White Mughals (42 page)

This time, as Dr Kennedy stepped back, he found that as well as the eavesdropping boy-servant of Bâqar Ali, his conversation had also been listened to by ‘a servant of the Resident’ who had clearly tailed him to Bâqar Ali’s
deorhi
and somehow slipped in at the same time as his palanquin. The two eavesdroppers had, wrote Kennedy, ‘heard all that had passed’.

For Bâqar Ali Khan, this was in every way the worst possible outcome, a total collapse, a complete humiliation. He had been outwitted and completely outmanoeuvred by his womenfolk. They had taken matters into their own hands, and not only had they successfully opposed a marriage alliance he had forced upon them and to which his granddaughter had expressed an ‘unequivocal aversion’, he had been fooled by them into thinking that they were planning to turn fakir, and so had successfully protected themselves from his wrath. By themselves sending threatening messages to Bâqar Ali which purported to come from James, and by inventing a series of intimidating visits from the
aseels
of the Prime Minister’s
zenana,
the women had hoped to induce Bâqar Ali to back down quietly and to hand Khair un-Nissa over to James without a struggle. That plan had gone wrong, and Bâqar Ali had instead taken the complaint to his British friends in the Subsidiary Force; but though their various tricks had now been exposed, the women still ended by getting their way.

Two days later, on the morning of 1 January 1801, Sharaf un-Nissa and her mother, Durdanah Begum, were summoned to Aristu Jah’s
deorhi.
There they were asked to confirm what they had told Dr Kennedy. They did so, and were warned that they had behaved disgracefully, even if Bâqar had drawn a sword on them and they had been forced to invent these stories to save their lives. But the Minister’s real wrath was reserved for Bâqar Ali. He told James’s
munshi
, Aziz Ullah, that Bâqar had been given the wrong title—instead of Akil ud-Daula, ‘The Wisest of the State’, he should be renamed Ahmuk ud-Daula, ‘The State Fool’—and that the old man should be banished or imprisoned. Aziz Ullah replied that Bâqar’s public humiliation was probably more than punishment enough.
⁷⁴

That same day, at three in the afternoon, a grave and embarrassed Bâqar Ali appeared at the Residency and asked to see James. He apologised for falsely accusing him of issuing secret threats, and said it was clear that he could no longer stand in James’s way. As long as Khair un-Nissa’s paternal uncle, Mir Asadullah, also gave his assent, as the law required, he withdrew all his objections to James marrying his granddaughter if he still wished to do so; but he was not prepared to attend the
nikah
(marriage ceremony) in person. Instead, ‘with a view of not being a witness to the ceremony he would quit the city and take up his abode 10 or 12 coss
^dx
from it; but that he would leave his seal in the house and that they might execute what they pleased in his name and apply his seal to it’. With that he set off north in a
dhoolie
or covered litter, towards where his cousin Mir Alam was still temporarily encamped. James later wrote that he believed the old man was ‘more to be pitied than blamed’ for the confusion, adding that he was ‘defective in sight and hard of hearing [so] the females might [easily] have succeeded in deceiving him’.
⁷⁵

Two men had stood between Khair un-Nissa and James: one of these two, Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple, was now dead, while the other, Bâqar Ali, had formally withdrawn his objections. But there was still one further obstacle to James’s marriage. For all that he wore Hyderabadi clothes and had embraced Hyderabadi customs, and indeed for all that he was widely believed in Hyderabad to be a Muslim, he was nonetheless still technically a Christian, and so strictly forbidden by Sharia law from marrying a Muslim woman. There was only one way around this: he had to be circumcised, and then formally to convert to Islam.

According to a later report prepared by a Residency
munshi
after consulting with Khair un-Nissa’s family, ‘As a marriage was impossible without professing Islam he [James] promised to embrace that faith at the time of marriage … Hashmat Jang [therefore] secretly embraced Islam before a Shi’a
Mujtahid
[cleric] and presented a certificate from him to Khair-un-Nisa Begum, who sent it to her mother.’
⁷⁶

As the conversion is never referred to in Kirkpatrick’s own writings, it is difficult to guess at his feelings about taking this major and irrevocable step. Was it a nominal conversion, taken only in order to give him access to his pregnant lover? Or did his ‘partiality’ to Muslim culture extend to the religion itself? At this distance, with the nature of the sources that exist, it is impossible to say. What is certain, however, is that if it
was
a real conversion, then it seems to have been Khair un-Nissa who brought him to Islam, rather than the other way around.

James having produced his certificate of conversion, it was agreed that the marriage could go ahead, and ‘accordingly, the marriage tie was bound by the said Shi’a
Mujtahid
and all the ceremonies incident there to were performed in accordance with the customs in vogue with the Mohamadans’.
⁷⁷
As Sharaf un-Nissa makes clear in a letter she wrote much later, the ceremony did however take place in the greatest secrecy,
^dy
and there was no public
shadi
, or marriage party
^dz
—not least, presumably, because Khair un-Nissa was heavily pregnant by this stage. According to Sharaf:

This, in Islamic law, involved fixing the bride’s dowry and the amount that would be given back to her in the event of a divorce. In Khair un-Nissa’s case it was clearly a large sum, as James refers in his will to his wife’s private fortune and says that he need not provide for her as she was ‘amply provided for by Jaghiers [estates] and other possessions both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees’, a very large sum indeed, perhaps £300,000 in today’s currency.
⁸¹
Khair un-Nissa’s
jagirs
were presumably the gift of Aristu Jah, implying that he stood in for her dead father in more ways than one. The marriage, in other words, made James not only a very happy man, but a very rich one too.
^ea

If Sharaf un-Nissa’s account of the marriage is read in this way, it might be taken to indicate the degree to which—in the eyes of the Nizam and Aristu Jah at least—this was a political marriage, and a variation on the traditional courtly way of concluding alliances: first you signed a treaty, then organised a marriage between the two parties to seal the alliance. Khair un-Nissa was not of course an Asafiya princess, but for the purpose of this wedding she had become the Minister’s adopted daughter, while James was now the Nizam’s adopted son. In this way Aristu Jah believed he had finally succeeded in binding the British Resident through marriage into obedience and gratitude to the Nizam. No wonder the Nizam and Aristu Jah had been so angry at Bâqar Ali’s attempts to wreck so useful an alliance. It gave the two men a considerable degree of leverage on the Resident sent to keep an eye on them.

Whatever sensations of relief and elation James might have felt at the happy conclusion of eighteen months of often desperate hopelessness, he left no surviving record of his emotions at the moment of the marriage. For despite the fact that everyone in Hyderabad who needed to give their assent to the marriage had now done so, James continued to pretend to his brother William—and to everyone else in Calcutta—that the affair was over.
⁸²
On 16 January 1801 he wrote William a letter that veered further from the truth than any he had ever written, telling him that he had forbidden all messages from Khair’s family, despite their continual entreaties that he should marry her.
⁸³
James now clearly believed that with his conversion to Islam he had moved far beyond a position that he could ever explain to William; and so rather than telling the truth he began creating a whole Pandora’s box of lies and half-truths which once opened and exposed would come back to haunt him at intervals over the next few years. James also thought—presumably for safety’s sake—that for the time being it was better for Khair un-Nissa to continue in her house in the old city, at least until memory of the scandal had passed. So it was that less than two months later Khair un-Nissa gave birth to their first child, a little boy, in the family
deorhi
in the shadow of the Char Minar, the principal symbol of old Hyderabad.

James was in the house for the birth, and the note he wrote that night on a tiny scrap of paper still survives in the private archive of their descendants. It reads as follows:

 

 

In the summer of 1800—at around the time Khair un-Nissa became pregnant—James’s friend and closest political ally, General William Palmer, the liberal and sympathetic British Resident at the Maratha court in Pune, found that he had become a victim of Lord Wellesley’s new, harsher political order.

In late June, Palmer had received a letter from the Governor General giving him notice that in due course he would be removed from his important and ‘arduous public station’ on the ostensible grounds of his ‘precarious state of health and advanced time of life’. The true reason for his removal, as Palmer immediately realised, was that he represented exactly the sort of tolerant, Indophile white Mughal that Wellesley most abhorred, and which he was determined to weed out of the Company’s service.
¹

General Palmer was married to Fyze Baksh, a beautiful Mughal Begum from Delhi. He was a gentle, thoughtful and highly intelligent man, who was openly sympathetic to Indian fears and aspirations: Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who stayed with the Palmers at the Pune Residency, called him ‘almost angel-like in his good nature’.
²
General Palmer was, moreover, a man of firm principles, and had stated publicly to Calcutta that he refused to engage in ‘practices against the Peishwa [the Maratha leader] in any degree incompatible with [the] good faith … [or] candour and rectitude so essential to confidence and harmony in the public intercourse of nations’—in other words, he resolutely refused to obey Calcutta’s orders to bully, bribe and browbeat the Maratha durbar into a treaty which could reduce them to a state of subservience and which they had not the slightest wish to sign.
³
This was not the sort of man who could expect to flourish in Wellesley’s India.