White Mughals (67 page)

Knowing now for sure that their affair would have to end once they arrived at their destination, the two lovers slowed their progress even further. An express runner could make the journey from Calcutta to Masulipatam in under two weeks (something that amazed Abdul Lateef Shushtari, and which he compared to the old Sufi tales of saints being able to fly at will from one end of India to another
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), but on this journey Russell and Khair took over twelve. They were clearly in no hurry to resume their separate lives.

By the end of March the two had passed Masulipatam and were only a week’s journey from Hyderabad, when they stopped for three days to allow the Begum’s party and Russell’s own Muslim servants to celebrate Muharram. Their tents were still pitched by the banks of the Krishna when another express courier cantered into the camp bringing yet another urgent letter, this time from Charles Russell. Again it contained bad news. Mir Alam had at last reacted to the news of Henry’s ‘protection’ of his cousin. In a conversation with Sydenham the new Minister had made it chillingly clear that Khair un-Nissa was a disgrace to her family and that she would not be welcome back in Hyderabad. The vehemence with which the Mir had said this made it quite apparent what it meant. It would not be safe for Khair to return. If she did her life would be in danger.

This was of course the worst possible news; but there seemed no way of getting around it. Now that Sydenham had been forbidden by Calcutta to offer any protection whatsoever to Khair un-Nissa, she had to make a simple choice: either to return and risk Mir Alam’s desire for vengeance, or to settle elsewhere. As Russell wrote back to his brother, he had expected that if he had left the Begum alone she would have been

He then, rather belatedly, apologised to Charles for not having been more open with him about his relationship with Khair: ‘You are more than justified in censuring me for not having communicated to you what passed respecting the Begum before I left Calcutta … I thought it probable that you would not hear that anything had passed until I arrived in Hyderabad, and that I should have had an opportunity of personally talking the matter over with you.’
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For three weeks, Russell and Khair remained stationary in their temporary encampment, apparently torn by indecision. Russell wrote to Sydenham and Charles to try to find some way around the impasse. Eventually, however, it became clear that there was no choice. In the second week of April Charles wrote again to Henry. The rumours of Khair un-Nissa’s affair with him had been the final straw. The situation was hopeless. Mir Alam’s mind was made up. Khair could not return. She had to find somewhere else to live, outside the Nizam’s dominions.

The worst had happened. Mir Alam had decided formally to banish Khair un-Nissa from Hyderabad. Already a widow at the age of nineteen, the Begum was now, in addition to that, at twenty, an exile, a refugee.

On 14 April 1807 Henry wrote back to his brother, telling him of the decision he and Khair had finally made: ‘Your letter has convinced me that [Khair un-Nissa] would be exposed to great danger at Hyderabad.’ He explained that he read Charles’s letter to the two Begums, who ‘notwithstanding the desire they had both felt to return to Hyderabad, and the repugnance they had always evinced against remaining in the Company’s Territories, both resolved, without any further advice or persuasion from me, to relinquish their original plan, and to settle, for the present at least, at Masulipatam’. He added: ‘Whether Residence there, or in any other part of the Company’s country, will be permanent, or whether it will continue only during the life of Meer Allum, is a question of which the decision must depend on various circumstances which may hereafter come to pass. At all events they will be secure from danger at Masulipatam; and to that important consideration that of mere comfort must of course be sacrificed.’
⁴⁹

Russell went on to say that he had written to the Company’s agent in Masulipatam, Major Alexander, ‘directing him to prepare the best house that can be got for the reception of the Begum, and I shall myself accompany her to Masulipatam. I shall stay there only a few days, to see her comfortably settled, and to make such arrangements as may be necessary for her establishment, and shall then run on by dawke [i.e. as fast as possible] to Hyderabad … I hope I shall get [there] during the first week in May.’

He also gave detailed instructions to his brother about how he was to break the news to Durdanah Begum without unduly alarming the old lady:

It is at this stage that a note of ambiguity enters Russell’s letter. Up to now, he seems, like James before him, to have been prepared to risk his career to save his relationship with Khair. He had, after all, stood up to Neil Edmonstone and made the Governor General change his ruling that the Begum should remain in exile in Calcutta. But Henry Russell was a very different man to James Kirkpatrick. He had clearly been flattered by the Begum’s attentions, and had perhaps been mildly surprised to find himself in bed with his former principal’s wife. But there were limits to how far he was prepared to let such considerations get in the way of his career.

Such was Russell’s conceit that he seemed temperamentally incapable of taking in how culpable he was in the wrecking of Khair’s future: far from dwelling on what he had brought about—the final destruction of her reputation, her banishment and exile—he instead wrote to his brother patting himself on the back and remarking: ‘It will be gratifying to me to reflect that I shall have placed the Begum beyond the Reach of Danger, and myself beyond the necessity of asking favours from Captain Sydenham. I shall now feel perfectly independent of him; and I am sure that nothing will contribute so assuredly of our living on good terms together, as my never having occasion to ask him for anything.’

Already it was clear that his main concern was less ‘the poor little Begum’ than his own ease and reputation. As he explained to Charles: ‘the interests of both of us [i.e. the two Russell brothers] require that we should adopt the most decisive measures in our power to contradict the reports, whether idle or malicious, which seem to prevail so generally at Hyderabad’.
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A week later, Russell, Khair and their attendants had arrived back at the hot, humid harbour town of Masulipatam.

Masulipatam had once been the principal trading station of the Coromandel coast, and in the seventeenth century had grown to become a port of international importance, providing access to the rich bazaars of the kingdom of Golconda at the peak of its power and influence. It was also one of the earliest outposts of both the English and the Dutch East India Companies.
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But it had long been overtaken by both Madras and Vizagapatam, and its fate was sealed after it was sacked and burned to the ground first by Aurangzeb in 1661, then again by the Marathas in a raid in the mid-eighteenth century. It was finally overwhelmed by a cataclysmic cyclone which had swept over its sea walls only seven years before Russell and Khair’s arrival, during the monsoon of 1800.

By 1807 therefore, this once bustling port had shrunk to a small, ramshackle place, with a crumbling fort, a newly rebuilt English church and a graveyard quickly filling up with the victims of its endemic malarial mosquitoes, inhabitants of the undrained salt marshes to the west of the town.
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Three miles to the south, across the causeway from the English Civil Lines, the port’s deep-water harbour was slowly silting up, and was remarkable now less for its trading than its fishing fleet, after which it had become known locally as Machli-patnam, or Fish Town. The name stuck,
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partly no doubt because of the strong stench generated by the huge catch brought in every morning by the port’s flotilla of small wooden catamaran-canoes, and the overpowering odour of the small fry left out on the sand of its beaches to dry in the sun.

The fishermen here were of the lowest castes, dark-skinned untouchables; the English community was small; and there was no Mughlai society to mention.
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Even the town’s Nawab, James Dalrymple’s brother-in-law, had left the place and settled in the more lively atmosphere of Madras, a hundred miles to the south.
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A Dutch visitor at about this time reported that in addition to the all-pervading smell of fish, the swampy morass outside the city walls emitted an unbearable stench in dry weather, and the heat was so ‘insufferable that one can neither read, nor write, nor think’.
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Masulipatam was, in short, not a place Khair or her mother would ever naturally have chosen to live, which presumably indicated that both women at this stage believed that their exile would be of short duration.

On arrival, Khair and Russell pitched their tents in a garden belonging to Alexander, the Company’s elderly and rather fussy agent (Russell refers to him in his letters as ‘Old Mother Alexander’), in the shadow of his two-storey mansion. With Alexander’s help they set about trying to find temporary accommodation for Khair, rejecting the Nawab’s house as ‘too extensive’ and settling instead on a more modest bungalow: ‘I hope to settle everything about it in the course of tomorrow,’ wrote Russell, ‘and the next day, and to have the house cleaned out, and prepared for the Begum’s reception, by the first of the month. At all events there is every prospect that she will be comfortably situated; more so perhaps than she would have been at any other place in the Company’s territory... ’

Yet again, Russell’s tone seems somehow inadequate to the desperation of the occasion. There are no notes of regret, anguish or contrition in his letters, instead merely the passing observation that ‘As far as I can tell the society here is not very good. People live mostly to themselves.’ This was an understatement of the first order: there was not one person in Masulipatam with whom either Begum was likely to make friends. There was nothing to do and little to see. It was hot and it smelt. Russell himself seems to have been anxious to leave the town as quickly as possible, and in his letters at least, spares little time worrying about Khair’s life in such an unpleasant backwater.

More insensitive still are his remarks to Charles, who had just informed him by despatch that Henry’s
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in Hyderabad had given birth to a baby girl prematurely, and that the child looked unlikely to survive. Russell’s reaction is chilling: ‘I am sorry for the account you give me of the probability of losing my little girl,’ he writes, ‘but it would be hypocrisy to pretend that it had afflicted me deeply. Even the loss of an infant that we have seen, we lament only in proportion to the love we bear its mother; and the death therefore of a child, whom not only have we never seen, but whose mother was never an object of attachment, cannot be regarded as a misfortune of very serious magnitude.’ Then with barely a pause he continues, having apparently dismissed the
bibi
, the dying baby girl and Khair from his mind: ‘I have not a book to read in my palanquin between here and Hyderabad. Despatch me one
immediately by dawke
and if you cannot find a better, send me
Madam Europe.
’ The letter reveals the small sliver of ice in Russell’s heart, a compound of selfcentredness, conceit and insensitivity, qualities that became increasingly evident in the months to come.