White Mughals (21 page)

To William he wrote a more heartfelt reply: ‘I need not, I am sure my dear Will, say anything to you on the subject of my gratitude to that most worthy nobleman [Lord Wellesley] for his uniform condescension and kindness towards me. You know my heart, and can form a good idea of my feelings on the occasion … ’
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From the parapet of the wall that surrounded the British Residency in Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick could look down over the River Musi, a raging torrent during the monsoon, but a gentle, fordable stream in summer. On the far bank of the river rose the great city of Hyderabad: a seven-mile loop of walls, and over the top of its watchtowers, stretching far into the distance, a magnificent panorama of white mosques and palaces, monuments and tombs, domes and minarets, their gilt finials glinting in the summer sunlight.

For one hundred years from the late sixteenth century, thanks at least partly to the profits of the diamond trade, Hyderabad had been one of the richest cities in India; it was certainly the most prosperous town outside the Mughal Empire. Sultan Quli Qutb Shah had planned his new city in 1591 as ‘a metropolis which would be unequalled the world over and a replica of paradise itself’.
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When the French traveller M. de Thevenot passed through in the late 1650s he described how far the Sultan’s plans had succeeded: elegant, clean, opulent and well planned, the still-young city of Hyderabad was filled with grand houses and gardens, and miles of bazaars humming ‘with many rich merchants, bankers and jewellers and a vast number of very skilful artisans’.

Beyond the walls, the scene was equally seductive. The pleasure gardens and the country retreats of the rich extended for miles in every direction; beyond, to the south-west, lay the citadel of Golconda with the swelling hemispheres of the great Qutb Shahi tombs at its base. European merchants flocked there ‘and make great profits … the Kingdom may be said to be the Country of Diamonds’.
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One of these merchants was William Methwold, the English factor at the sultanate’s seaport of Masulipatam. On his first visit to Golconda he was astonished by what he saw, describing it as

After a prolonged rivalry between Golconda and Mughal Delhi, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb finally captured and sacked Hyderabad in 1687, stabling the horses of his cavalry in the Shi’ite mosques and
ashur khanas
(mourning halls) as a deliberate insult to the city’s Shi’a (and thus, in Aurangzeb’s orthodox Sunni eyes, heretical) establishment.
^ay
After this, the city underwent a temporary eclipse. The focus of the region moved to Aurangzeb’s new Mughal headquarters town at Aurangabad, and for eighty years Hyderabad was left a melancholy shadow of its former glory, with whole quarters of the city deserted and ruined. But on the accession of Nizam Ali Khan in 1762, Hyderabad was again made the capital of the region, and this time of a domain which now embraced a far wider slice of central and southern India than the old Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda had ever done.

Despite the intermittent warfare of the period, the city quickly began to recover its former wealth and splendour. The ruins of the Qutb Shahi palaces and public buildings were renovated and restored, the mosques rebuilt, the gardens replanted and, crucially, the city walls were strengthenedand patched up. By the 1790s Hyderabad, with a population of around a quarter of a million, was once again both a major centre of commerce and the unrivalled centre of the hybrid Indo-Muslim civilisation of the Deccan, the last link in a cultural chain stretching back to the foundation of the first Muslim sultanates in the region in the fourteenth century.

At Hyderabad’s centre stood the great Char Minar, a monumental gateway formed by a quadrant of arches rising to four domed minarets. The Char Minar marked the meeting of the city’s two principal bazaars, where the road from the craggy citadel of Golconda crossed with that coming from the great port of Masulipatam: ‘There are drugs here of all sorts,’ wrote one visitor, ‘every kind of spice, book, paper, ink, pens, gingham, cloth, silk fabrics and yarn of all colours, swords and bows, arrows and quivers, knives and scissors, spoons and forks, thimbles and dice, needles large and small, gems fine and false—in short, all that one may desire.’
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Here merchants and traders from all over the Middle East as well as from France, Holland, England and even China came to buy from the spice bazaar where mountains of cloves, pepper, ginger and cinnamon were all on display, the necks of hessian sacks rolled down to reveal shiny black carob sticks, lumpy ginger stems, aromatic slivers of sandalwood or small hillocks of bright orange turmeric. Other merchants came to Hyderabad to purchase silver and copper, the famous blades of its unrivalled ‘Damascus’ swords, exquisite gold brocades and
shatranji
(chessboard) carpets.

In the streets crowds of Persians and Arabs in flowing robes joined turbaned Mughals from Delhi and Lucknow, Portuguese horse-traders from Goa and parties of Dutch jewellers up from their base on the coast at Masulipatam. Together they explored the bazaars, testing the delicacies of the city’s famous confectioners or lingering before the fragrant stalls of the perfumers, where the scents and aromatic oils were mixed to suit the season, and their ingredients altered depending on the heat or the degree of humidity.
^az

Beyond stretched the shops of the filigree-dotted gold and silver merchants,which led in turn into the richest of all the bazaars: that of the jewellers and the diamond mart. The great Golconda diamond mines—from ancient times until the early eighteenth century the world’s sole supplier of these most coveted of all precious stones—were not yet exhausted, and the same seams that had produced the legendary Koh-i-Noor as well as the Hope and the Pitt diamonds were still active enough in 1785 for Nizam Ali Khan to send King George III the newly discovered 101-carat Hastings Diamond as a small diplomatic gift.
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Stones of that size were always rare, even in Hyderabad, but the heavily guarded workshops nevertheless groaned with lesser treasures: gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds, superbly inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers, champlevé scabbards and manuscripts of the Koran, their bindings inlaid with burnished gold and empurpled ebony. There were other more effete fopperies too: bejewelled and enamelled flywhisks, and
bazubands
(armbands) set with the Nine Auspicious Gems, including yellow topaz and the rarest chrysoberyl cats’ eyes.
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Palaces stretched off down the narrow sidestreets towards Mughalpura, Shah Gunj and Irani Gulli, some magnificent, but most plain on the street frontage, hiding their richly latticed treasures for those admitted within. Many were huge—‘some of them are three times the length of Burlington House’, reported one astonished British traveller
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—and contained within them wide expanses of garden, cool and quiet after the bustle of the streets. Throughout ran rippling runnels punctuated by slowly dribbling marble fountains and filled with ‘rows of mango trees, date-palms, coconuts, fig trees, bananas, oranges, citrons, with some yew trees … and very fine circular reservoirs. Around the reservoir are dotted pots of fragrant flowers’.
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Where there are the rich in India, there are always the poor too. The magnificent architecture of Hyderabad’s palaces and mosques created a façade of order and grandeur which hid the thieving, the sickness, the hunger and the pain that lay behind. On his arrival in the city several years earlier William Steuart had been very struck by its extremes of wealth and poverty—something that travellers in the Nizam’s dominions continued to notice right up until the middle of the twentieth century: ‘There is perhaps a stronger contrast of extravagant profusion & of wretchedness at this durbar than anywhere in India,’ Steuart wrote in 1790.

Leading out from behind the grand bazaars ran a warren of filthy lanes and unswept sidestreets—the preserve of the rats, the pickpockets and the lower sort of prostitute. Even the lane leading to the royal stabling yard was known as ‘Muthri Gulli’—Urinating Lane—and the road that led from the main gate of the palace was ‘fit for horse and carriage traffic only’.
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Along this route sat the beggars, the lepers, the lame, the halt and the blind. Maimed sepoys flanked landless peasants and the mentally ill, ejected from the Sufi shrines as unhealable and beyond the powers even of the city’s renowned exorcists. From the palace to the gates of the Mecca Masjid they sat in lines, crying for alms and raising their bandaged hands in supplication to passing palanquins, out of which, if they were lucky, might be thrown a small shower of silver annas.

For these people, as for the other Hyderabadis, there were the festivals. To one side of the Char Minar was the Maidan-i-Dilkusha, or Heart-Rejoicing Square, where on holidays such as
Id
and the Prophet’s birthday the ground would be swept clean and
bhistis
(water-carriers) sprinkle the warm earth with water. After this canopies and awnings would be raised and food provided free to the entire populace. Elaborate displays of fireworks would round off the evening.
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Nearby was the city’s renowned Dar ul-Shifa, or ‘house of healing’, a four-hundred-bed teaching hospital open to all for no charge and famous as one of the most sophisticated centres of yunani
^bb
and ayurvedic medicine. Beside it stood a wide garden, the Bagh i-Muhammed Shahi, specially planted with healing herbs and aromatic plants, as well as with flowers whose purifying and uplifting scent was believed to help the patients recover.
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There were other scents too, as well as the gardens, the whiff of spices from the bazaars and the darker smells emanating from Muthri Gulli. From nearby street stalls came the all-pervading smell of grilling kebabs, and another smell still more specific to Hyderabad: the scent of slowly-cooking
biryani
: ‘In truth,’ admitted a patriotic Delhi-wallah, abandoning for a moment his metropolitan Mughal hauteur, ‘no better dish is cooked anywhere throughout India.’
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One of General Raymond’s French officers found this smell particularlyirresistible: ‘There are dishes consisting of bread made
à la manteque
[
naan
], stew, and the liver of fowls and kids, very well dressed,’ he wrote, ‘[but most renowned of all is the] rice boiled with quantities of butter, fowls and kids, with all sorts of spicery … which we found to be very good, and which refreshed us greatly.’
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