White Mughals (52 page)

James planned as a first improvement to ‘add a spacious Hall or Dining Room to the South or open side of [the pavilion] and immediately connected with it’. He also asked for permission to construct ‘a suite of apartments consisting of a sitting room for the reception of occasional visitors, a bed chamber and two smaller rooms for writing in or as temporary bedrooms—the whole to be sheltered by a verandah on the two sides most exposed to the weather’.
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There was another reason for James’s sudden interest in rebuilding the Residency. In the summer of 1800, around the time he was negotiating the Subsidiary Treaty with the Nizam, his landlord, a venerable Hyderabadi
amir
named Nawab Shumshair Jung, had died of old age. Realising the opportunity this provided, James had asked the Nizam for both the Residency compound and some of the fields that immediately surrounded it, to be thrown in with the other land handed over to the British in the treaty.
⁵⁵
The Nizam had agreed, and James’s letter asking Calcutta for funds to begin the rebuilding was written only four days after the treaty was signed. James was no longer a tenant: he was now the effective owner of the Residency, and while he had to wait for Calcutta’s say-so to rebuild the house, there was nothing to stop him immediately improving and replanning the gardens around him.

James already had the beginnings of a wonderful mango orchard thanks to the trees sent from Pune by General Palmer. Now he asked his brother William to help to procure some first-class peach trees and, a little later, enough orange trees to plant a decent orange grove. The detail of his requirements demonstrates the degree to which James was becoming a connoisseur in such matters: ‘I wish you would endeavour,’ he asked William, who was just about to catch ship back home,

He added: ‘By the means of a few Alphonso and Massagon plants which I got from our friend [General Palmer] I hope in a few years to improve the mangoes here wonderfully … ’
⁵⁶
A year later, James was still searching for more varieties of mango, and told his agent in Bombay that he was ‘desirous if it is practicable to have an orchard of those fine fruits at once, and I have now in my garden an avenue of many trees of six years growth that will I think all yield fruit next season, if only I could engraft them all from mature grafts’.
⁵⁷

In the months following James’s rupture with Wellesley over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, his correspondence became more and more centred on the ‘improvements’ he was planning at the Residency. Disillusioned with diplomacy and the Company’s ambitions, which he now saw were in danger of destroying a world and a civilisation he had come to love, he concentrated instead on building a nest for his little family, and living with his wife and children in a style which mixed Mughal tastes with the ambitions of a Georgian gentleman ‘improving’ his estates.

One day he would write to his agent in Madras asking for ‘a handsome house clock’, some good ‘wheels for my chariot’ and ‘three pipes of the very best Madeira together with twelve dozen of choice Malmsey wine’; the next, he sought out the type of Mughal goods which catered to his more Indianised tastes: from Lucknow he ordered a set of best-quality hookah snakes, a large pack of scented Lucknavi tobacco and some
soorayes
(or
surahis
)—the traditional north Indian water-coolers which he believed were of much better quality than those made in Hyderabad.
⁵⁸

A consistent worry was the lack of any decent china or table linen for entertaining visitors, and for years James kept writing to his various agents with requests for ‘creditable table ware, equipment I consider requisite to the station I fill, and yet it is what this Residency certainly has not had to boast of since I have been at the head of it. My table cloths and napkins I have hitherto had made up from such cloth as bazaars here afford, that is very flimsy and extravagantly dear; and my China ware is a motley collection of occasional auctions’.
^59
fk

A flourishing vegetable garden was another persistent goal of James’s: of one friend in Calcutta he asked for seeds of peas, French beans, lettuce, endive and celery, ‘to which may be added a little choice cabbage and cawliflower seed’.
⁶⁰
In return for these, all he could offer were seeds of aubergines, which appears to have been very much the Hyderabadi vegetable of choice in the late eighteenth century. James particularly pined for ‘a good supply of potatoes, being a vegetable which I like much but have not tasted for these two years and more’—interesting evidence that at this period the potato was only grown around the three Presidency towns—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras—though it is hard now to imagine Indian cooking without
aloo
.
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James even tried breaking the ice with General Palmer’s uncommunicative successor in Pune, Colonel Barry Close, with some fruit-tree diplomacy. In the course of an exchange of elephants between the two men, James took up an offer from the bluff soldier of some saplings from the General’s old peach trees: ‘The Ceylon Elephant shall be sent off to you in the course of a few days,’ wrote James,

Within two years, James had arranged all these fruit trees into a huge orchard and kitchen garden ‘about half a mile in circumference, completely walled in, and abounding in the choicest Grapes, Mangoes (from Bombay), Peaches, Apples, Oranges, Pine Apples, Strawberries, Raspberries, together with all the horticultural productions of the best sort peculiar to Indian Gardens, or introduced into them of late years from Europe’.
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He also tried to acquire a variety of gardeners from different horticultural traditions. In May 1802 he sent requests to his agent in Madras to try to find a good English gardener; five months later he was writing to Bombay trying to find one from China, having heard that Chinese gardeners were to be found in that city, and that they were particularly skilled in the growing of vegetables. For entertainments he also wished to buy

Part of James seems to have felt a faint homesickness for England. Certainly, at the other side of his estate from the Mughal watercourses of ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’, in the farmland he had acquired in the treaty of 1800, he wished to create the sort of gentle, informal park that William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton had made fashionable in the England of his youth: an arrangement that had become as central to British conceptions of peaceful, civilised refinement, as cool rippling waters and the shade of overarching broadleaf trees was to that of the Mughals. For this purpose he got teams of men to lay out, on the main axis of the Mughal pavilion, ‘Pleasure Grounds, and a paddock well stocked with Deer, of nearly a mile in circumference’.
⁶⁵
To keep the deer company, he ordered from Bombay some elk and a herd of ‘Abyssinian sheep’.
^66
fn

Creating an expanse of pseudo-English parkland was not, however, without its problems in the middle of India, and by the end of the year James had had to send to Bombay for ‘a fire engine, or even two, to water my trees and Pleasure Grounds’ to prevent the grass withering in the intense Deccani heat.
⁶⁷

Visitors to the Residency make it clear, however, that the overall style of James’s very extensive gardens remained principally Indian in inspiration: according to Malcolm, for example, they were ‘laid out more in the Oriental than European style’. Moreover, James told Kennaway that ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’ was still as he would remember it, and that he had deliberately kept it unchanged. This ‘Hindoostanny Garden’ appears to have been a typical irrigated Mughal
char bagh
with rippling rills, thickets of fruit trees and flowing fountains; it lay in the corner of the compound beside Khair un-Nissa’s Rang Mahal.

With James’s clear fondness for Indian paradise gardens in mind,
^fo
it is intriguing to wonder how much he discussed gardening with the Nizam, Aristu Jah and his friends in the Hyderabad durbar. For just as Nizam Ali Khan’s highly cultured reign had led to a revival of Hyderabad as a centre of Deccani literary and artistic endeavour, so the Nizam’s interest in the art of gardening led to a revival of the Deccan’s remarkable traditions of Indo-Islamic horticulture.

The court chronicles of Nizam Ali’s reign from the 1790s onwards are suddenly full of references to visits to gardens, and to new gardens being built around Hyderabad: for example Aristu Jah’s chief wife, Sarwar Afza Begum, built a huge new
char bagh
named Suroor Nagar, where the Minister used to go to relax. Beside it she created a deer park where Aristu Jah, the Nizam and the men of their families would hunt black buck.
⁶⁸
Mir Alam was also a passionate lover of gardens, and was so proud of his creations that towards the end of his life he opened his
char bagh
to the public in spring; according to the
Gulzar-i-Asafiya
people would flock there to relax and to fly kites.
⁶⁹
The Hyderabadi miniatures of the period, especially those by the court artist Venkatchellam, are particularly concerned with the cultivated Arcadia of the pleasure garden, and the fountains and ranked cedar trees of the irrigated garden became the standard background to all Hyderabadi portraits of the time.
⁷⁰
The famous Venkatchellam image of Aristu Jah’s son Ma’ali Mian, for example, shows him sitting in a garden sniffing a flower and admiring a tame hawk as five small fountain jets play amid the roses and dragonflies at his feet, and clouds of rosy parakeets fly to roost in the banana trees and toddy palms that frame the scene.
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Moreover, it was during Nizam Ali’s reign that a great number of gardening books came to be written, translated and copied: one particularly influential manual named the
Risala i-Baghbani
was written in Golconda at the beginning of Nizam Ali’s reign in 1762. These books contain wonderful passages of advice to Hyderabadi gardeners which mix the scientific with the pseudo-scientific, the useful and well-observed with more eccentric—and probably rather less useful—items of
mali
’s lore and old wives’ tales. The
Risala
, for example, recommends that melons can be made especially sweet and tasty if, before planting, their seeds are stored in mounds of fresh rose petals, and if honey, dates, cows’ milk and chopped liquorice are dug into the plants’ roots. Bananas meanwhile can be encouraged to elongate to become as long and as firm as elephant tusks ‘if an iron bar dipped in a steamy mix of animal wastes’ is used to ‘scorch’ the tree.
⁷²