White Mughals (35 page)

The two resulting newsletters—or
akhbars
—accused James not just of sleeping with Khair un-Nissa but of raping her, and of using his position to force her mother and grandfather to hand the girl over to him for his pleasure. Moreover, the
akhbar
included several titbits of gossip about James’s previous revelries in Hyderabad, including a long and complicated tale of how James had ‘debauched a brazier’s wife’, leaving the cuckolded husband to attempt to commit suicide at the most public place in Hyderabad, directly in front of the Char Minar. There was a kernel of truth behind the story: there was a brazier’s wife, and she had indeed attempted to take shelter from her abusive husband with her mother who worked in the Residency; but James had never seen her, and when the woman was called in front of the Hyderabad durbar, her far from attractive physical features were enough to convince the court of James’s complete innocence.
¹⁰⁹

There was however a much more serious charge contained in the newsletters. Sharaf un-Nissa’s brother, and Khair un-Nissa’s uncle, Mahmud Ali Khan had died soon after Mir Alam’s departure for Rydroog, after a gun he was playing with—part of the loot from Seringapatam—had exploded in his face.
¹¹⁰
Bâqar Ali Khan had testified that ‘the gun accidentally burst as he [Mahmud] discharged it … he retained his sense and talked until 9pm in the night and himself mentioned that this had happened in consequence of the trait which he had always had since his infancy of amusing himself with fireworks’.
¹¹¹
But according to the scurrilous newsletter, the story was much darker: the uncle had strongly opposed Khair un-Nissa’s relationship with James, and had been quietly assassinated on the Resident’s orders so as to remove the one remaining obstacle to him attaining his wicked ends. As James reported to William, the
akhbar
maintained ‘that I sent or hired people to despatch him as an obstacle to my views on his Niece, or as other [gossips] related it, that I presented him with the fatal weapon, from the extreme badness of which I foresaw all that actually followed’.
¹¹²

Beyond the central undeniable truth that James had been sleeping with Khair un-Nissa, none of these charges had any basis in fact; but they were sufficiently credible for Mir Alam—already angry with James for failing to take his side with Aristu Jah—to believe them. Once they had been published, according to the historian Ghulam Husain Khan’s contemporary account, the
Gulzar i-Asafiya,
‘Aristu Jah wrote all the details of this affair [in an anonymous letter] and sent it to Mir Alam at Krapa … So it was that he [Mir Alam] wrote to Calcutta to the Lord Bahadur [Wellesley] demanding that the scandalous behaviour of Hushmat Jang [Kirkpatrick] should be punished as it deserved, to be a warning to others. Mir Alam acted according to the suggestion, and wrote a fulminating letter demanding Hushmat Jang’s execution.’
¹¹³

Mir Alam had fallen straight into Aristu Jah’s trap. As Aristu Jah had guessed he would, Wellesley reacted to Mir Alam’s letter by writing immediately to the Nizam and Aristu Jah, demanding to know the truth about Mir Alam’s charges.

He sent the letter via James. On the morning of 7 March 1800, James received in the weekly
dak
(post) what was probably the single most terrifying missive he was ever to be sent by Wellesley. There were none of the pleasantries or compliments he was used to. Instead the letter was as abrupt as it was menacing. It simply instructed James that

At this point, according to the usually very reliable
Gulzar i-Asafiya,
Aristu Jah called in James. ‘After some cockfighting’ he made it clear how serious the charges were, pointed out that James’s fate rested in his hands, and outlined what James’s fate would be if he chose to corroborate Mir Alam’s charges.
¹¹⁵
Then he effectively offered to cut a deal. If James sacked Mir Alam as the Company’s
vakil
and was prepared to work with Aristu Jah for the best interests of Hyderabad, then in return the Minister would make sure that James’s name was completely cleared. He would personally persuade the Nizam to write to Wellesley, telling him that the charges were a malicious invention of Mir Alam. The dialogue put into James’s mouth in the
Gulzar i-Asfiya
is presumably invented, but the substance of the conversation has the clear ring of truth and tallies with all the other evidence:

How seriously can this evidence be taken? Did Aristu Jah really succeed in using Khair un-Nissa not only as a way of disposing of his increasingly dangerous rival Mir Alam, but also as a way of ‘turning’ Kirkpatrick? And what exactly did Kirkpatrick’s promise to
‘strive for the best interests of your government and obey all your orders’
actually entail? Was he really promising to betray his country and become some sort of double-agent—a late-eighteenth-century Philby, Burgess or Maclean? Or was he expressing a more general sympathy with—and affection for—Hyderabad, and saying that in gratitude for Aristu Jah’s intervention he would always be willing to help the Minister whenever he could?

With the evidence available, so long after the event, this question is now almost impossible to answer. Certainly James had always been sympathetic to Hyderabad, and became more so the longer he stayed in the town. He also grew increasingly outraged by what he believed to be the completely unacceptable threats and aggression used by Wellesley to put pressure not only on his Hyderabadi allies, but on several other independent Indian princes, to enter into ever more unequal treaties with the British. James was also appalled by Wellesley’s failure to honour his obligations in those treaties he had signed. It is difficult, however, to know now how much this was due to his own increasingly anti-Imperial political views and his longstanding fondness for Hyderabad, and how much to the fact that Aristu Jah now had a lever with which he could put pressure on James. For, by strenuously denying to the Governor General Mir Alam’s charges that he had raped Khair un-Nissa and murdered her uncle, James had been able to skate over the fact that there was a real basis to the scandal which underlay these stories, and that he had indeed been sleeping with Mir Alam’s teenage cousin. He had not told any blatant lies to the Governor General; but nor had he come completely clean. This was a grey area which left James extremely vulnerable, and open to further manipulation by the wily Minister.

The question as to the reliability of the evidence is easier to answer. On its own perhaps the
Gulzar
would not necessarily carry much weight, though it is in general an unusually accurate and well-informed record of the period. But the same story is repeated in two other independent Hyderabadi histories—the
Tarikh i-Asaf Jahi
and the slightly later
Tarikh i-Nizam
¹¹⁷
—as well as in an investigation into the affair commissioned by the Residency after James’s death, which concluded that he had ‘ingratiated himself into the good graces of Aristu Jah, and by promising to stand by him in all his straits he succeeded in the fulfilment of his desires’.
¹¹⁸

Much more importantly, Mir Alam himself clearly believed that Aristu Jah had succeeded in blackmailing James, and that together the two had conspired to ruin him. Certainly he told this story to Arthur Wellesley six months later, in September 1800. The Mir had just been released from imprisonment but was still in deep disgrace, and had been banned from returning to the city of Hyderabad. Arthur Wellesley wrote immediately to his brother the Governor General to pass on what Mir Alam had told him, and his evidence is important as it is the earliest and most direct version of the story which later appears in a much fuller version in the
Gulzar.

It is unclear if Arthur Wellesley ever met James; but it is quite apparent in his writings that he actively disliked William Kirkpatrick, whom he did know, and nothing he had heard about James did anything to alter his decided prejudice against both Kirkpatrick brothers. Moreover, he had come to rather admire the efficient, intelligent and unemotional Mir Alam, with whom he had worked closely during the campaign against Tipu. So when Mir Alam and his followers, newly released from captivity and heading into internal exile, fortuitously bumped into the future Duke of Wellington and his regiment in the middle of rural Karnataka in September 1800, Arthur was quite prepared to give the Mir’s version of events the benefit of the doubt.

On 21 September, the day after their chance meeting, Mir Alam laid on a nautch performance for Wellesley and his officers in a garden close to the fort of Koppal, just to the north-west of the ruins of the great Hindu capital of Vijayanagar (modern Hampi). ‘During the noise of the nautch,’ Arthur wrote in a memorandum which he sent Lord Wellesley in an official despatch written a few days later, ‘Meer Allum took the opportunity of entering into conversation with Col W[ellesley—i.e. himself] regarding his exile and disgrace. He began by saying that the fountain of justice no longer flowed towards him; that it was stopped by William Kirkpatrick in Bengal and his brother at Hyderabad, and that he depended solely on Col W for a representation of his case to the Governor-General.’
¹¹⁹

Mir Alam then told the whole story to Arthur: how Aristu Jah had long wanted to have him disgraced, but finally succeeded in his object by using Kirkpatrick; how Kirkpatrick had wickedly seduced Khair un-Nissa; how Aristu Jah ‘had known of the affair from its commencement’, and tried to put the family of Ahmed Ali Khan off the idea of their son marrying Khair un-Nissa; how at first no one had dared to tell him—Mir Alam—about the developments; and how he, having at length been informed of the disgraceful behaviour of Kirkpatrick, wrote at once to the Governor General telling him what had happened; but that the Governor General—not knowing Aristu Jah’s close involvement with the affair—

All the other Hyderabadi accounts that refer to Kirkpatrick’s use of Hyderabadi clothes and customs speak of how much the people of the city were pleased and even flattered by his fondness for their culture, but on this occasion the Mir