White Mughals (71 page)

Six weeks later Russell reported that Fyze (whom he calls by her Mughal title, the Sahib Begum) was still ‘I fear in great distress. She has shut herself up entirely ever since the Begum’s death, and will not see anybody. The people about her have not ventured to tell her of the death of another relation which happened about a fortnight ago, and she has not yet mustered the resolution to see the old lady [Sharaf un-Nissa]. I wish for both their sakes that the first meeting were over. She says she has lost the only real friend she ever had; and I suspect from what I have heard of her disposition and habits, that it is truly the case.’

Sharaf un-Nissa was also completely inconsolable. Russell told Lady Hood that he had shown the letter she had written him about Khair to her mother:

Those are the final words we hear of Khair un-Nissa, the Most Excellent of Women, beloved wife of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and Henry Russell’s rejected lover. She had lived the saddest of lives. At a time, and in a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives, Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion. Her love affair had torn her family apart and brought her, her mother, her grandmother and her husband to the brink of destruction. Then, just when it seemed that she had, against all the odds, finally succeeded in realising her dream, both her husband and her children were taken from her, for ever, and in her widowhood she was first disgraced, then banished, and finally rejected. When she died—this fiery, passionate, beautiful woman—it was as much from a broken heart, from neglect and sorrow, as from any apparent physical cause.

There is no evidence that Khair un-Nissa received any direct messages from her children after their departure in 1805. It is however recorded that both she and her mother wrote desperate letters to England, begging and pleading for the children to be sent back to her.
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No reply ever came to these letters, until, ironically enough, six weeks after her death. For in November 1813, a letter and a pair of portraits of her children finally arrived in Hyderabad. It was of course too late for Khair, but Russell recorded the reaction of Sharaf un-Nissa to the pictures of the ‘poor Begum’s’ children: ‘I like them very much,’ he wrote to Lady Hood,

Yet even here the story does not quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final, extraordinary coda.

 

 

 

After being helped into the roundhouse of the
Lord Hawkesbury
at Madras, Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum—or, as they were now known, Katherine Aurora and William George Kirkpatrick—had to endure six long months on board ship, most of it out of sight of land.

During the voyage they found themselves under the watchful eyes of a posse of four guardians: the motherly figure of Mrs Ure; an equally well-rounded though rather younger (and unnamed) Indian ayah; Mrs Perry, the elderly wife of one of James’s bandsmen; and another faithful Hyderabadi manservant of James whom the children knew from the Residency. As they rounded the Cape, crossed the Equator and headed for the temperate climes of the north, and as the returning English passengers began to relish the familiar sensation of the cool Atlantic climate, the utter strangeness of the bleak, foreign, northern world they were heading towards must have slowly dawned upon the children.

For those Company servants who had spent many years in India, the barren chill of England held in the cold embrace of winter often came as an unexpected shock: after a decade in the East, and after months of longing for an imagined Britain of Eden-like beauty, the Scottish artist James Baillie Fraser had been horrified to find that ‘the brown of winter shrouded all, a gloomy welcome to the returned wanderer … all about seemed as desolate as a deserted city’.
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To those brought up in the light and warmth and colour of India, who had never before felt the cold, or seen the thick impenetrable murk of an English fog, the February half-light would have seemed all the more unnerving and uninviting.

The reception that awaited the party at their place of disembarkation ‘some four or five miles from Portsmouth’ could well have compounded this feeling of loss and despair. According to the somewhat condescending George Elers, a captain in the 12th Regiment of Foot, who happened to be travelling home on the same boat:

Elers bribed the officers with a massive twenty guineas of
baksheesh
and in due course delivered the children to the London townhouse of the Handsome Colonel in Fitzroy Square, an area of the capital perennially popular with returned nabobs and old India hands. The children’s uncle William was there to meet them too, luckily perhaps, as it is unclear how much English they would have understood at this stage, and after their parting from the bilingual Mrs Ure, William’s linguistic gifts may well have been much needed. Less than a month later, the two Muslim children were baptised Christian on 25 March 1806 at St Mary’s church, Marylebone Road.
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Another last link with India was severed.

The children grew up at Hollydale, the Handsome Colonel’s rambling country house near Keston in Kent, with frequent visits to Exeter to see their uncle William and all their West Country cousins. But inevitably they ‘pined for their native surroundings’; and they were forbidden from writing to their mother, grandmother or any of their Indian family, who in turn ‘wrote pathetic appeals to send them [back] out … probably it was feared that, if once they went there, the call of the blood might make complications’.
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Sadder still, ‘in after years the daughter told her own children how long she and her brother had pined for the father and mother they remembered, and longed to get away from the cold of England to Hyderabad, and were sad at hearing that they were not to go there again, which was all they could understand of their father’s death’.
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It was a childhood marred by more of the emotional and physical upheavals that had already scarred their young lives. The first trauma was the increasing incoherence of their uncle William, with whom they seem initially to have spent much of their holidays.
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William Kirkpatrick had retired to a relatively small but elegant townhouse in Exeter, an easy carriage drive from Sir John Kennaway, his ‘oldest and most esteemed friend’.
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Southernhay House lay in the lee of the crumbling Norman towers of Exeter Cathedral, the centrepiece of the smart new development of Southernhay, which prided itself on being to Exeter what the Royal Crescent was to Bath. The house lay in the middle of the two wings of the crescent, the only detached residence in the whole development. With its pair of side-wings, fluted classical pillars and a pedimented portico, it stood assertively in the middle of the other flat-fronted Georgian townhouses with their fan windows and wooden shutters, somewhat like a miniature redbrick version of the Hyderabad Residency re-erected in Devon. It was also remarkable in the English townscape for one single Oriental flourish that distinguished it from everything around it: a pair of twisted old Indian palm trees standing sentinel in front of the house, presumably planted by William to make the children—or indeed himself—feel at home amid the oaks, chestnuts and holly trees of Southernhay Green.
^ir

William was now an invalid. He had never recovered from either his bowel complaint or his ‘rheumatic gout’, and by 1809 he was confined to a chair. Judging by the pain he suffered and his increasingly erratic handwriting, he may have been taking large quantities of laudanum to help soothe his condition.
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But despite his illness, and the laudanum, he worked prolifically at his Oriental studies. He helped select a library for the Company, and wrote an account of his travels in Nepal.
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Increasingly, however, he became obsessed with the figure of Tipu Sultan. Before William had left India, James had in September 1801 sent him a huge wagonload of documents which had been taken from Tipu’s chancellery in Seringapatam.
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These documents William now worked up for publication in his 1811 volume
Select Letters of Tippoo Sultaun
, carefully sifting and selecting his material with a view to showing Tipu in the most fearsome light possible.
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As the decade progressed, William’s interests seem to have centred more and more on Tipu’s astronomical and astrological learning. William’s letter books in the India Office contain a series of fascinating letters that he wrote to Mark Wilks, Lord Clive’s Private Secretary during the Clive Enquiry into James’s love life, who had gone on to become Resident in Mysore, and the author of a series of important studies of both Mughal metaphysics and the political history of Tipu’s reign.
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William’s correspondence with Wilks deals with increasing singlemindedness on Tipu’s astrological system, and seems to hint at his growing conviction that Tipu had correctly forecast the time of his own death by a series of esoteric astrological calculations.

In November 1809 Wilks sent William the answer to his query as to the exact moment—according to Tipu’s new Mysore calendar—of Tipu’s birth ‘in the year Angeera on the 17th of the month Margeser. Angeera is the 6th of the cycle and corresponds to 1752-3.’
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From William’s last letters emerges an extraordinary picture of a man, clearly aware that he is dying, taking larger and larger doses of laudanum, obsessively studying the Mysore system of astrology, and all the while (one grows increasingly to suspect) making calculations, casting horoscopes, and believing that he is onto something, that he really does hold, almost within his grasp, some sort of universal Philosopher’s Stone. Whether William, in the haze of an opium addiction, really was trying to calculate the date of his own death in the same way that he clearly believed Tipu had succeeded in doing, must remain a matter of speculation; but it is certainly a possibility.
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