White Mughals (4 page)

David Godwin and Giles Gordon both worked incredibly hard in pushing this book forward. For their energy and enthusiasm many, many thanks. My different publishers have all been full of good advice—Robert Lacey, Helen Ellis, Arabella Pike and Aisha Rahman at HarperCollins; Ray Roberts and Paul Slovak at Penguin Putnam; David Davidar at Penguin India; Paolo Zaninoni at Rizzoli. Most of all I would like to thank Michael Fishwick, who has been as frank, funny, generous and wise in his guidance with this, our fifth book together, as he was with our first,
In Xanadu,
which he took on some sixteen years ago now.

Olivia has, I think, found living in a
ménage à trois
with Khair un-Nissa a little more trying than she did previous cohabitations with Byzantine ascetics, taxi-stands full of Sikh drivers and the courtiers of Kubla Khan, but she has borne the five-year-long ordeal with characteristic gentleness and generosity. To her—and to Ibby, Sam and Adam—a million thanks and much, much love yet again.

I would like to dedicate this book to Sam and Shireen Vakil Miller for their constant affection and friendship, first in Delhi and then in London, over the course of more than a decade; and to Bruce Wannell whose incredibly wide-ranging scholarship and wonderful translations from the Persian have done more than anything else to make this book quite as unfeasibly long as it is.

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Page’s Yard, 1 July 2002

The British Residency complex that James Achilles Kirkpatrick built in Hyderabad, now the Osmania Women’s College, is recognised as one of the most important colonial buildings in India, but its fabric is in very bad shape and it was recently placed on the World Monuments Fund’s list of One Hundred Most Endangered Buildings. A non-profit-making trust has now been set up to fund conservation efforts. Anyone who would like more information, or to make a donation, should contact Friends of Osmania Women’s College, India, Inc., a tax-exempt 501(c)3 not-for-profit organisation aimed at restoring the Osmania/British Residency buildings and site:

I first heard about James Achilles Kirkpatrick on a visit to Hyderabad in February 1997.

It was the middle of Muharram, the Shi’a festival commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet. I had just finished a book on the monasteries of the Middle East, four years’ work, and was burnt out. I came to Hyderabad to get away from my desk and my overflowing bookshelves, to relax, to go off on a whim, to travel aimlessly again.

It was spring. The stones of the mosques were warm underfoot, and I wandered through the shrines of the old city, filled now with black-robed Muharram mourners reciting sinuous Urdu laments for the tragedy of Kerbala. It was as if Hussain had been killed a week earlier, not in the late seventh century AD. This was the sort of Indian city I loved.

It was, moreover, a relatively unexplored and unwritten place, at least in English; and a secretive one too. Unlike the immediate, monumental splendour of Agra or the Rajput city states of the north, Hyderabad hid its charms from the eyes of outsiders, veiling its splendours from curious eyes behind nondescript walls and labyrinthine backstreets. Only slowly did it allow you in to an enclosed world where water still dripped from fountains, flowers bent in the breeze, and peacocks called from the overladen mango trees. There, hidden from the streets, was a world of timelessness and calm, a last bastion of gently fading Indo-Islamic civilisation where, as one art historian has put it, old ‘Hyderabadi gentlemen still wore the fez, dreamt about the rose and the nightingale, and mourned the loss of Grenada’.
¹

From the old city, I drove out to see the craggy citadel of Golconda. For six hundred years Golconda was the storehouse of the apparently ceaseless stream of diamonds that emerged from the mines of the region, the only known source of these most precious of stones until the discovery of the New World mines in the eighteenth century. Inside the walls you passed a succession of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens. When the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited Golconda in 1642 he found a society every bit as wealthy and effete as this architecture might suggest. He wrote that the town possessed more than twenty thousand registered courtesans, who took it in turns to dance for the Sultan every Friday.

This richly romantic and courtly atmosphere had, I soon discovered, infected even the sober British when they arrived in Hyderabad at the end of the eighteenth century. The old British Residency, now the Osmania University College for Women, was a vast Palladian villa, in plan not unlike its exact contemporary, the White House in Washington. It was one of the most perfect buildings ever erected by the East India Company, and lay in a massive fortified garden just over the River Musi from the old city.

The complex, I was told, was built by Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident—effectively Ambassador—at the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805. Kirkpatrick had apparently adopted Hyderabadi clothes and Hyderabadi ways of living. Shortly after arriving in the town, so the story went, he fell in love with the great-niece of the
diwan
(Prime Minister) of Hyderabad. He married Khair un-Nissa—which means ‘Most Excellent Among Women’—in 1800, according to Muslim law.

Inside the old Residency building, I found plaster falling in chunks the size of palanquins from the ceiling of the former ballroom and durbar hall. Upstairs the old bedrooms were badly decayed. They were now empty and deserted, frequented only by bats and the occasional pair of amorous pigeons; downstairs the elegant oval saloons were partitioned by hardboard divides into tatty cubicles for the college administrators. As the central block of the house was deemed too dangerous for the students, most of the classes now took place in the old elephant stables at the back.

Even in this state of semi-ruination it was easy to see how magnificent the Residency had once been. It had a grand, domed semi-circular bay on the south front, reached through a great triumphal arch facing the bridge over the Musi. On the north front a pair of British lions lay, paws extended, below a huge pedimented and colonnaded front. They looked out over a wide expanse of eucalyptus, mulsarry and casuarina trees, every inch the East India Company at its grandest and most formal. Yet surprises lurked in the undergrowth at the rear of the compound.

Here I was shown a battered token of Kirkpatrick’s love for his wife in the garden at the back of the Residency. The tale—apocryphal, I presumed, but charming nonetheless—went as follows: that as Khair un-Nissa remained all her life in strict purdah, living in a separate
bibi-ghar
(literally ‘women’s house’) at the end of Kirkpatrick’s garden, she was unable to walk around the side of her husband’s great creation to admire its wonderful portico. Eventually the Resident hit upon a solution and built a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace for her so that she could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with her own eyes. Whatever the truth of the story, the model had survived intact until the 1980s when a tree fell on it, smashing the right wing. The remains of the left wing and central block lay under a piece of corrugated iron, near the ruins of the Mughal
bibi-ghar,
buried deep beneath a jungle of vines and creepers in the area still known as the Begum’s Garden. I thought it was the most lovely story, and by the time I left the garden I was captivated, and wanted to know more. The whole tale simply seemed so different from—and so much more romantic than—what one expected of the British in India, and I spent the rest of my time in Hyderabad pursuing anyone who could tell me more about Kirkpatrick.

I did not have to look far. Dr Zeb un-Nissa Haidar was an elderly Persian scholar who taught her veiled women students in one of the less ruinous wings of the old Residency. Dr Zeb explained that she was a descendant of Rukn ud-Daula, a Hyderabadi Prime Minister of the period. She said she was familiar not only with the outlines of the story but with many of the contemporary Persian and Urdu sources which mentioned it.

According to Dr Zeb, these Hyderabadi sources were explicit about the fact that Kirkpatrick had converted to Islam to marry his bride. They also mentioned that despite the scandal Kirkpatrick had been very popular in Hyderabad, mixing freely with the people, and taking on the manners of the city. Dr Zeb remembered one sentence in particular from a history called the
Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi:
‘by an excess of the company of the ladies of the country he was very familiar with the style and behaviour of Hyderabad and adopted it himself’. Several of the Persian sources also hinted that, by the end, Kirkpatrick’s political allegiances had lain as much with the Nizam, or ruler, of Hyderabad as with the British. None of these sources had ever been translated into English, and so were virgin territory for those unfamiliar with either nineteenth-century Deccani Urdu or the heavily Indianised Persian that the manuscripts were written in—which meant virtually everyone bar a handful of elderly Hyderabadi Islamic scholars.

One night I visited the tomb of Kirkpatrick’s great rival, General Michel Joachim Raymond. Raymond was a Republican French mercenary in the service of the Nizam who had, like Kirkpatrick, adopted the ways of Hyderabad. Just as Kirkpatrick’s job was to try to ease the Hyderabadis towards the British, Raymond had tried to persuade the Nizam to ally with the French. After his death, he was buried next to an obelisk, under a small classical Greek temple on the hilltop above the French cantonments beyond the city, at Malakhpet.

While Raymond had definitely abandoned Christianity—something that seemed to be confirmed by the absence of any Christian references or imagery on his tomb—his Hyderabadi admirers were uncertain whether he had turned Hindu or Muslim. His Hindu sepoys Sanskritised the name Monsieur Raymond to Musa Ram, while his Muslims knew him as Musa Rahim, Rahim being the personification of the merciful aspect of Allah. The Nizam, who was as uncertain as everyone else, decided to mark the anniversary of Raymond’s death on 25 March in a religiously neutral way by sending to his monument a box of cheroots and a bottle of beer. The custom had apparently survived until the last Nizam left for Australia after Independence; but as I happened to be in Hyderabad on the date of his anniversary I was intrigued to see if any memory of Raymond had survived.

Raymond’s monument was originally built on a deserted mountaintop several miles outside the walls of Hyderabad. But the recent rapid growth that has turned Hyderabad into India’s fourth-largest city has encroached all around the site, so that only the very top of the hill around the monument is now empty of new bungalows and housing estates. I left my taxi at the roadhead and climbed up towards the temple. It was clearly silhouetted against the sulphur-red of the city’s night sky. As I walked I saw shadows flitting between the pillars, vague shapes which resolved themselves as I drew closer into the figures of devotees lighting clay lamps at the shrine at the back of the temple. Maybe the figures saw me coming; whatever the reason, they had vanished by the time I reached the monument, leaving their offerings behind on the tomb: a few coconuts, some incense sticks, some strings of garlands and a few small pyramids of sweet white
prasad.

Back in London, I searched around for more about Kirkpatrick. A couple of books on Raj architecture contained a passing reference to his Residency and the existence of his Begum, but there was little detail, and what there was seemed to derive from an 1893 article in
Blackwood’s Magazine,
‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, written by Kirkpatrick’s kinsman Edward Strachey.
²

My first real break came when I found that Kirkpatrick’s correspondence with his brother William, preserved by the latter’s descendants the Strachey family, had recently been bought by the India Office Library.
^a
There were piles of letter books inscribed ‘From my brother James Achilles Kirkpatrick’ (the paper within all polished and frail with age), great gilt leather-bound volumes of official correspondence with the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, bundles of Persian manuscripts, some boxes of receipts and, in a big buff envelope, a will—exactly the sort of random yet detailed detritus of everyday lives that biographers dream of turning up.

At first, however, many of the letters seemed disappointingly mundane: gossip about court politics, requests for information from Calcutta, the occasional plea for a crate of Madeira or the sort of vegetables Kirkpatrick found unavailable in the Hyderabad bazaars, such as—surprisingly—potatoes and peas. This was interesting enough, but initially seemed relatively unremarkable, and I found maddeningly few references either to Kirkpatrick’s religious feelings or to his personal affairs. Moreover, much of the more interesting material was in cipher. No sooner did Kirkpatrick begin to talk about his amorous adventures, or the espionage network he was involved in setting up, than the clear and steady penmanship would dissolve into long lines of incomprehensible numbers.