White Mughals (60 page)

The original plan had been for James and Khair un-Nissa to escort the children to Madras, ‘whither their respectable and amiable mother insists on accompanying them’, as James explained to William.
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Having said goodbye to the children, James and Khair would then travel on together to Calcutta for the marriage of William’s eldest daughter Isabella, who had not, as her father had feared, ended up a ‘returned empty’ but instead had been snapped up almost before she had left the gangplank by an ambitious young Company servant, Charles Buller.
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Buller had just been appointed Secretary to the Revenue Board, an important and powerfulposition, and the wedding, which was clearly going to be quite a grand one, was set for 26 August.

But at the last minute there was a hitch: James appears to have been struck down by some sort of fever, in addition to which he seems to have suffered a recurrence of his hepatitis. Together, the two complaints relegated him to his bed and prevented him from travelling. Moreover, there was a political crisis brewing in Hyderabad due to the famine spreading across the Deccan that had followed close on the devastation left by Wellesley’s Maratha War. From his sickbed, James was determined to do what he could in the way of famine relief. As he reported in early August to an old childhood friend,

As part of the famine-relief programme, the Nizam and Mir Alam had embarked, on James’s recommendations, on a grand programme of public works and construction as a way of providing employment and money to the starving famine refugees who now flooded into Hyderabad. As James explained to William:

The famine crisis and his dangerously fragile health prevented James from leaving as planned throughout the early summer, and in the end Khair un-Nissa opted to stay in Hyderabad too, nursing her ailing husband—though James still hoped to recover sufficiently to rush to the coast and join the children in Madras for a few days before their scheduled embarkation in late August.

So it was in late June that James and Khair un-Nissa began sadly to pack up for the children and to make preparations for them to set off from Hyderabad. They were then just five and three years old. Their parting from Khair un-Nissa was a terrible thing. She well knew how slim the chances were of her ever seeing them again, and of how changed they would necessarily be—both in their ways and attitudes and in their love for her—if she ever did. For the children, who were now old enough to understand that they were soon to be taken away from everything they had ever known, it was more traumatic still. Forty years later, Sahib Begum could still recall every detail of the separation:

In Madras, James arranged for the children to stay with his maternal uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs William Petrie, the former of whom had just been appointed as Senior Member of the Council there. Without telling Khair, he had also organised for another man to visit the Petries while the children were staying with them: the Anglo-Irish painter George Chinnery.

Chinnery, who went on to become one of the greatest of British Imperial artists, had been in Madras two and half years when he undertook James’s commission to paint a life-size portrait of the children for Khair. It was his biggest commission yet: probably his first full-length portrait since he had arrived in Madras to stay with his brother, and certainly his largest. Chinnery was a strange, volatile man, high-spirited and depressive by turns, and a certain emotional fragility seems to have been a family trait: his brother ended his life in a Madras madhouse.
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Thanks partly to his commission from James, Chinnery went on the following year to paint Henry Russell’s father, Sir Henry Russell senior, the portly and bewigged Chief Justice of Bengal. While doing so he found himself closely watched by Sir Henry’s attorney, the diarist William Hickey, who left a perceptive pen-portrait of the painter at work:

James’s son and daughter cannot have been in Madras for longer than three weeks, and children are always notoriously difficult sitters. Yet the completed painting is one of the masterpieces of British painting in India. In the richest and most gorgeous of colours, Chinnery presents the two small children in their Hyderabadi court dress, standing at the top of a flight of steps engulfed by the swags of a huge dark curtain. Sahib Allum—an exceptionally beautiful, poised, dark-eyed child—wears a scarlet
jama
trimmed with gilt brocade, and a matching gilt cummerbund; he has a glittering
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on his head and crescent-toed slippers. Round his neck hangs a string of enormous pearls. His little sister, who is standing one step up from Sahib Allum, and has her arm around her big brother’s shoulders, is discernibly fairer-skinned, and below her
topi
is a hint of the red hair that would be much admired in the years to come.

Yet while Sahib Allum looks directly at the viewer with an almost precocious confidence and assurance, Sahib Begum looks down with an expression of infinite sadness and vulnerability on her face, her little eyes dark and swollen with crying. Chinnery clearly understood the intense sadness of separation that this family were going through: six months earlier his own brother had sent his three young children back to England, and he well knew the empty grief and silence that now filled the Chinnery house in place of their cries and laughter.
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It was just after his children had arrived to stay with the Petries in late July that James learned the news of his sudden and rather unexpected popularity with the new regime in Calcutta.

In the middle of the month, the new Governor General, Lord Cornwallis, had landed at Madras. There he had been briefed by Petrie on the state of politics in India, and especially on James’s single-handed resistance to Wellesley’s more aggressive policies, particularly his creation and subsequent mishandling of the Maratha crisis. As Petrie duly reported to James, he had told Cornwallis how none of Wellesley’s senior officials had had the courage to question the Governor General’s policies, but ‘that impartial justice and the love of truth obliged me to make an exception in favor of the Resident at Hyderabad who was the only one of all the Diplomatic Corps who had ventured to speak his sentiments freely upon the consequences he apprehended from Marquis Wellesley’s Political system respecting the Mahrattas’.
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Cornwallis landed at Calcutta to replace Wellesley on 30 July 1805. He immediately made it clear that he wanted none of the Imperial paraphernalia Wellesley had insisted was his right. As he landed, according to William Hickey who was in the crowd massed on the shore to greet him, the bluff old soldier ‘looked surprised and vexed at the amazing cavalcade that was drawn up to greet him’—carriages, an escort, bands, staff officers, ADC and servants. ‘Too many people,’ said Cornwallis. ‘I don’t want them, don’t want one of them. I have not yet lost the use of my legs, hey? Thank God I can walk, walk very well, hey!’

And walk he did. The following evening, according to Hickey, ‘while I was out taking my airing, I met Lord Wellesley in his coach and six, preceded by a party of Dragoons and a number of outriders, and in about ten minutes afterwards I met our new Governor General, Marquis Cornwallis, driving himself in a phaeton with a pair of steady old jogtrot horses, accompanied his Secretary, Mr Robinson, and without a single attendant of any description whatsoever’.
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Less than a week later, soon after Wellesley had slipped off back to England,
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James received a note from this same Mr Robinson, inviting him to come straight up to Calcutta to meet the new Governor General and to give him a full briefing. The note was written in a very different tone to the sort of despatches he had become used to receiving from Wellesley’s Bengal staff. Robinson assured James that:

Robinson went on to hint that Cornwallis intended to bring about a radical change from Wellesley’s aggressive policies, saying that the new Governor General’s principal aim was to ‘establish perfect confidence in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British among Indian princes, and that ‘conciliation and kindness [were] the likeliest means of producing this impression on them’. He wanted ‘to avoid war’ and ‘to give every possible degree of facility’ to enable peace to return to India. With that view, he was planning to leave Calcutta as soon as was practicable to see for himself ‘the upper stations’ where the war against the Marathas had just burst into flame again. This was a new round of hostilities between the Company and the most powerful of the remaining Maratha leaders, Jaswant Rao Holkar, who at the end of August 1804 had succeeded in ambushing and wiping out a retreating British force on the modern Rajasthan-Gujerat border.
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Among the others Cornwallis wished to meet ‘up the country’ was General Palmer, who had recently been put out to grass in the badly-paid position of commander of a garrison at Monghyr, on the banks of the Ganges in Bengal.
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