment for the sale in the
Exeter Flying Post
read as follows: ‘Southernhay Place: To be SOLD at auction, on Tuesday the 12th day of May next, and following day, on the premises, the NEW and MODERN FURNITURE, of Major General Kirkpatrick, at his late dwelling-house, situated the upper end of Southernhay; comprising mahogany post and other bedsteads, and hangings; hair and wool mattresses; fine seasoned feather beds and bedding; floor and bed carpets; mahogany wardrobe; and all other bedroom requisites; mahogany chairs, with morocco seats; a secretary and book case; revolving library table; Grecian sofa; an eight day clock, in mahogany café; ivory handle knives and forks. The sale to begin by eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and continue until all articles in each days sale are disposed of. NB The goods are of the best quality, and may be viewed the Monday preceding the sale.’ This notice, appropriately enough, lies immediately adjacent to an advertisement for ‘Trotter’s Oriental Dentifrice or Asiatic Tooth Powder’.

Indian titles always impressed the British, and Kitty’s reputation as the daughter of a ‘Hindoo Princess’ (Khair un-Nissa was of course neither ‘Hindoo’ nor a princess) seems to have done as much as her relations, beauty and fortune to ease her passage in English society. Possession of a title remained a trump card for Indians throughout the Raj. As late as the mid-1920s this was something that struck Aldous Huxley as he watched India’s Maharajahs assemble in Delhi for a meeting of the Chamber of Princes, a week during which Delhi ‘pullulated with Despots and their Viziers’. Proust, he thought, would have enjoyed ‘observing the extraordinary emollient effect upon even the hardest anti-Asiatic sentiments of the possession of wealth and a royal title. The cordiality with which people talk to the dear Maharajah Sahib—and even, on occasion, about him—is delightful.’ Aldous Huxley,
Jesting Pilate
(London, 1926), pp.106-7.

So showing, in this quotation at least, a little less spirit than her parents had done in similar circumstances.

At this period, the 7th Hussars had a reputation not dissimilar to that of the modern SAS, and is described in one source as ‘Lord Anglesey’s crack regiment’.

Russell married Clothilde Mottet on 13 November 1816. The details are not clear, but she seems to have ousted his then
bibi
, named Luft un-Nissa, who may have been a cousin of Khair’s. See Bodleian Library, Russell Papers, Ms Eng Letts C157, p.83, 17 September 1814. See also Sir Richard Temple,
Journals of Hyderabad, Kashmir, Sikkim and Nepal
(2 vols, London, 1887), Vol. 1, p.119. When she first arrived at the Hyderabad Residency, the second Mrs Russell went out to check that the herd of buffaloes, which provided milk for the Residency, were being milked hygienically; ‘[but] the buffaloes, not used to white faces, charged at her, and she was obliged to take refuge in the kitchen quarters’. See Mark Bence-Jones,
Palaces of the Raj
(London, 1973), p.102.

De Warren remarks that when he first arrived in Hyderabad he stayed with his ‘brother-in-law Captain Mottet who was the last French officer in the Nizam’s army who had survived from the days of [James’s old rival, Michel Joachim de] Raymond.’ This Captain Mottet was presumably the father or the brother of Clothilde Mottet, Russell’s second wife.

It still stands, though the fragrant gardens have now been encroached upon by a line of VD clinics, the mosque rebuilt in concrete and the tomb itself has become a motorcycle repair shop. However the owner, Mr Das, voluntarily restricts his motorcycle work to the ambulatory and carefully maintains both the tomb chamber itself and the graves it contains: there are five smaller tombs surrounding the principal one, and they are said in Hyderabad to be the resting place of William’s Muslim wives. Mr Das told me he places a new marigold garland on Fyze’s tomb every week, and that though he is a Hindu himself, he also maintains and garlands the pictures of the Ka’aba and of the Sacred Heart that he has erected on the wall of the chamber, thus showing himself to be an appropriately syncretic guardian of Fyze’s mortal remains.

Though clearly she had somehow been informed of the death of Sahib Allum/William George in 1828.

The picture did go to Kitty on Russell’s death in 1852, ‘notwithstanding the remonstrances of his family … an evil day for them’, as his daughter-in-law Constance later wrote. See Lady Russell,
The Rose Goddess and Other Sketches of Mystery & Romance
(London, 1910), p.1. It remained in

i.e. Sulaiman Jah, the then Nizam’s uncle, who as a seven-year-old in 1802 had said that he wanted to marry Fyze’s adopted daughter, Fanny Khanum.

A reference to the Begum’s rank, by which she was entitled to the use of the
palki
(ceremonial litter), the
morchal
, or fan of peacock feathers, and the
naqqara
and
dumana
, or state kettle drums.

Despite possessing a claim to the
pukka
peerage, the Barony of Uttoxeter, over time the family squandered their wealth and became poorer and poorer, less and less British and more and more provincial Indian, gradually losing all touch with their aristocratic English relations. The Vicereine, Lady Halifax, had Gardner blood, and records in her memoirs that she was a little surprised when alighting from the viceregal train on her way from Delhi up to Simla, to see the station- master of Kalka break through the ceremonial guard and fight his way up to the red carpet. Shouldering through the ranks of aides and the viceregal retinue, he addressed the Vicereine: ‘Your Excellency,’ he said, ‘my name is Gardner.’ ‘Of course,’ replied Lady Halifax, somewhat to the astonishment of her entourage. ‘We are therefore cousins.’ The Gardner dynasty, incidentally, still survives at Khasgunge between Agra and Lucknow, today one of the most violent and backward parts of India (though the picture has been somewhat muddied by an Evangelical missionary from the family who named all his many converts after himself, thus filling Khasgunge with legions of Gardners, many of whom are no genetic relation at all to William Linnaeus). The present claimant to the title Lord Gardner, Baron Uttoxeter, who has never been to England and speaks only faltering English, contents himself with farming his Indian acres and enjoying the prestige of being the village wrestling champion; but until recently he threatened every so often to return ‘home’ and take up his seat in the House of Lords.