White Mughals (64 page)

It is not clear from Russell’s letters that May exactly where either he or the Begums were staying in Chowringhee, or indeed whether he and the families of the two
munshis
were renting the same apartments as the two Begums. But it is apparent that they were all very near each other and that they seemed to spend most of their time in each other’s company. Given this, it is perhaps most likely that the entire party from the Hyderabad Residency would have taken a large house in Chowringhee and apportioned the different floors between them, as Hickey had done a few years earlier when he, his
bibi
Jemdanee and their friends had clubbed together to rent a garden house outside town.

Certainly, in his letters from Calcutta, which span the seven months from May to November 1806, Henry Russell writes to his brother Charles in Hyderabad that the Begums and the
munshis
were never far from his side: in one letter, he reports that Munshi ‘Uzeez Ullah and his brother desire [to send] their bundagee [greeting] to you’; in another that ‘Amaun Oolah, who is at my elbow’, wishes to send his salaams. As for Khair un-Nissa, she clearly spent much of her first month or two in Calcutta mourning at her husband’s grave;
¹²
but thereafter—perhaps exhausted with weeping and bewailing her fate amid the mud and puddles, the dripping obelisks and monsoon-stained mausolea of Park Street—she too retreated to Russell’s side at the Chowringhee house. A month or so after that, she had gone so far as to remove her veil and show herself for the first time to Russell:
^ho
in one letter, which makes this explicit, we learn that the Begum ‘was with me sitting for her picture when your letter arrived’.
¹³

In his descriptions of the group’s activities, Russell invariably includes himself, and always uses the first person plural. When he hears for example that a false rumour has swept Hyderabad that Khair un-Nissa has died, he asks his brother to ‘send the enclosed letter [from Khair] to the old lady [Durdanah Begum] immediately, and, when you see her, tell her how much distressed we all are that she should have suffered so much uneasiness from a groundless report’. Later he asks: ‘What is the reason we receive so few letters from the old lady?’
¹⁴

Indeed, so friendly was the relationship between the Begums and the Russell family that in August Henry writes that Khair has even consented to receive and show herself to his younger brother Charles: ‘The Begums are both of them very grateful for your constant attentions to their wishes,’ Russell told him, ‘and frequently speak of you with great warmth and interest. Khyr oon Nissa says she will see you and become personally acquainted with you, whenever she has an opportunity... ’
¹⁵

The tone Russell adopts with Khair is at times close to that of the bowing and deferential courtier; it is almost as if he sees himself in the role of the Begum’s Private Secretary or Personal Assistant. In November, Khair’s promise to receive Charles is renewed, and Russell, like a faithful equerry, formally passes the information on in a style that is not far removed from that of a court circular: ‘The Begum desires to be kindly remembered to you. She says she should not have had any objection to my sending her picture to you, if she had not herself intended to take round the original; and that as she is so much handsomer than her picture, she wishes you to see her first.’
¹⁶

The new portrait of Khair un-Nissa was not the only picture in the apartment. On elephant-back, all the way from Hyderabad, the grieving Begum had brought with her the huge, life-size Chinnery of her two beloved children, all that she had now to cling onto from her marriage and her former life.

Soon the fame of the wonderful portrait began to spread, and before long strangers were turning up at the house asking to see it. As Russell wrote to his brother, ‘Chinnery’s picture of the Colonel’s children has been universally admired, and has acquired great celebrity for him here.’
¹⁷

This strange, diverse group of people from Hyderabad—a mixed bag of Begums,
munshis
, senior British diplomats and their respective slaves and staff—had more in common than mere geographical proximity. They were all, to different extents, refugees from the new regime at the Hyderabad Residency.

Thomas Sydenham, a Wellesley acolyte, had been appointed Resident soon after James had died. He had immediately set about removing all vestiges of James’s approach to Anglo—Hyderabadi relations, quarrelling with Nizam Sikander Jah within days of arriving at the durbar, and convincing Ghulam Imam Khan, author of the
Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi
, that he was intent on ‘ceasing all the work of Hushmut Jung, whose approach he disliked’.
¹⁸
At the same time, Khair was given notice to vacate the Rang Mahal, even though Sydenham had an English wife and did not need it for his own use. The strict rules about caste purity in the Residency kitchens (observed, presumably, to reassure Indian guests) were cancelled, and there was a fundamental change in the way the Residency operated.
¹⁹

Sydenham seems in fact to have defined himself and his style in direct opposition to that of James Kirkpatrick.
^hp
When he bought two of James’s silver elephant howdahs which had once belonged to Tipu Sultan’s father, Haidar Ali, he felt it necessary to send a despatch to Calcutta explaining that he had no intention of going the way of Kirkpatrick, despite the impression that might have been created by the purchase: ‘the dignity and respectability of the British Representative should be made to rest—as indeed it does rest—on more solid foundation than the maintenance of state and splendour borrowed from the manners and habits of the natives of Asia [which are] in great degree inconsistent with our national character’, he wrote.
²⁰

There are also hints that there was some sort of financial scandal in which Sydenham believed the old regime to be indirectly implicated. The exact details are unclear, but Sydenham decided that Munshi Aziz Ullah was responsible and had sacked him on the spot, even before initiating a proper investigation. This summary treatment horrified and disgusted Henry Russell, who had great respect for the
munshi
, admired his negotiating skills, and knew the degree to which he was responsible for the small print of all three of the treaties James had signed. Indeed he described the
munshi
to his brother Charles as ‘a man of uncommon character and acquirements, whose abilities did more for the Company than any European unaided could ever have done, and whose integrity was confirmed and secured by his pride … For all the important measures he [James Kirkpatrick] carried through he was ultimately indebted to Uzeez Oolah; [indeed] no one but himself could have been so indebted with such impunity.’
^21
hq

Russell’s theory was that the scandal was the creation of Captain William Hemming, the commander of James’s bodyguard, whom he and James had long disliked and distrusted. Moreover, Russell believed that it was part of Hemming’s ongoing attempt to smear James’s memory:

Russell personally disliked both Hemming and Sydenham, and one of his principal hopes in coming to Calcutta, while ostensibly only taking a short period of leave from the Residency to sort out Kirkpatrick’s will, was to find more congenial employment elsewhere in India. To this end he spent many of his evenings in Calcutta away from his Hyderabadi friends, attending a succession of levées and dinners at Government House in an attempt to find a suitable opening.
²³

Russell may have had his faults, but disloyalty was not one of them. For the rest of his life he remained unwaveringly true to James’s memory, and vigorously defended him whenever his style or record was attacked. While in Calcutta he was constantly enquiring of his brother Charles in Hyderabad how people were talking about Kirkpatrick and wanting to know how loyal or not James’s other old friends were being. In one letter, for example, he asks about ‘the Engineer’ (as the architect Samuel Russell
^hr
was known):

When Charles replied that the Engineer was indeed joining in the merriment and making jokes about James, Henry was incandescent:

Five years later when Russell did indeed become Resident, he made a great point of bringing back all the usages of James’s time—including the maintenance of strict caste rules in the kitchens—and kept to his promise to refuse to employ anyone who had been in any way disloyal to his old friend and patron.
²⁶

By the end of May 1806, once the Hyderabad party were settled in their Chowringhee house, they began to receive visitors.

Fyze and the General were the first to call. The two were now getting older, and beginning to feel their age. The General was also depressed—both by the disappointments that Wellesley had brought to the end of his career, and by the financial constraints that his new, reduced salary had imposed upon him. Throughout his life Palmer had always had debts, and as his worried son John wrote, despite ‘knowing the insecurity of his income, he never dreamt of saving one six pence out of it; and he has continued just as careless under the precarious enjoyment of his pension: every dumree of it goes somehow or somewhere’.
²⁷

Palmer’s financial situation was in fact rather worse than John had feared. It was becoming increasingly clear that the old General no longer had the income to service his debts and obligations, and as he wrote to Warren Hastings around this time, ‘I sincerely accuse myself for having neglected to secure a provision for my family & repose for my old age.’
²⁸
This was something, naturally enough, that worried his family too, and their anxiety was compounded by both the General and his wife refusing to change their courtly lifestyle to match their newly reduced circumstances. William, Fyze’s eldest child, took it upon himself quietly to put money aside for Fyze’s old age (as she was twenty years younger than the General it was naturally expected that he would die before her), knowing full well that his father would never have sufficient funds to do so. This was something that his half-brother John agreed was sadly very necessary. Writing to William, John said that he greatly