White Mughals (28 page)

Two years earlier, while Aristu Jah was still in captivity in Pune and Mir Alam had taken over the management of the Nizam’s British affairs, the Mir had appointed as
bakshi
or paymaster of the British detachment in Hyderabad an elderly Persian cousin of his. This was Bâqar Ali Khan, titled Akil ud-Daula, the Wisest of the State. The old man was a little deaf and short-sighted, but a good-natured and jovial figure who quickly became popular with the British officers in Hyderabad. William Kirkpatrick and he had become great friends, and before he left Hyderabad William had written a pen portrait of him to a friend in Masulipatam:

Bâqar Ali Khan had one daughter, a young widow named Sharaf un-Nissa, who had—unusually—returned to the family
deorhi
with her two teenage daughters after the death of her husband Mehdi Yar Khan.
¹⁰²
Like her father, Sharaf un-Nissa appears to have been very well disposed towards the British, and used to invite the wives of the Company officers to visit her in her
zenana.
They in turn reported that she was ‘unusually free of the prejudices of her sect’.
¹⁰³

Although Bâqar Ali was only the maternal grandfather of Sharaf un-Nissa’s two daughters, and so under no legal obligation to be responsible for them, the old man had generously taken upon himself the business of arranging his granddaughters’ marriages: as always an expensive business in India.
^by
By the end of 1798 Bâqar Ali Khan had negotiated marriages for both girls with members of the Hyderabad nobility, and the wedding ceremony of the elder of the two, Nazir un-Nissa, was celebrated sometime in December. James attended the marriage party.

His own account of it is very brief and gives little away. Indeed he only mentions it to William in an aside when he writes that Bâqar’s wife, Durdanah Begum, had asked for a loan to help meet the expense of the wedding, and that, in view of the family’s loyalty to the British, James had ‘sent the sum requested as a
loan
, as a marriage portion for the Begum’s granddaughter—say, did I do wrong?’
¹⁰⁴

But James almost certainly had other things in his mind when he arrived at the celebrations. For, according to Sharaf un-Nissa, he had already heard about the extraordinary beauty of her newly betrothed younger daughter, Khair un-Nissa, from one of the Company officers’ wives who had met her in her mother’s
zenana
. Forty years later, as an old woman of eighty, Sharaf un-Nissa remembered that

Only one contemporary picture of Khair un-Nissa survives, and it dates from 1806, a full eight years after the entertainment Bâqar Ali Khan gave for Colonel Dallas. Yet even then, when she was aged about twenty, Khair un-Nissa still looks little more than a child: a graceful, delicate, shy creature, with porcelain skin, an oval face and wide-open, dark brown eyes. Her eyebrows are long and curved, and she has a full, timidly expressive mouth that is about to break into a smile; just below it, there lies the tiny blemish that is the mark of real beauty: a tiny red freckle, slightly off-centre, immediately above the point of her chin. Yet there is a strength amid the look of overwhelming innocence, a wilfulness in the set of the lips and the darkness of the eyes that might be interpreted as defiance in a less serene face.

A later Hyderabadi source reveals that it was at the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa that Khair un-Nissa first saw James Kirkpatrick, from behind a curtain:

 

 

The ancient Persian town of Shushtar lies on the borders of modern-day Iran and Iraq, in the badlands to the far south-west of the country. Flanked on one side by the marshes leading down to the River Tigris and on the other by the dry and rocky Zagros mountains, Shushtar clings to the edge of a narrow plateau, just below the confluence of the Karun River with one of its tributaries.

The town was of great importance during the classical period. The Roman Emperor Valerian, enslaved by the Persian Emperor Shahpur I after being defeated in AD 260, spent the rest of his life in captivity in Shushtar, labouring at the construction of a colossal dam. The dam still stands; but the region has been in decline since then, and its once-rich agricultural land has long been exhausted. Yet for all its poverty, Shushtar somehow managed to retain its high culture. For generations the town exported its highly educated clan of black-turbaned Sayyids across the Shi’ite world, from Kerbala to Lucknow and Hyderabad. They distinguished themselves by their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, yunani medicine and Shi’a jurisprudence, as well as other more obscure forms of esoteric learning. They were also renowned for their talents as poets and calligraphers.
¹

Around 1730, Sayyid Reza, a young Shushtari
mujtahid
^bz
left Shushtar to seek his fortune in the Mughal Empire. The road east was a well-worn route: the mosque in Shushtar, one of the oldest in Persia, dating back to AD 868, was constructed in shisham wood brought from India by medieval Shushtari traders. In the centuries following those first trading contacts, generations of Persians had been welcomed to the various Muslim courts of India, where they were honoured as bearers of high culture and inheritors of a sublime literary tradition.
^ca

Following in the footsteps of this long succession of émigré Persian scholars, soldiers and confidence tricksters, Sayyid Reza found his way to Delhi. There he took service in the household of the Prime Minister of the Mughal Emperor, another Persian exile named Abul Mansur Khan Khorasani, who later took the title Safdar Jung, and whose magnificent tomb is the last great Mughal monument in Delhi.

For two decades Sayyid Reza worked in the palaces of the Mughal capital; but as the Empire began to shatter and fragment under a succession of incompetent emperors, and as Delhi slowly descended into chaos, Sayyid Reza decided to return home to Shushtar. Because the land route by Kabul and Kandahar was blocked by fighting, he made the decision to head south to the Deccan, from where he hoped to catch a ship up the Gulf to Persia. But by chance, in Hyderabad, he met Nizam ul-Mulk, the father of Nizam Ali Khan. The Nizam was impressed by Sayyid Reza’s learning and integrity, and persuaded him to stay on in India under his patronage. Sayyid Reza settled in Hyderabad, in Irani Gulli, a small colony of Persian exiles not far from the Char Minar, tucked in behind the narrow lanes of the Burkha Bazaar. There his wife gave birth to a son, Abul Qasim, known to history by his later title, Mir Alam.

In his old age Sayyid Reza gave up worldly attachments and dedicated his life to prayer and fasting. According to his nephew, the old man ‘refused all public office: however much Nizam ul-Mulk urged him to accept a position in the Hyderabad government, even the post of Chief Judge, he turned the offer down. Some fifteen or sixteen years before his death, the desire for retreat became dominant in his character, and he increasingly cut himself off from other people. He spent his days alone in his prayer room, donned an ascetic’s cloak and spent his life in worship, seeking the True God.’
²
He died in 1780, and was buried in the sanctified burial ground of Daira Mir Momin, beside the tomb of the great Shi’a saint Shah Chirag.

It was during the forty days of mourning for Sayyid Reza that the young Mir Alam met Aristu Jah for the first time. Aristu Jah was already in his fifties and the most powerful official in Hyderabad; Mir Alam was in his late twenties, the penniless but talented son of a respected divine. The Minister had come in person on the third day of mourning to attend the
soyem
ceremony at the house of Sayyid Reza, and when he took the young man aside and confirmed him in possession of his father’s estates, Mir Alam replied with a fine Persian couplet praising the wisdom of the Minister. Aristu Jah, who had both a discerning eye for talent and a great love of poetry, realised that Mir Alam was a youth of unusual promise, and invited him to attend his durbar. Before long, he had appointed him his Private Secretary, and given him the job of preparing his correspondence and journals.
³

Physically, Mir Alam was a slight youth, and seemed especially so when he stood beside Aristu Jah, whose remarkable height and bulk emphasised his new Secretary’s lean and wiry build. Mir Alam had a serious, intelligent face, with a long, straight nose and a thin, finely waxed moustache. His complexion was strikingly fair, a legacy of his Persian ancestry; but it was his watchful, alert expression that people always remarked upon. It was as if he were constantly vigilant, awake for an opening or an opportunity, and few Europeans who met him failed to come to the conclusion that here was an unusually clever and ambitious young man. James Kirkpatrick was very struck by him on their first meeting, and wrote to Wellesley that ‘as a scholar he stands unrivalled, and as a man of business he would have few equals … his stile is remarkable for its strength and perspicuity, as well as elegance, and his pen is consequently always employed when state papers requiring extraordinary care and attention are called for’.
⁴

Muslim chroniclers, by contrast, singled out Mir Alam’s qualities of
ferasat,
which is sometimes translated as intuition but which has far greater resonance in the Persian, referring to that highly developed sensitivity to body language that almost amounts to mind-reading, and which was regarded as an essential quality for a Muslim courtier. It is still an admired feature in the social and political life of the Muslim East.
⁵

Despite Mir Alam’s intuition, intelligence and abilities, however, there always seemed to be a strange absence of feeling in the man, as if there were a chilling numbness somewhere in his heart. As the Mir grew older and increasingly powerful, this potential for callousness became more marked. James’s Assistant Henry Russell, who later got to know him well, had no doubts about the Mir’s qualities, writing of his ‘extraordinary capabilities’. But he was also under no illusions about his unusual ruthlessness, describing him as ‘utterly deficient in qualities of the heart’, and ‘strangely without emotions … He neither remembers his obligations, nor forgets his adversaries. Though he always craves to be popular and expects gratitude from others, he is devoid of any sympathy or compassion towards his fellow beings, be it individually, or collectively.’
⁶

Mir Alam was, nevertheless, a generous patron to his friends and family, and when the news of his growing power and success in Hyderabad reached his relations in Shushtar, several of them decided to emigrate from Iran to Hyderabad and seek service there on his staff. Among these was his first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan, the son of Sayyid Reza’s elder sister, who was around twenty years older than Mir Alam. Bâqar Ali was generously received by Mir Alam, made a
mansabdar,
^cb
and married to a Hyderabadi beauty named Durdanah Begum, the daughter of one of the city’s most powerful families.
⁷
In due course two children were born of the marriage, a boy, Mahmud Ali Khan, and a girl, Sharaf un-Nissa, the mother of Khair un-Nissa.