White Mughals (58 page)

It was to Kennaway that James wrote the fullest description of his Residency ‘improvements’. His brother William, he seemed to accept, was not an aesthete, and would not have appreciated the labours he had undertaken to turn ‘one of the most dreary spots [in Hyderabad] into one of the most delightful in the whole Deckan’.
³⁴
Indeed in his letters to William, James describes his ‘improvements’ as rarely as he once described the progress of his
amours
. But Sir John Kennaway was a man of taste who understood the business of building a country house, as he had demonstrated on his return to Britain when he tastefully extended and beautified the exquisite Inigo Jones mansion of Escot near Exeter that he had bought with his Indian fortune.
³⁵
James knew about this, and with Kennaway he was not ashamed to show his pleasure and pride in what he had brought into being: ‘It would be as little in your power to recognise the place where you once resided, as it is out of the power of all who now see it to withhold their surprise and admiration,’ he wrote proudly in October 1804, as the building was nearing completion.

This palace was to be James’s home, and he tried to persuade William to send his eldest daughter Isabella, now aged sixteen, out to him so that he could bring her ‘back with me to the Residency, which by that time will perhaps be one of the most delightful spots in India, as I think Isabella herself will allow when she has once seen it; and where I trust you will ultimately find yourself greatly mistaken in supposing that she cannot meet with an eligible match—while at all events, there can be no harm in trying the experiment’. James also insisted that he would pay Isabella’s Indian costs, whether she came to see him or just went to straight to Calcutta as part of the British ‘fishing fleet’ of girls who sailed out every year on the lookout for an eligible husband:
^go
‘Isabella, you know, is my daughter by adoption, and as such I beg you will make her over entirely to my management. It shall be my business and my delight, to defray her expenses... ’
³⁷

As the Residency rose higher and higher, and the prospect of actually moving into it grew closer, James began to think about how he would furnish his huge new mansion. He started by ordering an enormous carpet, sixty feet long by thirty wide, to be woven for the main durbar hall.
³⁸
He also purchased an enormous chandelier which the Company had bought from the ever impecunious Prince of Wales, and which had once hung in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. At the same time, thinking of the entertainments he could hold in the house, James asked his Madras agent to try to find him a bandmaster and ‘twelve lads from the orphan school’ to be trained up as musicians.
³⁹
He also got a job lot of music and musical instruments sent up, along with twenty cartloads of his much-missed potatoes, plus ‘a few armed peons to guard them on the road’, one of his odder consignments.
⁴⁰

At the same time James continued sending orders to Europe for other more rare and valuable items that would allow him to fulfil his great dream of combining the lifestyle of a Mughal prince, the landed pursuits of a Georgian gentleman and the interests of a Renaissance man. Over the course of 1803 and 1804, these interests seem to become increasingly scientific, and James’s letters are suddenly full of requests for ‘a good Electrifying Machine with a curious apparatus such as would surprise and delight’ the nobles of the durbar, as well as a ‘box of chemical preparations’. The electrical apparatus apparently got lost in transit, but the ‘chemical box’ duly appeared.
^gp

James’s interest in chemistry, however, seems to have been soon overtaken by his growing fascination with astronomy. He hatched an ambitious plan to build an observatory on the roof of the Residency, and towards the end of 1804 he asked William to send out to him ‘a capital telescope for astronomical observations … The terrace of my new house is a noble observatory, and there is a gentleman here who has inspired me with a great love and admiration of the noble science of astronomy.’
⁴¹

^gq
This was none other than James’s old friend and now relation by marriage, Khair’s first cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari. At the end of 1804, Shushtari had taken advantage of the death of Aristu Jah and Mir Alam’s return to power to come back to Hyderabad from Bombay (where he had been briefly engaged in the textile trade
⁴²
), to complete the writing of his great memoir, the
Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam.
Astronomy, like philosophy and jurisprudence, was one of the traditional accomplishments of Abdul Lateef’s polymathic branch of the Shushtari sayyids, and before coming to India he had spent several years studying the stars with one of his many learned cousins, Sayyid Ali Shushtari. Sayyid Ali, as remarkable a scholar as the rest of his clan, had been the chief astronomer in Baghdad when the young Abdul Lateef came to him for instruction.
^gs

Shushtari came to recognise that not only were the British more knowledgeable than Persians on some astronomical matters, so, to his surprise, were the Indians: ‘Copernicus was more exact in astronomical observation than the traditional Muslim astronomers which makes the Muslim
zij
tables and our astronomers’ predictions less reliable. What appears to onlookers as the movement of the sun is in reality the movement of the earth … Moreover, the English reject the idea of astral influences … Even the Hindus have more knowledge than us in some matters of astronomy and mathematics’—a virtually unprecedented admission for the often Indophobic Abdul Lateef.
⁴³

In some matters, however, Islamic astronomy was still well ahead of European learning, as other British amateur astronomers in India had learned to their surprise. Thomas Deane Pearse, who acted as Warren Hastings’ second during his famous duel with Philip Francis in 1780, developed an interest in astronomy in the late 1770s and regularly sent his observations to Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.
^gr
In September 1783 a conversation with ‘a learned Musulman’ directed Pearse’s attention to a Persian text,
The Wonders of Creation
, which showed that Saturn (as Pearse wrote excitedly to the Secretary of the Royal Society in a long letter of the twenty-second of that month) was ‘possessed of what, till very lately, we were utterly ignorant of, I mean his satellites or ring. Hitherto only five satellites have been seen by Europeans, [but in this text] he is there represented as having seven … I am much inclined to believe that the [medieval Arabs] had better instruments than we have.’ The seventh satellite of Saturn was only formally ‘discovered’ by the astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) in 1789, six years after this correspondence.
⁴⁴
For the next few years Pearse’s letters contain intermittent references to his conversations with pundits and ‘learned Mussulmen’ on astronomical matters.
^†

In a similar manner, although the exact details are now sadly lost, James and Abdul Lateef Shushtari seem to have been spending their nights on the Residency roof, busy comparing notes to see how Indian, Islamic and European astronomical systems could be reconciled, and what each could learn from the other. Certainly James’s letters between 1804 and 1805 become full of requests for such objects as ‘A Compleat Planetarium, Tellurian and Lunerian, all in brass showing the motions completely by wheel work, packed in a portable mahogany case’, and ‘a pair of 18 inch terrestrial and celestial globes’. But over and again his letters come back to the matter of the telescope, which he repeatedly tells William he should spare no expense upon, instructing him to take the very greatest care in shipping:

James seems to have been determined that not only would the Residency become a place where British and Mughal ideas of civilised refinement would be fused, it would also be a place where, albeit in a typically amateur Enlightenment way, the intellectual life of the two peoples might begin to meet and enrich each other, to the mutual benefit and fascination of both.

At about this time, James entrusted a small confidence to Sir John Kennaway: that despite his fears for the way India was going under Wellesley, and despite his professional difficulties, surveying his creation and the life he had made for himself in Hyderabad, he was now ‘as happy and comfortable’ as he could ever imagine himself being. In a rare letter to his elder brother George Kirkpatrick, with whom he had little contact,
^gt
he echoed his feelings of intense happiness and fulfilment, noting, as he signed off:

Yet amid the now Eden-like idyll of the magnificent new Residency and its observatory, the elk and the grazing Abyssinian sheep, the laughing children playing with their ayahs, the gardens and the park, the Rang Mahal with its frescoed walls and its gently falling fountains—amid all this, there always lay a great unspoken sadness: the knowledge of the eggshell fragility of this creation, and the growing realisation that it could not last.

Towards the end of January 1805, James’s health had suddenly gone into rapid decline. In July, Dr Ure wrote out a medical certificate for James to send to Calcutta. It read: