White Mughals (38 page)

The following month, around the time of the wedding of Sikander Jah, James’s own health had begun to fail, yet at this vital moment Leith was unable to assist in any way. James wrote: ‘I have been tormented for this week past to an unusual degree with bile which has at length brought on a fever and ague which I am at this moment suffering under. Pray heavens that the physic which Ure has just given me may afford me some relief! For I plainly see that it will be a
long time
indeed ‘ere my present assistant [Leith] gives me any. He is slow beyond anything I had conception of … He is almost deaf and blind, and upon the plea of candlelight burning his eyes, has requested me to excuse his attendance at the durbar … ’
²⁵

Over the course of the year, as the treaty negotiations wound their interminable way through successive drafts, proposals and counter-proposals, Leith disappeared from his office for weeks at a time on a variety of excuses: ‘I am almost at my wits end with this strange assistant of Malcolm’s recommendation,’ James wrote in February. ‘I have not set eyes upon him for this last fortnight, he being laid up with worms in his feet, and in a deep salivation in consequence of attempting to kill them with mercury. If ever his finger aches he fancies himself terribly out of order and declares his incapacity to attend the office; though from the specimens [of his work] he has hitherto given, I can’t say I suffer much inconvenience from his absence. I am obliged as hitherto to attend to, and to carry, all the detail [i.e. humdrum] business of the Residency, which the assistant surely ought to ease his principal of. Ure says Leith is constantly whimsical and hypochondriacally inclined.’
²⁶
Captain Leith finally took fright at the danger Hyderabad posed to his delicate health and fled back to his regiment in Madras later in the year.
²⁷

This left James to deal with the entire business of the treaty negotiation with only his highly intelligent and wily Delhi-born
munshi,
Aziz Ullah, to help him.
²⁸
In order to lure the Hyderabadis into a closer embrace with the Company, James and Aziz Ullah were forced to use every stratagem they could think of, and Aziz Ullah spent many hours at Aristu Jah’s
deorhi
trying to find ways of making the Minister more pliable. Day after day he would go to sit with him smoking a hookah in the summerhouse of the Minister’s garden, or to fly pigeons, or to watch cockfights; on one occasion the grave
munshi
even reported in his official record of a meeting that Aristu Jah had invited him to continue their discourse in his personal
hamam
(Turkish bath), where they could talk without being overheard.
²⁹

On Aziz Ullah’s advice, James tried buttering up Aristu Jah by sending to Madras for ‘a curious piece or two of mechanism in the clock work way’ which he believed ‘will go a great way to clinching the treaty now brought on the carpet.’
³⁰
The Nizam was likewise deluged with presents, including a new set of winter woollies to keep him from the worst of the December cold.
³¹
James also spent huge sums bribing both Aristu Jah and the women in the Nizam’s
zenana,
writing to William in code that he had promised Aristu Jah a pension of one thousand rupees a month if he could get the Nizam to agree to the treaty, and remarking that the ‘citadel of negotiation’ might yet be taken ‘by a well directed fire of gold shot’.
³²

Later, when William asked for details, James wrote—again in code—revealing exactly how he went about the difficult art of bribing the Prime Minister:

The Subsidiary Treaty of 1800, dubbed ‘The Perpetual Alliance’, was finally signed on 12 October after nearly a year of negotiations. The Company agreed to increase the British forces in Hyderabad by an additional two thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry, in return for which the Nizam handed over to the British the Mysore provinces he had won after the fall of Seringapatam eighteen months earlier—provinces that were of course worth a huge multiple of the actual cost of maintaining a few thousand sepoys.

Diplomatically, it was another triumph, and Wellesley wrote to congratulate James in fulsome terms; indeed when the Governor General had his portrait painted by Robert Home the following year he asked to have himself depicted with his hand resting on the Subsidiary Treaty, as if he regarded it as his greatest achievement to date in India.
³⁴
The Nizam also seemed pleased, and gave James the title ‘Beloved Son’ as well as an enormous gem attached to a gold ring. ‘Solomon [Aristu Jah] for some time past had dropped obscure hints to Munshi Uzeez Oollah of having something in store for me,’ wrote James on the day the treaty was signed,

Nevertheless, the whole affair left a nasty taste in Kirkpatrick’s mouth. He was particularly disgusted by the degree to which he had had to bully and bribe the durbar to get his way, and he had more than a sneaking suspicion that the treaty was not at all in the best interests of Hyderabad. To his friend General William Palmer in Pune he wrote in full agreement with the latter’s view that the Company was becoming dangerously grasping and over-confident.
³⁶
When he finally wrote to his brother to tell him of the imminently successful result, the letter contained no hint of triumph. Instead he revealed his growing unease at the ruthlessness with which Wellesley had pursued his objects, telling William that Aristu Jah had told Munshi Aziz Ullah ‘that our avidity had no bounds, that we required everything while we would concede nothing and that we seemed determined in short, to have everything our own way’. He added as a P.S.: ‘My mind is just now in too perturbed a state to answer the private matter contained in your letter, even if I had time to do so.’ Instead he simply asked his brother ‘whether I ought not in justice to myself and to the public to request permission to resign the station’.
³⁷

This ‘private matter’ over which he was considering resignation was, of course, Khair un-Nissa.

The affair was now a continual source of pain and worry to James. In May, the growing unrest in Hyderabad over rumours about his seduction of a Sayyida had surfaced dramatically when, on his usual early-morning ride along the banks of the River Musi, James was ambushed: ‘I had a narrow escape from being shot, having been twice fired at by two sepoys of the old French Party, within twenty yards,’ he reported to William the following day. ‘One of the balls passed very near to my head. I had some difficulty suppressing the indignation of the troopers who attend me; but the offenders were sent bound to me soon after by Solomon, with a request that I would hang them up. I contented myself however (after asking if they had been sent by anyone, which they positively denied) with cautioning them against ball firing in future, except against enemies of the state.’
³⁸
Hyderabad gossip, of course, immediately linked the shooting to the growing disquiet caused by James’s affair.

But it was not the gossip and signs of anger in the old city that really worried James. He knew now that Khair un-Nissa was pregnant. He also knew that her family were trying to force her into aborting their child.

Little is known about abortion in India and the Islamic world at this time, but the practice was clearly widespread. Islamic jurists had ruled early on that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy was not
haraam
(forbidden); indeed they laid down that it was permissible, in exceptional medical circumstances connected with the health of the mother, up to the fourth month, at which point the foetus was deemed to have become fully ‘ensouled’, and so a human being. Niccolao Manucci, who attended Aurangzeb’s Imperial Mughal harem in Delhi, asserts that abortions were common there, and medieval Islamic texts are full of unusual suggestions for herbs and medicines that either prevented conception or aborted any foetus that might accidentally be conceived.

Birth-control methods varied widely around the Islamic world, and there are a great number of texts suggesting a variety of techniques, ranging from
coitus interruptus
to more bizarre solutions such as suppositories containing rennet of rabbit, ‘broth of wall flower and honey’ and ‘leaves of weeping willow in a flock of wool’ (a popular option in early medieval Persia). But birth control was not just the woman’s business: male contraceptive techniques included ‘drinking juice of watermint at coitus’, rubbing the juice of an onion or a solution of rock salt onto the end of the penis, or, more alarmingly, smearing the entire penis with tar.
^do
Other mysterious solutions to the problems of Islamic family planning included ‘fumigation with elephant’s dung’ and, stranger still, ‘jumping backwards’.
^dp

Much less is known about the always sensitive subject of abortion, but the great medical authority Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), writing in early-eleventh-century Bokhara, suggested the following methods in his
Canon of Medicine
, all of which sound fairly unpleasant, as well as being (one would have thought) notably risky for the mother’s health:

Other widely-used abortifacients in the medieval Islamic world included drinking potions of ‘myrrh in lupine water, pepper, laurel seeds, cinnamon, madder, juice of absinthe, cardomum, water mint, roots of sweet basil, candy carrot and luffa seeds in vinegar’, which methods could be combined with rubbing the navel with the gallbladder of a cow, fumigation with roots of cyclamen and the use of suppositories containing roots of wild carrot and ‘the juice of squirting cucumber’.

It is not known what methods late-Mughal midwives favoured, still less what were those common in Hyderabad, but the midwives concerned, the family and Kirkpatrick all clearly regarded the act as well within their competence. Just as Indian women were regarded throughout the Middle East as being especially sophisticated in the arts of love, so they were believed to be especially skilled in the art of preventing pregnancy, and if all else failed, in assisting at births.
³⁹

Abortion was nevertheless a dangerous operation, and apart from wishing to keep the child, Khair un-Nissa must have been alarmed at the sheer risk involved in undergoing a termination: after all, her half-sister had died only a few months before, in March 1800, after going through a presumably much less dangerous operation to help her conceive.
⁴⁰

Not surprisingly, this unpleasant saga was not something James felt able to confide to his brother. Indeed he always tried to tell William as little as possible about his Hyderabadi lover, and even avoided revealing to him that she was pregnant—but a brief reference was made to the abortion attempt in the Clive Report, when Colonel Bowser testified that Kirkpatrick had personally told him that