White Mughals (48 page)

Sometime towards the end of September, an anonymous letter was sent from Hyderabad to the Governor General, detailing all the facts about Khair un-Nissa and her child and their move to the Residency that James had so far managed to keep concealed from Calcutta. The letter reached Wellesley in Patna at the very end of the month. Only a week later, having first checked the facts with James’s former Assistant John Malcolm, who had accompanied Wellesley on his journey, the Governor General picked up his pen and wrote an ominous letter to William Kirkpatrick as follows:

As if all this was not bad enough, the letter grew worse. Having stated his belief that James was guilty of gross deception, Wellesley then asked William to disown and publicly denounce his brother if he wanted to save his own reputation:

By the time William received the letter, the order had already arrived in Hyderabad for Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr to head straight for Madras to report to Lord Clive on a matter of the greatest secrecy and importance. Unknown to James, his investigations of the Subsidiary Force had brought down on his head the most serious threat yet to his life and career in India.

By the time he became aware that things were amiss towards the end of November, the investigation was already well under way.

 

 

At the very end of December 1801-the most beautiful time of year in the Deccan, when the light is oblique, the evenings cool and the shadows long—William and Fyze Palmer finally packed up their household and set off for the last time from the Residency in Pune, heading off towards Hyderabad by the old Golconda road.

Their convoy moved slowly down through the then thickly wooded foothills of the Western Ghats, and out into the open farmland that lay in the plains beyond: rich, well-watered black earth where bullocks ploughed flat fields edged with palm groves and mango orchards. By 4 January 1802, the Palmers had made good progress and reached the dusty cotton-town of Tuljapur on the border with the Nizam’s dominions. James was there to meet them, but Khair un-Nissa stayed behind in the newly completed
mahal
at the Hyderabad Residency. There was a good reason for this: though James had yet to tell anyone about it, Khair was now five months pregnant with their second child.
¹

Pune had been the Palmers’ home for four years, and the elegant British Residency at the confluence of the rivers Moota and Mula, opposite the ghats where
sati
(widow burning) was performed, was filled with the treasures they had accumulated in the course of their life together in Lucknow, Delhi, Agra and Pune itself. Yet even by the standards of the time the Palmers travelled heavily, and James was astonished by the sheer number of bullock carts, transport cattle, elephants, baggage camels, syces, sepoys, bearers and Fyze’s ‘dozen females’ (presumably her attendants) that turned up at the Maratha—Hyderabad border.
²

The Palmers had originally planned to spend only a week or so resting in Hyderabad, before continuing their journey to Calcutta overland along the new military road which had recently been constructed up the length of the east coast. But so well did the two families get on, and so well matched were both the men and the women, that James tried to persuade his guests to stay on, arguing that if they waited for spring they could then catch a fast boat from Masulipatam and reach Calcutta just as quickly, and with much less effort, than by lumbering slowly over the Eastern Ghats. The General was won over, and in the end he and Fyze did not set off on the road again until April had come, and with it the height of the summer heat.
³

Over their three months together Fyze and Khair un-Nissa struck up a close friendship, despite the fifteen-year difference in their ages. They spent their days in each other’s company, and in that of Sharaf un-Nissa, playing with Khair’s little boy Sahib Allum, now one year old and, according to James, beginning ‘to prattle very prettily’.
⁴
Fyze introduced Khair un-Nissa to her twenty-two-year-old son William, for whom James had found a job in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, while Khair introduced Fyze to the women of both the Minister’s and the Nizam’s
zenanas.
With them came Fanny Khanum, Fyze’s adopted daughter, who was probably the General’s child by a concubine whom Fyze had taken into the family, as was the tradition at that period in both East and West.
^eu

On these visits Fanny, who must then have been aged about ten, played happily with Prince Sulaiman Jah, the Nizam’s nine-year-old son.
^ev
After the Palmers had set off to Calcutta, James wrote to William, ‘Pray do not omit presenting my kindest remembrances to Fyze and her little daughter by adoption, with whom the little Prince Sulaiman Jah
⁵
was so smitten, that he himself begged the females of my family to intercede on his behalf. They all join in sending kind wishes to Fyze … ’
⁶
Later, James talked of Fanny as she ‘whom the young Prince Sulaiman Jah wished for his bride. By the bye, the impression she made was deeper than could be supposed, as he never fails to ask after her.’
⁷
At the end of April, after Fanny had recovered from a serious illness, James promised the General that Khair would pass the news of her recovery on to Aristu Jah’s women, and assured him that Fanny’s ‘rapid improvements when mentioned by my family in their occasional visits to the Minister’s, will fire the breast of her young princely lover’.
⁸

A miniature by the Hyderabad court artist Venkatchellam of the young Sulaiman Jah, with his younger brother Kaiwan Jah, still remains in the possession of James and Khair’s descendants. It shows the two boys, aged about seven and eight, sitting on superbly inlaid chairs on a marble terrace next to the Hussain Sagar lake, being fanned by barefoot attendants. Sulaiman Jah wears a suit of child’s toy armour; Kaiwan Jah, Nizam Ali Khan’s youngest son, who was given to Aristu Jah to adopt following the death of the latter’s only son in 1795, wears orange pyjamas, is hung with pearls and holds a sarpeche.
^ew
Presumably Sulaiman Jah was regularly brought to the Minister’s
zenana
to play with his younger brother Kaiwan, and it was no doubt there that Fanny and Fyze first met the young prince.
^ex

The friendship between Khair and Fyze grew very deep indeed. They had much in common: both were of Persian extraction and spoke Persian as their first language; both were second-generation immigrants to India who had grown up with fathers in senior positions in the armies of Shi’a Indian courts, and with local Indian mothers. Moreover, both had faced the same challenges in that they had fallen in love with, and eventually married, Englishmen from a very different world to their own. Fyze perhaps acted as older, wiser adviser to Khair, but she was clearly as fond of Khair un-Nissa as Khair was of her. From the day the Palmers left Hyderabad, letters and parcels passed between the two women, both of whom were literate and keen letter-writers.
⁹
Although their letters have since disappeared—or in the case of Khair un-Nissa’s apparently been deliberately destroyed
¹⁰
—something of their contents can be gauged from the accompanying letters written by their husbands, most of which are still intact.

Two days after Fyze and the General had left for the coast, James was writing that ‘My little Boy’s Mother and Grandmother return with interest and affectionate ardour the kisses imprinted on their infant in the name of Begum [Fyze], to whom I beg my best remembrances.’
¹¹
The following morning Khair un-Nissa, attended by James and her mother Sharaf un-Nissa, and presumably also by Dr Ure, gave birth to a baby girl. James recorded the exact time and date on a small scrap of paper that he kept next to the piece on which he had recorded Sahib Allum’s birth only thirteen months previously: