White Mughals (55 page)

Six months later, James was surprised to discover that the Nizam was still taking the mercury, and yet showing remarkably few signs of its ill-effects, though James hoped that he was beginning to tire of the ‘wizard’ who was feeding it to him: ‘His Highness certainly has, as Colonel Palmer observes, as many lives as a cat,’ he wrote,

James’s affection for the increasingly eccentric Nizam was more than returned. The Nizam used to address him as ‘Beloved Son’, and once the plan for the Residency had been reduced to the size of a card he had been happy to authorise not only the handing over of the adjacent fields, but had generously offered to cover the cost of the rebuilding himself.

No sooner had the Nizam agreed to pay for the building than James set to work planning a Residency mansion rather larger and more substantial than he had originally envisaged when applying for funds from Calcutta. The magnificent Residency at Hyderabad has traditionally been attributed to Samuel Russell, and there is no doubt that Russell oversaw the last part of the building’s completion, and may have added to or refined the final plan. But equally it is quite clear from James’s letters that the initial plans, and the beginning of construction, were undertaken by James himself with the help of an anonymous Indian
‘maistry’
^ge
architect, who was apparently trained in Mughal methods before being taught a basic grammar of contemporary neo-classical forms by the British. James’s letters reveal that behind the construction of the apparently perfect European classical form of the Palladian Hyderabad Residency lay a Mughal-trained architect. As with so many features of life in the East India Company, look under an apparently English veneer and one finds a more complicated, hybrid Anglo-Mughal reality.

In October 1802, some six months after the storm over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, James wrote to James Brunton, a friend in Madras, with a set of detailed instructions and a request for him to start work collecting the men and materials that would be needed to begin work on his great project. Very little is known about the details of the architecture of the East India Company at this period, as buildings tended to be erected in a fairly
ad hoc
fashion by military engineers rather than trained architects. Most buildings in the three British Presidency towns were copies of originals in England, constructed from plates in books like Robert Adam’s
Works of Architecture
or Colin Campbell’s
Vitruvius Britannicus
, although they were given a superficial gloss of Oriental features, such as blinds and verandahs, essential for the climate. Few original plans, or correspondence, survive to indicate the ideas, conceptions and ambitions that lay behind these buildings, and in this—as in so many other areas—James’s letters are unusually illuminating and well worth quoting in full: ‘Being about to build a new mansion at this Residency,’ he wrote to Brunton on 6 October 1802,

In a final, characteristically thoughtful postscript, James said he was happy to arrange for part of the workmen’s wages to be paid direct to their families in Madras.

Within a few months the masons and architects had been found and duly despatched to Hyderabad. By the early summer of 1803, the foundations were already being laid for one of the most ambitious buildings to be erected in the Deccan for over a hundred years. James’s main concern now was to remain in his post long enough to complete this project; and on this score he had good reason to worry.

Not only was he completely and irreparably out of favour with Lord Wellesley, his health was in decline too. His rheumatism grew worse over the course of 1802, and towards the end of the year he developed some severe hepatitic complaint that left him bedridden for a month, and very weak for the entire first quarter of 1803. He never entirely recovered from the disease and suffered from intermittent relapses the rest of his life. For the first time, Dr Ure began to mutter about James considering following his half-brother William back to Europe.

England was no longer the place that James really considered to be his home. He had been born in India, and had spent all but eleven years of his life there. Like General Palmer, he felt most himself in India, and returning to England was the last thing he wanted. But as his health continued to decline, it increasingly became a prospect he was forced to hold in reserve, to consider as a final option, if the worst came to the worst.

 

 

On 6 August 1803 Nizam Ali Khan died in his sleep, at the age of sixty-nine. That same day Lord Wellesley declared war on the Maratha Confederacy, and sent his younger brother Arthur into battle. James had long predicted both events, and had dreaded the prospect of either.

For years he had worried about the Nizam’s death and the possibility of the major upheavals that might follow it. He had good reason to do so: almost every Mughal Emperor had come to power in a fratricidal bloodbath, and the same pattern had shown every sign of developing in the Mughal satellite of Hyderabad: when Nizam Ali’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had died in 1748, Hyderabad had been engulfed in fourteen years of disastrous civil war as the Nizam’s six sons fought for control. Moreover, Nizam Ali’s own progeny had already demonstrated their capacity for internecine anarchy: in 1795 and 1796 the Nizam’s eldest son Ali Jah, and his ambitious son-in-law Dara Jah, had both revolted. Although the two rebellions had been quickly crushed (and Ali Jah despatched in an apparent suicide, while under Mir Alam’s charge), fear of the Nizam’s sudden death had kept James in Hyderabad, or its immediate vicinity, for most of the previous two years. This worry was the reason he had been unable to go to Madras to see his brother William off to England—a meeting both knew might well have been their last.
^gf

In the event, however, to the surprise of most observers, the transition of power was completely smooth. The Nizam had had another stroke in early June 1803, after which James had reported sadly to Calcutta that ‘his whole appearance is now [suddenly] emaciated in the extreme, his eyesight dim and drowsy, his countenance worn, his speech feeble and inarticulate, and his faculties in short greatly impaired’.
¹
A month later, ‘Old Nizzy’s’ condition had worsened further: ‘The very dangerous state of the Nizam’s health continues to be such as to leave very little hope of his Recovery,’ James reported, ‘the Palsey having spread to his left side, and deprived him nearly of the use of his left arm and leg … ’
²
As the old man’s end was clearly approaching, James and Aristu Jah—who was the grandfather of the Crown Prince Sikander Jah’s wife and so, like James, firmly committed to his swift accession—were both able to make minute arrangements for ensuring a peaceful handover of power.

The Nizam finally passed away in the Chaumhala Palace in the early morning of 6 August, and was buried that evening beside his mother in the great marble forecourt of the Hyderabad Mecca Masjid.
^gg
The following day James was able to report to Arthur Wellesley that ‘nothing has hitherto occurred beyond that sort of stir and commotion in the capital usually attendant on such an event, and I have little doubt that I shall have it in my power to announce to you in the course of tomorrow, the Prince Secunder Jah’s peaceable succession’.
³

This was indeed the case. Remarkably, the thirty-one-year-old Sikander Jah was able to take over the reigns of government without a single sword being removed from its scabbard. The following evening James picked up his pen to report: ‘I am just returning from witnessing and assisting in the ceremony of His Highness Secunder Jah’s installation on the vacant
musnud
[throne] of the Deccan. This was conducted in the due forms, but with little if any pomp or ceremony, owing to the very recent death of the late sovereign.’ To mark the accession of Sikander Jah guns were fired in the cantonments, from the city walls and from the parapets of Golconda, while (somewhat bizarrely) James gravely reported that ‘extra butter [was] served to the Europeans’ of the Subsidiary Force as part of the celebrations; but otherwise ‘the utmost tranquillity reigns, both within and without the city, and I see no probability of its meeting with the smallest interruption’.
⁴

It was only in the period that followed the carefully stage-managed succession that James realised how much he found himself missing his old friend, the eccentric but kindly Nizam: ‘His memory will be ever dear to me,’ he wrote to William a week after the death. ‘His eldest son, the Prince Secunder Jah ascended the
musnud
on the 8th amid the universal acclamation of the people. I all along assured the GG [Wellesley] that the succession would be a peaceable one, and I think myself particularly fortunate that it has so turned out. I have reason to believe that some doubts on this head were entertained in other quarters, so that if my predictionhad not been verified, I should have been subjected to, and no doubt have met with, considerable reproach, if not something worse...’
⁵

Privately, however, James had few illusions about Nizam Ali Khan’s successor. Five years earlier, in his first major report from Hyderabad, he had written to Wellesley of Sikander Jah’s ‘unpopularity and sordid avarice’, remarking that he was ‘not extolled for the brightness of his talents nor the strength of his judgement’, though he also remarked that, ‘inclined to corpulency though he may be, yet [Sikander] is not ungraceful … His deportment is easy and affable, and in his placid well-favoured countenance, mildness, diffidence and good nature, are conspicuously enough depicted.’
⁶
This, it soon became clear, was wishful thinking: reports quickly began to circulate of the new Nizam publicly kicking his concubines and even attempting to hang various members of his family with silk handkerchiefs. Soon there were mutterings that he was suffering from bouts of insanity. According to Henry Russell, James’s assistant, Sikander Jah’s