IX

When William Hunter sailed into Calcutta for the first time to take up a job as a Junior Clerk in the Company at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, he wrote home: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’ And this wasn’t just because (as one cruel commentator has suggested) he was in love—and had arrived fresh from Peckham.¹

In 1806 Calcutta was at the height of its golden age. Known as the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East, the British bridgehead in Bengal was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in India. Here a Nabob like Philip Francis could boast in the 1770s that he was ‘master of the finest house in Bengal, with a hundred servants, a country house, spacious gardens, horses and carriages’. Francis’s ‘wine book’, which survives in the India Office Library, gives an indication of the style in which such men lived: in one typical month, chosen at random, Francis, his family and his guests drank seventy-five bottles of Madeira, ninety-nine bottles of claret, seventy-four bottles of porter, sixteen bottles of rum, three bottles of brandy and one bottle of cherry brandy—some 268 bottles in all, though part of the reason for such consumption was the noxious state of the Calcutta drinking water, and the widespread belief that it should always be ‘purified’ by the addition of alcohol—and especially by a little tot of brandy.²

Nor was it just the British who did well and lived extravagantly: Bengali merchant dynasties also flourished. The Mullick family, for example, had rambling baroque palaces strewn around the city, and used to travel around Calcutta in an ornate carriage drawn by two zebras.

If Calcutta impressed and surprised the British who sailed out from Georgian London, it amazed Mughal and Persian travellers, for whom it combined the splendour of scale with the novelty of imported notions of European urban management and Palladian architecture.^hj Khair un-Nissa’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari, first saw Calcutta in 1789 and could not believe his eyes: ‘The city now contains around five thousand imposing two or three storey houses of stone or brick and stucco,’ he wrote.

Most are white but some are painted and coloured like marble. Seven hundred pairs of oxen and carts are appointed by the Company to take rubbish daily from streets and markets out of the city and tip it into the river. All the pavements have drains to carry off the rain water to the river and are made of beaten brick so as to absorb water and prevent mud forming. Houses stand on the road and allow passers-by to see what is happening inside; at night camphor candles are burned in upper and lower rooms, which is a beautiful sight. Grain and rice are plentiful and cheap …

There is no fear of robbers nor highwaymen, no one challenges where you are going nor where you have come from; all the time, big ships come from Europe and China and the New World filled with precious goods and fine cloths, so that velvets and satins, porcelains and glassware have become commonplace. In the harbour at Calcutta there are over 1000 large and small ships at anchor, and constantly the captains fire cannons to signal arrival or departure … ³

If Calcutta was a city of trade and business, it was also a place of swaggering excess, famous for being as debauched and dissolute as any port in the world. Forty years earlier, Robert Clive had written that ‘corruption, licentiousness and want of principle seem to have possessed the minds of all the Civil Servants’; and he spoke from experience. British Calcutta was a uniquely introverted, self-obsessed and self-regarding society, a little island of Britishness with remarkably few links to the real Indian India beyond. In his decade in the subcontinent, Philip Francis, for example, never ventured more than a mile or two outside Calcutta, and as late as 1793 the artist William Hodges, travelling up the Ganges and Jumna, could express it ‘a matter of surprise that a country so closely allied to us should be so little known. Of the face of the country, of its arts and crafts little has yet been said.’⁴

The hundreds of Company servants and soldiers who arrived annually in Calcutta—typically, penniless younger sons of provincial landed families, Scots who had lost their estates or their fortunes (or both) in one of the Jacobite uprisings, squaddies recruited from the streets of the East End, down-at-heel Anglo-Irish landowners and clergymen’s sons—were all prepared to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles to the impossible climate of Bengal’s undrained marsh and steaming jungle, hazarding what would very probably be an early death, for one reason: if you survived there was no better place in the world to make your fortune.

More clearly and unequivocally than those elsewhere in India, the British inhabitants of Calcutta had come east to amass a fortune in the quickest possible time. For the politically ambitious in the East India Company too, this was the place to be: here, by the side of the Governor General, was somewhere you could make your name, find yourself quickly promoted up the ranks, and, all being well, return home with a Governor’s cocked hat and an honour which would allow you to match your elder brother’s inherited title. Few in Calcutta seem to have had much interest in either the mores of the country they were engaged in plundering, or in the social niceties of that which they had left behind.

By 1806 William Hickey was an attorney working for Henry Russell’s father, the Chief Justice of Bengal. He had been in Calcutta for thirty years now, but was still appalled by the excesses he saw around him every day in the taverns and dining rooms of the city. In his celebrated diaries he depicts a grasping, jaded, philistine world where bored, moneyed Writers (as the Company called its clerks) would amuse themselves in Calcutta’s punch houses^hk by throwing half-eaten chickens across the tables. Their womenfolk tended to throw only bread and pastry (and then only after a little cherry brandy), which restraint they regarded as the highest ‘refinement of wit and breeding’. Worse still was

the barbarous [Calcutta] custom of pelleting [one’s dining companions] with little balls of bread, made like pills, which was even practised by the fair sex. Mr. Daniel Barwell was such a proficient that he could, at a distance, snuff a candle and that several times successively. This strange trick fitter for savages than for polished society, produced many quarrels … A Captain Morrison had repeatedly expressed his abhorrence of pelleting, and said that if any person struck him with one he should consider it intended as an insult and resent it accordingly. In a few minutes after he had so said he received a smart blow in the face from one which, although discharged from a hand below the table, he could trace by the motion of the arm from whence it came, and saw that the pelleter was a very recent acquaintance.

He therefore without the least hesitation, took up a dish that stood before him containing a leg of mutton, which he discharged at the offender, and with such well-directed aim that it took him upon the head, knocking him off his chair and giving him a severe cut upon the temple. This produced a duel in which the unfortunate pelleter was shot through the body, lay upon his bed for many months, and never perfectly recovered.⁵

With only 250 European women to four thousand men, and with little else to spend their money on, the young Writers tended to wander the streets of Calcutta, whoring in the city’s famous brothels and debauching in its taverns. Even the otherwise admiring Shushtari was horrified by the number of bordellos lining the Calcutta backstreets, and the health problems this caused:

Brothels are advertised with pictures of prostitutes hung at the door … Atashak—a severe venereal disease causing a swelling of the scrotum and testicles—affects people of all classes. Because so many prostitutes are heaped together that it spreads from one to another, healthy and infected mixed together, no one holding back—and this is the state of even the Muslims in these parts!⁶

Even his own cousin, he admits elsewhere, caught something of the sort in Calcutta, ‘an itching skin disease called hakka o jarb common in Bengal … It spread to cover his whole body and the itching allowed him no rest, so that he had to employ four servants to scratch and scrub him continually; this they did so vigorously that he often fainted; and he was no longer able to eat or sleep.’⁷ That such social diseases were rampant was due at least partly to the fact that the manners and morals of Calcutta’s European élite left much to be desired, at least to Shushtari’s Persian eyes. It wasn’t just the phenomenal consumption of alcohol that worried him: ‘No-one eats on his own at home whether by night or by day, and people who know each other go to each others’ houses and debauch together … No man can prevent his wife from mixing with strange men, and by reason of women going unveiled, it is quite the thing to fall in love...’⁸

All this was, in a way, hardly surprising. The Writers who made up most of the Company’s Calcutta employees were little more than school-boys, sent out from England as young as fifteen. After a dull and uncomfortable six-month voyage they were let loose from the holds and found themselves free from supervision for the first time. One traveller commented how ‘the keeping of race horses, the extravagant parties and entertainments generally involve the young Writers in difficulties and embarrassments at an early period of their lives’, while according to another observer, ‘the costly champagne suppers of the Writers Building were famous, and long did the old walls echo to the joyous songs and loud rehearsing tally-hoes’.

Joyous songs was clearly about as sophisticated as British Calcutta’s musical scene got. In 1784 a Danish player of the newly invented clarinet turned up in the city, seeking employment. Joseph Fowke, regarded as one of the more cultured citizens, was appalled: ‘This Clarinet D’Amor [is] a coarse instrument,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘worse to my ears than the grunting of Hogs.’ As for the new music of Haydn that the clarinet player had brought with him from Europe, Fowke was quite clear that it was not fit for public performance: ‘[This] Noisy modern music … ’ he wrote. ‘[Haydn is] the Prince of Coxcombs.’ A John Bull conservative down to his square-toed shoes, Fowke continued, ‘Fashion governs the world of Music as it does in dress—Few regulate their taste on the unerring principles of Truth and good Sense.’⁹

Certainly not, so it would seem, the Calcutta clergy. According to Hickey, the army chaplain Mr Blunt, ‘[an] incomprehensible young man, got abominably drunk and in that disgraceful condition exposed himself to both soldiers and sailors, talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry, and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs, so as to render himself a common laughing stock’.^hl Even the Calcutta Constabulary were far from paragons of virtue: W.C. Blaquière, the startlingly effeminate police magistrate throughout the 1780s, being a noted cross-dresser who used to leap at any opportunity to adopt female disguises.^hm

Wellesley had made some efforts to reform this dissolution, and in one of his more far-sighted moves had set up Fort William College in an attempt to educate the cleverer of the Writers in the Indian languages that they would need to administer the subcontinent. But the social reforms and stricter Victorian morality that began to establish themselves from the 1830s onwards were still far away, and in 1806, when Khair un-Nissa first arrived in Calcutta, this was still a city of Hogarthian dissipation.

Sometime at the beginning of May 1806, a small boatload of Shi’a Muslims from Hyderabad docked at the Port of Calcutta. Two veiled Begums were accompanied by their ladies-in-waiting and the shrouded ladies of another family, headed by a pair of suave and highly educated brothers, originally from Delhi.^hn Munshi Aziz Ullah and his younger brother Aman Ullah, and their families, had all made the journey to Calcutta before and knew what to expect. But to Khair un-Nissa and her mother this was all new, foreign territory, to be wondered at with the widest of eyes.

It was not the sailing season: the winds and unpredictable coastal tides of April and May made it too unsafe. So from Masulipatam, the party had skirted the foothills of the Eastern Ghats on elephant-back, then headed on up the east coast as far as the Orissan river port of Cuttack. There they had sent their elephants and the mahouts back to Hyderabad, and caught a skiff down to the coast and thence across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta.

After the relatively dry, equable climate of Hyderabad, the weather in a Bengali May—the hottest and most humid time of the year—would have been something quite new to the two Begums. Certainly, their cousin Abdul Lateef had been amazed by the humid fertility of the Calcutta hinterland—so different from the dusty scrub of Persia or the Deccan plateau: ‘The rainy season lasts for up to four months,’ he wrote,

during which time it is difficult for men and animals to pass, the fields and plains are all under water, and the wealthier citizens spend their time on boats as their dwellings are flooded. [In the fields around Calcutta] rice grows up to a hand’s breadth overnight when the rains are heavy … Agriculture is flourishing here, well-tended and pleasing to the eye, indeed unparalleled in all the world. In all seasons the surrounding country is emerald-green in colour: you cannot find one rock in the mountains nor one handful of earth in the plain which is not green... ¹⁰

The Hyderabadi party eventually landed at Beebee Johnson’s Ghat, beside the old Customs House, and set off—perhaps carried in closed purdah carriages or covered palanquins—to a rented house in the fashionable district of Chowringhee.¹¹

To the two Begums, this city, so different from their own, and indeed from anything they had ever seen, must have been a breathtaking sight. Like their cousin Abdul Lateef Shushtari twenty years earlier, they would have been amazed at their first glimpse of a European town: by the succession of tall, white-porticoed palaces that lined the banks of the Hooghly long before they arrived at the city itself; by the mansions of Garden Reach with their soft lawns and fertile, landscaped grounds leading down to the muddy brown monsoon waters of the river; by the flowerbeds of the riverside gardens full of unfamiliar, imported English blooms; by the star-shaped ramparts of Fort William, then the port with its hundred Indiamen bobbing at anchor; the wide, clean streets leading into the heart of the town, and the buggies and carriages bumping in and out of the potholes on the Esplanade; the top hats and tailcoats of the men about town; the busks, parasols and (inexplicably to Muslim eyes) lapdogs of their ladies; the Governor General’s bodyguards in their plumed busbees and ‘blazing uniforms’; the ubiquitous storks perched atop Wellesley’s new Government House; the gleaming stucco.

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.’^21hq

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:

If there was reason to suppose that abuses existed in any department of the treasury at H [i.e. the Hyderabad Residency] it was unquestionably wise to institute an enquiry. But whatever may be the result, I am convinced that no imputation of blame can be affixed to the character of Colonel Kirkpatrick. I am almost as much assured of the integrity of Uzeez Ullah … It is an extraordinary circumstance that every charge that I have ever heard urged against the Colonel [Kirkpatrick] or the Moonshy, and every suspicion which ever entered my mind against either of them, were communicated to me by Hemming; and its surely honourable to the character of both the Colonel and the Moonshy, that the most unrelenting and virulent malignity has been unable to prove a single instance of his misconduct against either of them … I am convinced that we shall be able to defeat all the malice of the poor Colonel’s enemies with plain and simple matters of fact.²²

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):

How does the Engineer conduct himself? And what part does he take in any discussions that arise regarding the Colonel? He is perhaps too weak to persevere in proposing that gratitude which he ought to feel; but it would be painful to me to think that among the many to whom the poor Colonel was kind, you and I are the only two that cherish the memory of his goodness... ²⁴

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

Your account of the Engineer’s conduct has gratified me exceedingly and what you say has caused me more pain than surprise. Perhaps I may be too sanguine, but I cannot help indulging a hope that some day I may be Resident at Hyderabad. If that day should arrive, he will find ample cause to deplore it, for he may be assured that my vengeance shall descend upon him, and that I will give him good reason to know [that] there is no crime which I will [deplore more?] highly, than that of Ingratitude to the Memory of a Benefactor.²⁵

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

approve[d] of your proposed plan of making a settlement on your mother for her life … [Perhaps] she should [now] forgo the allowance of Rs. 700 or more that she receives from the General and from whom she draws every other supply she requires … I confess however that I despair of the good sense and the moderation of the one [the General] or the economy & fortitude of the other [Fyze, who was always regarded as ‘magnificent’, i.e. enjoying life’s little perks] & that your benevolence would be abused without the slightest relief to my father is my rooted belief …

Despite this, John was able to report that both ‘the old lady’ and her husband were in fine fettle:

I have however the happiness of assuring you that his constitution is nothing impaired & that few men 15 years his junior have a fairer chance of life. He sleeps and eats well—and though occasionally inconvenienced by a severe tritius auditus [spells when he heard ringing in his ears], their duration is short and a yet shorter time restores his vigor and health.²⁹

Staying around the corner from the Hyderabadis in John Palmer’s lavish Loll Bazaar mansion (notorious, incidentally, for its mosquitoes, which compelled lady supper-guests to cover their legs with thick stockings during dinner),^hs Fyze and the General came over regularly to see Khair, though Russell reported to his brother Charles that Fyze was upset with him for forgetting to bring ‘a parcel of soosunee [coloured embroidery] and other things from her son in Hyderabad. I recollect William telling me he intended giving me a present of that sort; but I cannot find it anywhere, and am strongly inclined to think that he neglected to send it to me. Ask him and let me know what he says.’³⁰

Another frequent caller at the house was William Kirkpatrick’s beautiful daughter Isabella Buller, in whose home James had died the previous year. Isabella was now heavily pregnant with her first child, and she and the Begum struck up a firm friendship from the moment they first met: ‘Since the Begum arrived in Calcutta, Mrs Buller has been extremely civil in calling on her, and paying her every Attention in her power,’ wrote Russell in June. ‘[Khair] is therefore desirous to evince her sense of this kindness, by gratifying Mrs Buller’s wishes to get some handsome native dresses, and as she left five very rich suits with her grandmother at Hyderabad, she thinks it is better to get them forwarded to Calcutta, than to incur the expense of making them up here.’³¹

Reverting to his role as the Begum’s self-appointed private secretary, Russell went on to give his brother more specific instructions about the consignment:

The enclosed letter to the old lady points out the things the Begum wishes to be despatched and desires that they may be very carefully packed and sent to you without delay. I will thank you to take it yourself to the old girl [Durdanah Begum], and to desire that she not be any time in complying with her daughter’s wish, as the season for sending things by sea is now nearly over. Take care also that they are well packed; and if you should not be satisfied with the Begum’s precautions, incur, on my account, any expense that may be requisite to secure the dresses not only from damp, but even from the sea air, which would be apt to tarnish the silver trimmings. When you get them, send them as expeditiously as possible to Alexander [the Company agent at Masulipatam], and check that he will send them consigned to me by the first vessel that may sail for the port of Calcutta.³²

Many other similar commissions on behalf of Khair un-Nissa soon followed. A week later, for example, after Isabella Buller gave birth to a little girl, Henry was writing to Hyderabad asking Charles to send ‘two lots of choorees [bangles], one for Mrs Buller, and the other to accompany whatever dupatta the Begum is making up for dear little Rose [Isabella’s baby daughter]’.³³

One thing that comes across very clearly in these letters is the strength of the bonds linking all these women: between Fyze, Isabella Buller and Khair, but also, more intensely and remarkably still, between Khair, her mother and her grandmother. The two Calcutta Begums are constantly writing to Durdanah Begum in Hyderabad, and a whole succession of small domestic requests (and even, apparently, on one occasion, a large helping of halwa carrot pudding³⁴) go backwards and forwards between Hyderabad and Calcutta, up and down the east coast via the two Russell brothers. The false rumour that Khair has died brings on a further succession of frantic letters. ‘I mentioned to the Begum the anxiety which had been caused to her family by the reports that have been prevalent about her illness,’ writes Henry in June,

but her mother is so fidgety, and so much distressed at anything that it is likely to occasion uneasiness to the old Begum, that I did not like to communicate it to her [Sharaf un-Nissa]. The old lady’s mind will have been set at ease by so many letters which she must have received before this time; but the Begum and I both thought it would be prudent to express to her grandmother some regret for the distress she has suffered from a premature report.

Russell and Khair ‘after consulting together’ therefore hatched a small family conspiracy to fake a letter from Sharaf un-Nissa to her mother, something which Russell reported to Charles was easily achieved as ‘the old lady always gets her letters written through me, and I had not much difficulty in accomplishing what we wished’.^ht He goes on: ‘Send the enclosed letter to the old lady immediately … You may also safely assure her that neither her daughter nor her granddaughter were ever in better health in their lives. The season has been uncommonly favourable and mild... ’³⁵

It is increasingly apparent throughout these letters that it is Khair who seems to be the dominant force among the women. It is she, not her mother, who is writing the letters;^hu and it is she who is always ordering the various items from Hyderabad. There is absolutely no question of Khair un-Nissa being some sort of powerless ex-concubine: this is a beautiful, charismatic Mughal noblewoman behaving according to her rank, with a pair of senior British officials running around to do her bidding. In her widowhood, she clearly still retained her magnetism and her effortless ability to get her way with all those who were drawn into her orbit. Henry Russell, who treated her both protectively and with the greatest of respect, seemed no more able or willing to resist her requests than her mother, grandmother or late husband had been before him. At times, indeed, Khair seems to treat Russell as if he is some sort of junior milliner’s assistant, dictating to him long precise details of her requests which he uncomplainingly passes on to his younger brother at the Residency:

The enclosed piece of husmah [material] was given me with a request that I would get her some of the same pattern. You will oblige me by consulting the old Begum on the subject. I understand that she will be able to extend you useful assistance, and that a female servant of hers, named Jagumma is particularly au fait at procuring husmah. One dress, which is all I want at present, will require six yards … get it done, that is a great fellow, as soon as you can, and send it to me carefully packed by dawke.³⁶

Pages full of further details follow, laying down exactly the measurements, patterns, colour and trimmings that the hapless Charles was supposed to find, and where he should go with Jugumma to get them.

In all ages, in all families, younger brothers are rarely treated with much deference by their elder siblings. Few however can have been so comprehensively patronised as Charles Russell, who was now Assistant Secretary at the Hyderabad Residency and so a diplomat of some standing and seniority in his own right,^hv but who nevertheless at this stage seems to have spent a great deal of his professional time running errands for the two Begums between the Residency, Durdanah Begum’s deorhi in Irani Gulli, and the various textile bazaars of the old city of Hyderabad, as well as trotting out to fetch any other personal items that Khair un-Nissa had forgotten to pack before leaving home, such as her paan set: ‘What is become of the chicknee, suparu and cardamoms [I ordered] for the Begum?’ demands Henry at one point. ‘I will thank you to send the enclosed letter to the Old Begum,’ begins another. ‘It contains a desire that she will give you a small box of medicine which her daughter is in the habit of taking, and which she cannot procure in Calcutta. It will be of very small dimensions, and I therefore beg you will forward it to me by dawke... ’³⁷

Intriguingly, amid all these letters between the women, there is never a single mention of Bâqar Ali Khan, nor of Khair’s brothers or uncles; and there is certainly no mention of Khair ever writing to them. The strongest bonds, quite clearly, were those within thezenana—although it could also be of course that Bâqar and the men of the family had broken off relations with their unusually strong-minded and somewhat ungovernable womenfolk.^hw

But increasingly—and perhaps inevitably—there is another bond in the air: that between Russell and Khair. Khair had spent eighteen months in mourning. She had lost her children—there is no indication that William Kirkpatrick encouraged them to write to her, though she presumably had news of them via William’s daughter Isabella Buller—and she had lost her husband. After the scandal of her affair with James, and the disgrace that Mir Alam had suffered in its wake, she was now very vulnerable to the Mir’s vengeance and was completely unprotected. Moreover she was only twenty, still regarded as a great beauty, and there is no stipulation in Islam against the remarriage of widows.^hx Indeed, Muslim tradition encourages it, and suggests that the late husband’s brother is usually the ideal second husband.

James’s two brothers were now in England and so unavailable; but his closest friend and Assistant was at hand, and seems to have needed little persuasion to have become more intimate with the ‘poor Begum’.

From the start, even before he arrived in Calcutta, Henry Russell had always been extremely solicitous to Khair un-Nissa.

In his letters to Charles on his way to Calcutta, Henry worries that as Ure and the other executors are taking so large a percentage of Kirkpatrick’s will as commission, the Begum is unlikely to get her full legacy. He therefore decides to claim his commission and give it straight to Khair, ‘both in order to remunerate her for the loss of the provisional bequest, and as the most fair and creditable mode of disposing of that money which nothing but Ure’s shabbiness and rapacity would have induced me to have requested from the estate’.^hy

Henry also takes it upon himself to get the new diwan^hz in Hyderabad, Rajah Chandu Lal, to pay up the money owed to the Begum from her jagirs (estates), while he personally advances her the legacy from James’s will from his own funds ‘in order to prevent the Begum suffering any financial embarrassment’.³⁸

The news that Khair had unveiled for Russell is the first hint that the two were becoming intimate. By July they were clearly discussing more personal matters. In the middle of the month, a letter arrived for Henry from Hyderabad telling him that his Hyderabadi concubine, by whom he had a son, had again become pregnant. There seemed to be no suggestion that the father was anyone but him,^‡ yet he still wrote a slightly chilling reply to Charles, saying that ‘your account of my girl’s conduct gives me much pain, and I am exceedingly dissatisfied to hear she is with child’. He adds: ‘On me she has not many claims, but the Begum has interceded very warmly for her; and at her particular request, I have consented to restore to the girl her full monthly allowance of 30 rupees she originally received from me. I will therefore thank you to pay her that sum in future, and to tell her that I expect her gratitude to the Begum, as well as to me, will induce her to behave better than she has done lately.’³⁹

He does not say it here, but the Begum—missing her own children as badly as she clearly did—had in fact offered to bring the child up herself; ^ia something that was in both Mughal and Georgian society more normally the response of a long-suffering wife to a husband’s infidelities than that of a distant friend or acquaintance. But if Charles Russell, on reading these letters, was growing suspicious of his brother’s relationships with the Begum, he does not appear to have voiced it. So it was only in November, as winter was beginning to set in across north India, that Henry brought the matter to a head. He began by telling Charles that he had changed his mind and had now decided to come back to his job beside Charles at the Residency: ‘You will be astonished to learn that I have determined to return to Hyderabad,’ he wrote.

The motives which have led to this decision appear to me so prudent and judicious, with a view to your interests, as well as to my own, that I am sure you will not disapprove of them … the result of my experience during the time I have been in Calcutta, convinces me that no situation in my own line is to be got here, and that Sir George Barlow [the acting Governor General since the sudden death of Cornwallis^ib] is the most unlikely man in the world to make one for me … It is true that Captain Sydenham is both poor and young, and that he is therefore likely to hold the Residency longer than it may be worth while to wait for it … [but] painful experience has taught me that in deciding a question like the present, the chance of death ought not to be excluded from the calculation … ^ic

Having tried to explain the purported reason for his sudden change of plan, Russell then, as discreetly as possible, drops a heavy hint about what has happened in his relationship with Khair un-Nissa:

The Begum having performed her intention of visiting the poor Colonel’s tomb, and finding herself melancholy and lonesome without the society of the friends and relations with whom she was accustomed to live, has gladly determined to avail herself of the security of my convoy to return to Hyderabad. After having resided so long among us, and having been accustomed since the poor Colonel’s death to look up to me entirely for protection and support, she wished, in addition to the house of the family in the city, to have one near me.

I have therefore purchased for her Uzeez Oolah’s Shadee Khana, the zenana which he gave to his nephew Ibrahim when he was about to leave Hyderabad, and the enclosure near the large mill containing the Bawuraha Khana, Movigh Khana, and other offices and accommodations for servants. Some or all of these houses are, I believe, occupied by Captain Sydenham’s Moonshee or his friends. Tell them I shall be very sorry to put them to any inconvenience, and that they are perfectly welcome to continue in the houses that I have bought until my arrival within a few marches of Hyderabad, when of course it will be necessary to have them cleaned and repaired for the Begum’s reception.

Having gently dropped into the middle of the letter the news that he had bought the Begum a zenana next to his own Residency bungalow, Russell goes on to reveal that Khair un-Nissa was very nervous about the security of her estates under Mir Alam. Her affair with James had, after all, led to the Mir’s disgrace six years earlier, and in his violent treatment of both Aristu Jah’s widow and the former Minister’s close political allies, the Mir had already shown his appetite for revenging himself on those who had brought exile and disgrace on him at that time. Khair thus had every reason to worry that since James’s death she was vulnerable to her cousin’s schemes of vengeance, and at the very least could expect that her estates, given to her at the time of her marriage by Aristu Jah, might now be seized by his successor. For this reason, in an earlier letter, she seems to have persuaded Russell to ask Sydenham to use his influence as Resident to guarantee her estates and her income. Sydenham had agreed to this, and Russell now ended the letter by telling Charles:

I have communicated to the Begum that part of your letter of the 22nd ultimo which contained Captain Sydenham’s handsome and satisfactory assurance of protecting her jagir and property. She is not less sensible of his kindness than I am; and she desires that when you express her gratitude to him, you will assure him that she will never abuse his kindness by troubling him with applications. She [now] does not seem to have any fears that her jagirs and property will be lapsed to the Nizam; and at all events, an attempt to encroach on them would be the only occasion that could induce her to request the interference of Captain Sydenham... ⁴⁰

The response to this letter was not long in coming. Despite his careful wording, no one in Hyderabad—least of all Sydenham—seems to have had any doubts about the nature of the ‘protection’ Russell was offering the Begum. Nor did the new Resident have any doubts as to Russell’s motives in wanting Khair installed in a zenana within easy reach of his bungalow. In both cases Sydenham’s suspicions proved entirely correct: though it was not something Russell yet felt able openly to admit, thrown together in the house in Calcutta by James’s death, he and Khair un-Nissa had indeed become lovers.

Three weeks later, when Sydenham’s reply reached him, Russell had not yet set off from Calcutta and was still making preparations for his overland journey back to Hyderabad. His preparations were not going to plan, and he had been forced to put off his departure as he grappled with the massive task of arranging a full complement of tents, elephants, carriage bullocks and an armed escort. He cannot have been very surprised by what he read in Sydenham’s letter, but nevertheless both he and Khair must have been bitterly disappointed by it.

In his reply to Russell, Sydenham makes it quite clear that he does indeed have a ‘serious objection’ to the plan of the Begum returning to the Residency, with the political repercussions this could cause.^id He also remarks that Russell’s plan would hardly be a very satisfactory solution to the Begum’s needs as, ‘after occupying the Rang Mahal and living in a state of comparative Opulence and Splendour, it must be distressing to her own feelings to be placed in the local remembrance of all her former Enjoyment, at one of the Moonshies dwellings’. It would, in other words, represent a considerable demotion for the Begum: from Lady of the Manor to what Sydenham regarded as a residence behind the green baize door. To soften this blow, the new Resident added:

At the same time I beg you to assure her that, if she determines in returning to Hyderabad, I will consider her under the protection and safeguard of the British Residency, that I will pay her every Attention and Respect in my Power; & that she may depend on my fullest assistance & support in securing her from every possible Inconvenience and Danger. If she requires any assurances from Mir Allum and his family, I will readily procure them, and I will take care that these assurances shall be meticulously fulfilled. She has only to point out how I can be useful to her, and she may rely on my most zealous exertions.⁴¹

This was an important and unexpectedly explicit guarantee of full protection, and must have come as a great relief to Khair. However, Sydenham appears immediately to have copied these letters, or at least relayed their contents, both to the acting Governor General in Calcutta and to Mir Alam in Hyderabad. It was at this stage that Khair un-Nissa’s love-life blew up again into yet another full-scale scandal.

Sir George Barlow was the first to respond. His letters to Russell on the subject have been lost, but it is clear that he was horrified by the new development. Worried by the possibility of Khair un-Nissa causing yet another breach in Anglo—Hyderabadi relations, he went as far as attempting to forbid the Begum from ever returning to Hyderabad at all. In a letter to Sydenham he cited the recent mutiny of sepoys at Vellore, and claimed that ‘the connexion of native women with European officers having been urged by the troops on the coast as one of the causes of the disaffection, it might be dangerous to recall to their minds so conspicuous an instance as that afforded by the connexion of Col Kirkpatrick with a female of the Begum’s rank and family’.⁴² This was an extremely dubious assertion, and one that even Sydenham thought stretched credibility. ^ie But the ban on Khair leaving Calcutta remained in place.

A desperate Henry Russell was forced to go to Government House to plead on the Begum’s behalf with Barlow’s Private Secretary, Neil Edmonstone, himself something of a Persian scholar and (discreetly) the father of an Anglo-Indian family. Russell pointed out ‘the painful and cruel situation to which the Begum would be reduced by being detained in Calcutta, and the difficulty she would find in returning to her family at any future time’.⁴³ This argument had little impact on Edmonstone. As Russell later wrote to his brother, ‘All this he acknowledged, but still he said that the objection which had suggested itself to Sir George Barlow’s mind being of a public nature he would not suffer any considerations of individual hardship to be opposed to it.’ Russell then lost his temper and angrily pointed out that Barlow had no jurisdiction over Khair, a subject of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and so was hardly in any position to order her to remain in Calcutta. Edmonstone coolly replied that he would convey Russell’s argument to the Governor General. On Christmas Eve 1806, Russell received a curt note from Government House stating Barlow’s conclusion on the matter:

My dear Sir, On a consideration of all the circumstances of the case, the Governor General withdraws his objections to the lady’s proceeding to Hyderabad. But he considers it necessary for political reasons that she should not be deemed to be in any way under the immediate protection of the British Government. She may return to Hyderabad and live under the protection of her own family. Any pledge of protection on the part of the British Govt might eventually be productive of great embarrassment. I have instructions to write to Capt Sydenham on the subject,

I am ever, dear sir,
Yours most sincerely
NB Edmonstone⁴⁴

That night Russell finalised his preparations for departure, and scribbled a last, conciliatory note to Sydenham, saying that he wished to

assure you that neither the Begum nor I will ever trouble you with any Requests which, under the letter you will have received from Mr. Edmonstone, you might think improper. She wishes to live as quietly and as much retired as possible with her mother and grandmother, and she does not appear to be apprehensive of danger from any quarter. Perhaps indeed Mir Alum might occasion her some difficulty and uneasiness if a declaration were explicitly made to him that she would not receive any protection from you. But such a declaration cannot under any circumstances be necessary and I am sure your own kindness and your regard for the memory of Colonel Kirkpatrick would alone be sufficient to restrain you from making it.⁴⁵

Khair and Henry bade goodbye to the two munshis, Aziz and Aman Ullah, who were setting off into retirement by the banks of the Ganges at Benares. The following morning the two lovers nervously set off on their journey to Hyderabad.

It was a journey that they would never complete.

For over three months, Russell and Khair, accompanied by Sharaf un-Nissa and the Begum’s household, travelled slowly down the now-familiar spine of the Eastern Ghats, between the teak forests of the hills and the white breakers of the Bay of Bengal.

With little to look forward to in their return to Hyderabad, they took their time about the journey. Their progress slowed even further after an express message from Sydenham reached them on the road sometime at the end of January. The Resident had received Barlow’s orders, and explained that regrettably he was now forced to withdraw his offer of protection for Khair. He claimed to have ‘rejoiced’ that Russell had been able ‘to overcome the Governor General’s objections to the Begum’s Return to this Place’, adding: ‘As a question of mere policy, I should certainly prefer the Begum to remain in some part of Company’s Territories; but as she felt such repugnance at that plan, I do not foresee that there will be any unpleasant consequences to her return to Hyderabad, provided she remains in the City under the protection of her own Family and Friends … I am told that the houses, both of the mother and Grandmother of the Begum are in good repair and sufficiently convenient; and I should imagine that one of them would be the proper place of Residence for the Begum herself.’ But Sydenham then added what was in effect a new condition to Russell’s return, further impeding his and Khair’s hopes.

I hope you are prepared to relinquish all personal intercourse with the Begum after her Establishment in the City. I know that Meer Allum will expect that she should not see you, and his objections are natural enough when the customs and prejudices of the Moosulmen respecting their women are considered. I have already informed you that the people in the city of every Description have misconceived notions of the Nature of your Protection which you have afforded to the Begum and there is no doubt that your visits will confirm their notions.⁴⁶

Rather stiffly, the very English Sydenham then added as a postscript: ‘P.S.: If such a message be not inconsistent with Propriety I beg you will make my Compliments to the Begum,’ before noting that: ‘Sir H Russell [Henry’s father, the Chief Justice] had once the Goodness to spare me a canister of his excellent snuff. Do you think you could prevail upon his kindness to repeat such a sacrifice?’

Just to rub salt in Russell’s wounds, there soon appeared a second express letter, this time from his old enemy, Captain Hemming. It was short and to the point. Hemming wrote that he had just had breakfast with the Begum’s brother, Dustee Ali Khan,^if and he wanted to make a few things quite clear to Russell: ‘It is not impertinent curiosity that makes me ask you if you are prepared to take leave of the Begum the day you arrive, probably never to see her again. I don’t mean to say that her life would be in any danger residing in the city. But I am sure that all intercourse between you will be interdicted by Meer Alum ...’⁴⁷

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^ig), 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

suffered to live quietly and securely with her family, and that she would not have anything to dread from Meer Alum. But I infer from a part of your letter that you apprehend that the spirit of malignity and revenge by which the Meer is still actuated towards the Begum [appears to be] so active as to urge him to the adoption of measures of such severity, that the influence of Capt Sydenham—confined [now] by the restrictions imposed on him by the Gov. General—would be insufficient to protect her … If I have accurately conceived your meaning, and you still think your apprehensions are well founded, it is absolutely necessary that I should resort to the only means still in my power to preserve the Begum, by recommending her to stay in some part of the Company’s Territories.

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.’⁴⁸

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:

The enclosed letter will communicate to the old begum the changes which her daughter and grand daughter have made in their plans; but it would have been improvident to inform her of their real motives. We have therefore imputed it to a whimsical spirit of opposition in the poor little Begum, and have left the letter open, that you may take your line from it. When you have read it, close it and give it to the old lady. You must also make the necessary communication to Capt. Sydenham. I have little doubt that both you and he will approve of the Begum’s determination.

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’.⁵⁰

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.^ih 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.ⁱⁱThree 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,^ij 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.^ik 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.⁵¹ 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’.⁵²Masulipatam 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 bibi 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.

A week later, Russell had apparently installed the Begum in her new house, looking onto the palms, fishing canoes and breakers of the Coromandel coast; but the only explicit mention he makes of her in his letter to Charles is to note that ‘If I can, I shall dispose of some of my bullocks here. The Begum’s baggage has left a great many unladen, and it would be a needless expense to feed all the bullocks between here and Hyderabad.’⁵³

The next day he was gone, heading back to Hyderabad as fast as his palanquin-bearers could carry him. Behind him he left the weeping Begum, in exile, in a strange town, with only her mother for company, and convinced, from a dream she had had, that she and Russell would never meet again.⁵⁴

And with that, there is a gap in Russell’s correspondence for eight whole months. There is no indication of how Khair un-Nissa passed the time, what her feelings were, her mood, or her hopes, or her fears; but it is not difficult to imagine them.

When the letters resume, it is January 1808, and Henry Russell is back in Masulipatam for a fortnight’s visit, on his way between Hyderabad and a new posting in Madras. He is flattered and pleased by Khair’s rapturous reception of him: ‘Dear Khyroo is all kindness and attention,’ he tells Charles,

and seems quite as much delighted to see me as I am to see her; more so she could not be. She is pleased at my appointment to Madras, because it has offered us the opportunity of meeting; and as we have once met after our separation, she appears to have got rid of her superstitious dread she formerly had, that we were not to meet again. I hope therefore that she will not feel my going to Madras so acutely as she felt my going to Hyderabad, and that she will trust to the same good fortune which has brought us together once, bringing us together again.

He goes onto the describe the situation of the two Begums:

I found both the Begum and her mother well. They appear to be in excellent health, the old lady better perhaps than when she first came here; and their spirits are as good as could possibly be expected. The house they moved into after I left them, is a much better one than [that] in which they lived at first. They occupy the upper storey only, which makes them quite private and retired, and gives them the advantage of fresh air and a good prospect: the whole of their lower apartments is appropriated to their baggage and servants; and they have a Havildar’s guards, which while perhaps unnecessary, is so far of use in that it confirms their notion of security.⁵⁵

Russell’s letter also inadvertently reveals why he had had to leave Hyderabad. In Masulipatam, where he was staying with an old soldier friend, formerly of the Subsidiary Force, he dines with his host, and later in the fort, and is pleased and evidently surprised to discover that ‘every lady seems anxious to be as attentive as they can; and what is very satisfactory, as far as I can judge from appearances, I am not here a subject of scandal’. This, it is apparent, was a welcome change from Hyderabad, where his position at the Residency had become untenable due to the rumours circulating in both the city and English society about his relationship with the Begum.

All he now wants in Madras, he says, is ‘to be as quiet as possible, and although I cannot lull the tongue of slander, I will not stimulate it. If any of the reports invented or circulated by my friends at Hyderabad appear to you to be of such a nature that I ought to know them, for the reputation of my conduct on any point relating to the Begum, of course you will mention them to me—otherwise do not say anything about them. They would irritate and vex me without doing any good.’ In the meantime, he is pleased to discover that in Masulipatam ‘every lady appears to take an interest in the Begum, and to speak of her with the greatest respect and consideration’.⁵⁶

As for Khair herself, Russell’s letter reveals that she is relieved that she is still getting the money from her estates, and has only one deep desire: that she should get back the portrait of her children, which George Chinnery seems to have borrowed in Calcutta, and which, despite her repeated pleas, he is apparently unwilling to send back to her. Russell asks his brother to write to their father, the Chief Justice, himself then sitting for Chinnery, and to tell him ‘that the Begum is exceedingly anxious to receive the picture and has written to you very urgently on the subject’. There is no indication that Khair has heard a word from her children since they embarked for England two and half years earlier. The picture is still her only link with what she has lost.

The rest of Russell’s letters from Masulipatam are filled with making plans. Sharaf un-Nissa wants to visit Hyderabad over Muharram to petition Mir Alam on her daughter’s behalf at that most auspicious time of year, and Russell asks his brother to make the necessary arrangements for an escort: ‘She will travel in her palanquin, with a single set of bearers; and as she will be only a few days on the road, she will not encumber herself with any tents or baggage, beyond two or three bungies [wagons].’

Finally he asks Charles to help him keep in touch with the Begum. He anticipates trouble finding a good Persian munshi in the very English world of Madras, and certainly no one who could safely be entrusted with the delicate task of writing his love letters to the Begum. He is also keen to avoid any cause for scandal in Madras, and therefore asks his brother a favour. In case he finds writing to Khair impossible, could Charles now begin writing to her, passing on his news? He is worried about Khair, and about her spirits, especially once her mother leaves and she is left on her own. If Charles could write,

I shall be able to assure the Begum, through you, that I am well, and that my silence does not proceed from any cause that ought to make her uneasy.

On all these accounts it is particularly desirable that from here forward you should continue to correspond with the Begum as regularly as I did; and although the benefits of such rigid punctuality may sometimes prove troublesome, I am sure you will submit to it for the sake of giving the Begum so much comfort and satisfaction as she will derive from it. I wrote to her every third day, and never on any account allowed an interruption to take place. If I was busy I wrote a single line to say so, and that she always thought enough; and if I was to be out all day on the letter day, I wrote a few lines overnight, saying so, and left them to be despatched by the dawke as usual.

Let me entreat you, my dearest Charles, to persevere in this plan; and be assured that constant and persevering regularity in correspondence is the greatest blessing you can confer upon an absent friend. Many people neglect to write at all if they are busy, because they think it indispensable to write a long letter; but this a very erroneous idea. A single hearty line on a regular day to say that you are busy, and cannot write more, is infinitely superior in value to the longest letter on a later day. Bear this in mind, and recollect that the Begum is of that frame of mind, and is so situated, that to her of all people in the world, this principle is most peculiarly applicable.

If he has any trouble, suggests Henry, he should consult Aziz Ullah’s old assistant, the Qazi, who is back at work at the Residency, and who

knows my plan of correspondence every bit as much as I knew it myself, and can always tell you what I was accustomed to do on any particular occasion. He is also perfectly acquainted too with the terms and modes of address that you ought to use. I have explained all that I have written to you on this subject to the Begum, who desires me just to add a request from her, that whenever my letters for her reach you from Madras, you will despatch them to Masulipatam by the very first dawke without thinking it necessary to detain them until you have prepared a letter from yourself …

This is a new side to Khair un-Nissa, one we have not seen before. We have seen her strength and resilience, and her warmth and charm; but never has she sounded so vulnerable, so badly in need of reassurance, so badly in need of love.

And with that, again, Russell is gone, and the curtain descends on both him and the Begum for a further three months.

When we next catch a glimpse of Russell, he is in the middle of a very different world.

Madras in 1808 was a somewhat provincial place compared to Calcutta, at least in terms of power and trade; but it nonetheless prided itself on being a politer, more elegant and refined city than its brash, debauched Bengali rival. Its layout was quite different to that of other British cities in India, being spread over a far wider area with low, white, classical garden houses dotted for miles over the plane which lay between the fort and St Thomas’s Mount. As one visitor reported a few years later, few Englishmen lived in Madras proper, instead they preferred ‘country houses scattered for miles through the interior, and even the shopkeepers who can afford it have detached bungalows for their families’. The hub of the city, around the fort, was a no less singular sight. Thirty years earlier, when the artist William Hodges landed on the surf below Fort George, he wrote that its ‘long colonnades, open porticoes and flat roofs offer the eye an appearance similar to what we may conceive of a Grecian city in the age of Alexander. The clear, blue, cloudless sky, the polished white buildings, the bright sandy beach and the dark green sea present a combination totally new to the eye of an Englishman.’

By 1808 Madras had become famous for its social life, and especially for the fact that there seemed to be a much larger proportion of European women to men than at Calcutta. There was the huge new banqueting hall at the Governor’s House, with an interior so vast that Lord Valentia thought he and his fellow guests ‘looked like pigmies’ as they reeled and waltzed. There was the Madras Hunting Society and the annual races below the Mount; a series of good schools, including ‘a seminary for young ladies modelled on Miss Pinkerton’s in Chiswick Mall’, where classes full of young British memsahibs-to-be were taught ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, history, the use of globes, French, Greek and Latin’. Even the city’s alehouses were relatively respectable places, with pukka names like the Old London Tavern and the King’s Arms. Not far from the elegant spire of St Mary’s, the seventeenth-century fort church, lay for example the celebrated Fort Tavern, which served ‘soups every morning, and dinners dressed on the shortest notice, and the very best wines’. It was a far cry from the pelleting punch-houses of William Hickey’s Calcutta.^57il

For the last few years Henry Russell had been enveloped in the Mughal society of Hyderabad. Now he found himself warming to the pleasures of a busy and very British Presidency town like Madras. He was after all intelligent, good-looking and rich; in short a thoroughly desirablebachelor. This was something he was himself only too well aware of: ‘I see that the people at Madras have marked me as an eligible object,’ he wrote a few weeks after his arrival, ‘and that they observe rather minutely to whom my attentions are principally pointed; but I am thoroughly on my guard and always take care to divide my civilities equally.’⁵⁸

By March, Henry was boarding with James Kirkpatrick’s aunt and uncle, the Petries, while he looked around rather half-heartedly for a house of his own. His letters are now full of dinners, races and horses: ‘The Madras plate was won by McDowell’s Bacchus, a small bay horse that he got out of Abdool Luteef,’ he tells Charles in one letter, adding with some pride, ‘With the exception of the three parties Mrs Petrie had at home, I have dined out every night since I arrived here, and frequently I have had three or four invitations for the same day. The dinners are generally pretty good, everybody appears anxious to be as civil and attentive as they possibly can... ’⁵⁹

In this social swirl, Russell made friends quickly, and took an especial liking, somewhat surprisingly, to the odious Mrs Samuel Dalrymple who had accompanied James on his last boat journey to Calcutta: ‘Mrs Dal is my prime favourite,’ Russell told his brother, ‘but I occasionally throw a handkerchief at another object … ’ As the weeks went by, he threw himself deeper and deeper into the round of parties and dances, and by mid-April wrote to Charles to tell him he had never been happier, or felt more properly appreciated.^im At long last he was receiving the attentions and respect that he had been brought up by his adoring father to believe were his by right: ‘I become more pleased with Madras every day,’ he wrote,

and the more I see of the society and the people, the more I like them. My situation and my connexions (shall I add my manner and my appearance?) naturally contribute to ensure me a kind and general reception … In the gaiety and dissipation of an extensive society I do not think that I ever enjoyed myself so much as now I do at Madras. When I find myself laughing, and flirting, and entering heartily into all the fun that is going on, I almost forget the solemn reserve and steadiness of the Secretary. The Dalrymples and all my old friends tell me that I am the most altered being in the world, and Gould says that nothing can be more unlike what I am to the sullen, silent politician that was described to him in Bengal. I now dance, and drink, and laugh and dress, and crack jokes …

He then makes what is his first reference to the Begum for several weeks:

However, lest you should entertain any apprehensions of it leading me by the road of flirtation to the temple of love, it may be as well to assure you that my prudence and caution on that subject are unabated, and that any change in my views and sentiments on such a point I should consider a deplorable one indeed. My affections are not, I believe, very easily engaged; but when once fixed, they are steady; and from the quarter where they are at present fixed, I think it would be difficult, I might almost say impossible, to detach them.⁶⁰

Khair had been receiving the odd message from Henry ever since they parted company, but with each month that passed, his letters to Masulipatam were becoming increasingly irregular. Soon there began the first of a succession of complaints from Khair that she was being neglected, complaints that Russell, characteristically, sidestepped, putting the blame on his younger brother and on Sharaf un-Nissa: ‘Be very particular too in mentioning me in all your letters to the Begum;’ he tells Charles,

and when you next write say that I am sorry to perceive, from the letters I have lately received from her, that she imputes my silence to forgetfulness. That, she ought to know and believe, is impossible, and she only gives me pain in saying so. She hears of my being well, just as satisfactorily through you as she could hear it from a letter written by any common hand [i.e. professional Persian letter-writer] I could put up here; and it is by no means difficult to imagine that I find it impracticable to get at once a person I could employ to write confidential letters for me.

He goes on to say that Khair is clearly lonely in her mother’s absence in Hyderabad, and says that Charles should tell Sharaf un-Nissa to hurry back to her daughter’s side in Masulipatam: ‘She promised me to stay only a month at Hyderabad, and you must insist on her leaving in the beginning of April. Do not, on any account, permit her to remain beyond that time, even if she should express a desire to do so.’⁶¹

But despite his protestations to the contrary, there is no doubt that Khair was indeed beginning to move from the centre of Russell’s world. It was not just that she appears increasingly infrequently in his letters; there is also a measure of conscious disengagement: when Charles writes to tell his brother that there has been a dispute over the seizure of Bâqar Ali Khan’s property—presumably it has been resumed by Mir Alam’s government following the old man’s death—Henry counsels him not to get involved: ‘I do most strongly insist that no consideration whatever may induce you to intervene, on any occasion, on behalf of any member of her family. You would not do so without being liable to a charge of impropriety.’⁶²

Henry also fails to react with proper sympathy when Charles and Sharaf un-Nissa both write to tell him that the latter has failed in her attempt to persuade Mir Alam to revoke Khair’s banishment. This was a heartbreaking moment for both mother and daughter, the confirmation of all they had feared; but Russell takes it all easily in his stride. Referring to Sharaf’s news he remarks merely:

Her letter was a very good one. It appears she has been kindly received by all those on whose kindness she places any value; and as the coldness and inattention with which the Meer treated her seem not to have given any pain, I am glad that she has been furnished with so strong a practical proof of the insurmountable objections that exist against her daughter’s return to Hyderabad. I hope you will take an opportunity of impressing this deeply on her mind, and of inducing her to believe that the Meer still regards even her, as well as her daughter, with sentiments of such virulent and restless asperity as to render their permanent Residence at Hyderabad a source of the most alarming and serious danger to them both.⁶³

In a later letter, after Sharaf un-Nissa has headed back to Masulipatam to break the news of Mir Alam’s decision to Khair, Russell merely observes: ‘I am glad that Shurfoon Nifsa Begum has returned to Masulipatam. The man’s conduct towards her has been perfectly consistent, and therefore ought not to cause surprise … [and confirms] the necessity of [the Begum] remaining at Masulipatam … I think it was discernable [in advance] that the Meer should treat her as he has always done.’⁶⁴

So saying, Russell returns to describing his Madras social life. And as the rounds of parties continue, one figure in particular takes the place of Khair in his correspondence: a beautiful, rich Anglo-Portuguese merchant’s daughter. Her name was Jane Casamajor.

Jane is first mentioned as a friend of Thomas Sydenham’s younger brother George: ‘If George Sydenham is arrived [in Hyderabad],’ Henry writes to Charles in March 1808, ‘tell him that Jane Casamajor has been alarmingly ill indeed; and though better today, is not yet even pronounced to be out of danger.’⁶⁵

When she recovers, Russell goes to see her: ‘Yesterday I called at the Casamajors to congratulate them on the recovery of Jane … [She] looked delicate and feeble … [and] has been very ill indeed … I believe that for several days her medical attendant thought it very precarious which way it would terminate.’⁶⁶ Jane eventually made a full recovery, and as March gives way to April she takes up an increasingly large amount of space in Henry’s letters. She is, he assures Charles, ‘an extremely fine girl and the family is altogether the best at Madras’; but he quickly adds that

none of their weapons are sharp enough to graze even the surface of my heart … I am thoroughly on my guard and always take care to divide my civilities equally so as to prevent them from suspecting that I have a decided preference for anybody … At a very pleasant dance at Mrs Oakes’s the other night I divided myself between Mrs Dal[rymple] and Jane—while I was with Mrs Dal nobody seemed to observe me particularly; but when I went to Jane, and after flirting an hour with her, handed her to Tupper, I saw a number of sly enquiring looks directed towards me; and the next day a number of people asked me very significantly if I did not think Jane Casamajor a very charming girl.⁶⁷

For the ball, which was a masquerade, Russell had got Charles to send him some of James Kirkpatrick’s old Mughal robes, which James had kept at the Begum’s house in the old city and which he appears to have worn when he came to relax there, and also at informal occasions at court.⁶⁸There had been moments in Russell’s past when it seemed he might have followed James in his journey across cultures; but in the end he was a very different man to his principal. Moreover, and crucially, he was from a very different generation. James was among the last of the English officials in India who found it possible to truly cross cultures. The new Imperial ideas that Wellesley imported from England—ideas which Henry Russell had absorbed when he first arrived in Calcutta—made it increasingly difficult for individuals to make the leap from Britain to India, from Georgian to Mughal, from Christianity to Islam. India was no longer a place to embrace and to be transformed by; instead it was a place to conquer and transform. The British attitudes to Indians and Indian culture that Russell absorbed in the Calcutta of 1800 were never entirely shaken off by his time at James’s side in Hyderabad. James had worn his Mughal clothes for everyday use around the Residency and for his other life in Khair un-Nissa’sdeorhi in the old city; now Russell wore them merely as fancy dress. In the brief period separating the two men, an important historical line had been crossed.

Shortly after the ball, Russell writes that he has not visited Jane for nearly a week: ‘Excepting once in the evening on the Mount Road, I have not seen Jane since I went there last Sunday. This is Friday. Is not my self command wonderful? But perhaps I shall call there tomorrow morning. It is surely the pleasantest home in Madras... ’⁶⁹

By the middle of May, rumours about Russell and Jane have reached Charles in Hyderabad, and he writes to his brother to ask if there is any basis in the stories doing the rounds. Henry is horrified, and asks for more information about the detail of this gossip: ‘I am now placed in a most cruel and painful predicament; and if her feelings and pride are half so great as mine are I am sure she must feel as distressed as I do’ at these stories in circulation, he writes. He goes on to deny having given Jane any grounds for believing he would marry her, and says the rumours Charles has been hearing are wholly incorrect:

You say that you hear that, wherever I dine, Jane Casamajor is invited, that wherever I dance she is my partner; and that in short we are scarcely on any occasion separated from each other … I shall easily be able to convince you that there is no [basis for any of these stories] … But how, you will say, if this be correct, is it possible that the report of my having formed an attachment for Jane should have become so prevalent? In the easiest way of the world. My youth, my connexions, my circumstances, and my situation all concur to point me out as the most eligible man in the place (don’t laugh) for a woman to marry; and people suppose, naturally enough, that if I admire any lady, I must of course admire the girl who generally speaking is the most admired by everybody else … to a girl who like Jane who has (whether deservedly or not) the reputation of a leading belle, it is sufficient for me to be a little attentive to set the place agog and to make everybody say it will certainly be a match.⁷⁰

Only a week later, Russell’s tone is very different, and he finally admits what has been obvious to everyone in Madras for months. In the middle of a letter to Charles he suddenly bursts out: ‘Jane! Dear Jane! What shall I say of her? That I feel my danger growing more imminent every day, and that the swain who deliberates is undone. When I am absent from her I feel that an immediate permanent separation would ultimately eradicate any affection I have formed for her; but in her presence, I am conscious of the influence of a fascination which is altogether irresistible. Of such a separation I see no Prospect.’ He tells his brother of a dinner party the night before: ‘I said nothing with my tongue that could appear like Love; but I fear my eyes and my manners were beyond my control and that they may have betrayed to anybody who would take the trouble to observe them, that I was far from being insensible to the charms of my companion … the truth of the matter is that I am in Love... ’

As for the Begum, Henry’s mind was clearly made up: ‘If anything comes of this flirtation,’ he tells Charles breezily, ‘I shall request you to take Masulipatam in your way, as you come here; and will, before that time, write to you fully on that subject. The duty you will have to discharge will, I fear, be a very painful and distressing one; but for my sake I am sure you will undertake it.’⁷¹

Painful and distressing it certainly would be. But not for Henry Russell. The following evening, less than two months after he first met her, he asked Jane Casamajor to marry him.

One month later, on around 20 June 1808, Charles Russell set off from Hyderabad on yet another errand for his brother. This time, however, the task in hand involved a rather longer journey, and a rather more upsetting business, than the fetching and packing of Hyderabadi women’s garments, a task on which he had been intermittently engaged on his brother’s behalf for the past two years. His job now was to go to Masulipatam and break the news of Henry and Jane’s marriage to Khair un-Nissa, a woman he had yet to meet, but with whom (again at his brother’s request) he had been corresponding every three days or so since January.

Charles had earlier received a long letter from Henry, telling him that his proposal of marriage had of course been accepted by Jane, and giving him detailed instructions on how he was to deal with the delicate task of informing Khair that she had been abandoned: ‘the task you will have to perform will be arduous and painful; most arduous to you, and most painful to me. But it is necessary.’⁷² Two days later, obedient as ever, Charles set off to Masulipatam, intending to head on to Madras to meet his future sister-in-law after he had done his brother’s bidding.

Unknown to Charles as he cantered down the road to the coast, back in Madras there had been a major hitch in Henry’s plans. Quite unexpectedly—at least to Russell—ten days earlier, on 10 June, Jane Casamajor had called him to her house and told him the marriage was off. She gave no reason. Henry returned home, astounded that anyone would or even could turn him down. It was only late the following morning that he remembered that his brother was by now in all probability on his way to Masulipatam to deliver a message that could only come as shattering blow to Khair un-Nissa.

Rushing to his desk, he quickly wrote out two notes. He sent one to Hyderabad and the other direct to Major Alexander at Masulipatam, with urgent orders that it be given to Mr Charles Russell the minute he arrived in the town. Then he sat down to await what would happen.

The express letter to Masulipatam read as follows:

My dear Charles,

I have today written a long letter to you at Hyderabad explaining to you, as far as I could explain them in a letter, and indeed as far as I can myself understand them, the circumstances that have suddenly and unexpectedly occurred finally and, I believe, and even hope, irrevocably to break off the match between me and Jane Casamajor.

I take the precaution of sending these few lines, under cover to Alexander, and I shall desire him to give them to you immediately on your arrival at Masulipatam in order to prevent you from making to the Begum any of the communications described in my long letter of yesterday, in short from saying anything to her about me, except that I am well, that you are coming to pass a month with me and that she may be satisfied, that, notwithstanding that I have not been able to write to her, I still continue to think of her with the former kindness and affection as ever.

I am vexed that anything should have happened to break off a match, on which I had certainly set my Heart more strongly than I ought in prudence to have done, though not perhaps as strongly as I originally imagined. It really is a source of vast comfort to have avoided the necessity of conveying to the poor Begum any communication of so very aggravated and painful a nature, as those contained in my letter to you yesterday. Of course it now becomes totally superfluous to take any measures whatever regarding her. She need not, she must not know or suspect that my affections, have ever been diverted from their original direction; and, situated as we now are towards one another, it is better that we should continue on mostly the same footing on which we have hitherto stood.⁷³

The letter sent to Hyderabad was longer, more leisurely, and a little more self-aware. It was, Henry acknowledged to Charles, ‘impossible to conceal from either you or myself that I am nettled and annoyed at anything like a refusal from any woman whatsoever; but excepting the violence that my pride, or perhaps rather my vanity has sustained, I really am quite astonished at the degree of coldness and apathy with which I have submitted to a separation from a woman to whom I already conceived myself to be irrevocably and eternally united … be that as it may, my vanity is certainly more deeply injured than my heart’.⁷⁴

He went on to speculate how it was that Jane could possibly have found it in herself to turn down such a splendid chap as himself. In the course of this passage he reveals one reason why his relationship with the Begum had never developed into the marriage that Khair un-Nissa had clearly hoped for and, at least initially, set her heart on. For Russell explained to Charles that the most likely reason for Jane’s action was that she had been alarmed by his total refusal to tell his father of their forthcoming marriage, which in turn was due to his father’s almost certain refusal to condone it. The reason for this was that Jane had a Malay great-grandmother, and Sir Henry, an ambitious arriviste who had closely orchestrated the careers of all his children, had long made it quite clear to them that he would never agree to any of them marrying anyone ‘contaminated by one streak of black’.⁷⁵ Henry Russell was deeply in awe of his father, who was evidently a very strong personality. It was out of the question that he could ever have dreamed of marrying Khair un-Nissa if he dared not tell his father even about his relatively uncontroversial match with Jane Casamajor.

The letter to Hyderabad arrived too late to catch Charles; he had already set off to Masulipatam to break the news to the Begum. But the express note to Alexander got there just in time. After a week’s journey, the ever-obedient Charles read it and headed straight back to Hyderabad without even waiting to pay a courtesy visit to Khair un-Nissa.

But it was only a reprieve, a putting-off of the inevitable. Five months later, Charles was back, on the same errand. Jane Casamajor had changed her mind. She eventually married Henry Russell in St Mary’s church in Madras on 20 October 1808. ‘Dear Jane,’ wrote Henry to his brother, ‘has made me love her ten times more than I ever did before... ’⁷⁶

Russell had fully briefed his brother on the story that was to be told to the Begum, and it involved what he described as an ‘innocent deception’—perhaps something along the lines that he had been forced into the marriage by his father, and had no option but to submit. Whatever lie it was, it did little to soften the blow, for the news shattered Khair un-Nissa’s already fragile composure and self-assurance. Henry was pleased that Charles had kept his description of the encounter to a minimum: ‘Your account of what passed between you and the Begum was quite sufficiently full to be satisfactory, and not so detailed as to be unbearably painful to me. The subject is a distressing one; and I shall therefore say as little upon it as I can.’ But he still wanted to know one detail more: ‘You said that you went to see the Begum again the day you left Masulipatam. Did you see her? Was she more composed and more satisfied of the necessity of submitting to what you had told her the previous day?’⁷⁷

Charles’s reply does not survive. But the answer to his question is quite clear, as Khair un-Nissa’s subsequent story shows.

With that final conversation, the curtain descends once again on the Begum, but this time not for a month, or a year, or even two years, but for five. In that time Russell wrote thousands of letters, but barely one that mentions Khair un-Nissa. And with his gaze turned elsewhere, she again vanishes from history.

Following his abandonment of the Begum, Russell’s own life was engulfed in tragedy. Jane Casamajor died quite suddenly of fever only six months after their marriage. For once something genuinely seemed to have moved Russell, and his grief was absolute. He wrote to his brother Charles: ‘Your poor Jane, your poor sister, my wife, my comfort, my darling, my everything, is gone. At ten o’clock this morning her sweet, her heavenly spirit left the frail but lovely tenement it had inhabited; and all hope but her happiness in a better place is now fled. I felt the last vibration of her pulse, I heard the last faint flutter of her breath; and she expired on my arm.’⁷⁸

He tried to continue at Madras, but gave up and returned to England for a year, spending much of the time working on poems to his late wife and writing endless drafts of her epitaph. On his return in 1809 he was appointed briefly to the Pune Residency before, in 1810, finally gaining his long-held ambition of becoming Resident at Hyderabad.

His first act was to summon Aman Ullah from retirement in Benares and to offer him place of honour at the Residency (his elder brother, Aziz Ullah, was now too old to begin work again). The old munshi immediately accepted, but died on the journey, just ten days’ march from Hyderabad.ⁱⁿ

Mir Alam had died of his leprosy on 4 January 1809, and it was at this point that Khair un-Nissa and her mother appear to have limped back to Hyderabad from Masulipatam, and attempted to resume their life in the family deorhi. Fyze Palmer also reappears in Hyderabad around this time, spending time with her son William—and presumably with Khair—in the extensive new Palmer mansion, known as the Kothi, facing the main gate of the Residency.

After the return of the two Begums to Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa makes occasional fleeting appearances in Russell’s letters: at one point, for example, he receives a petition from one of Nizam Ali Khan’s widows, Pearee Begum, on receiving which he tells Charles: ‘Pearee Begum’s letter I will answer, if necessary, after my arrival at Hyderabad … She is a particular favourite of the Old Begum’s, and so … I should not like to offend her by shewing any sort of slight to her favourite.’⁷⁹ On another occasion Sharaf un-Nissa sends Henry a broken watch and a chipped locket containing James Kirkpatrick’s hair. Russell succeeds in mending the watch, but manages to lose the precious locket, telling the old Begum, somewhat insensitively, that ‘if she sends some more hair he will have another made’.⁸⁰ There are also references to Henry having finally received the Chinnery of the children from Calcutta and promising to send it over to the old Begum. But while Sharaf un-Nissa seems to have intermittently kept in touch with Russell, her daughter—significantly—did not.

It was not until the late summer of 1813 that Khair briefly re-entered Russell’s life. The occasion was the visit of an aristocratic Scottish tomboy from the Isle of Lewis named Lady Mary Hood. Mary Hood had temporally deserted her rich, elderly admiral husband and gone off on her own around India, breaking a series of diplomatic hearts as she passed: Mountstuart Elphinstone, William Fraser and Henry Russell himself all seem to have been, to different extents, a little in love with her. During her stay at Hyderabad, Mary had asked Russell if she might meet some ‘Hyderabadi women of rank’, and he brought Khair and Fyze to see her at the Residency, though whether he attended the meeting and actually saw Khair face to face after all that had passed between them is not clear.

Either way, Lady Hood was entranced by the sadness, beauty and intelligence of the ‘poor Begum’,^io while Khair in turn seems to have liked Lady Hood enough to promise to make her a dress. This dress weaves its way in and out of Russell’s letters over the following three weeks: initially it was too small, and Lady Hood asked Russell to ‘let the Begum be told with my regards & salaams, that if she will allow me I will make a body for the dress myself at Madras to fit me, & send it to her to be trimmed, as I know the one she has kindly made already for me is not large enough for a Scotch princess’.⁸¹ But in all these letters there is no hint of Khair un-Nissa’s former engagement with the world. She appears instead like some broken butterfly, wounded, and unhealed by the passage of time.

At her most vulnerable point, she had opened up her heart, only to be seduced, banished and then betrayed. Five years had passed since she had been abandoned by Russell, but despite her beauty and her fortune, she had never remarried.

Khair’s last recorded action, towards the end of September 1813, was to send a brief note to her former lover—her first for five years—simply telling Russell that she was dying.

Russell, for once, rose to the occasion. Perhaps struck with remorse he invited the Begum back to the Rang Mahal, to end her life where she had once been happy. By 1813 those days must have seemed far distant to her: it was, after all, eight years since she had been widowed, eight years since she had kissed first her children and then her husband goodbye.

Khair un-Nissa—already fading—was duly carried in, and the couch on which she had once given birth to her daughter now became her deathbed. There was no clear cause for her condition: she just seems to have finally turned her face to the wall. Maybe revisiting the Residency—with the flood of memories it must have brought on—had been too painful. But she did not recover, and over a period of two weeks she got weaker and weaker, and her pulse fainter and fainter. She finally slipped away, without pain, on 22 September 1813. She was aged only twenty-seven. By her side, holding her hand to the very end, were Fyze Palmer and Sharaf un-Nissa.

The following morning a clearly shocked Russell picked up his pen to break the news to Lady Hood: ‘I am sure you will be very much concerned to hear of the poor Begum’s death which happened yesterday morning,’ he wrote.

What her complaint was he [the doctor] hardly knows even now. On the very first day she sent to me to say she was unwell, her hands were cold and clammy, and her pulse so quiet that Mr Currie [the new Residency medic^ip] could not count it. She was unable to take any sort of nourishment, and said all along that the feelings she had were such as to convince her she would not recover. She died [two weeks later] in the Hindoostanee House [the Rang Mahal].

Her mother and all her relations and friends were with her, and according to Mahommedan customs, must remain in the house in which she died until they have performed some particular ceremony which is observed on the fortieth day.

You cannot imagine anything so distressing as the old lady’s situation. More sincere or dignified grief I never witnessed. She was quite wrapped up in her daughter, and seems to feel that the only object she lived for was taken from her; yet her calmness and composure were really admirable. I always thought her a woman of a very superior mind. The Begum was buried by the side of her father, in a garden belonging to the family on the opposite side of the city from the Residency, and her funeral was attended by every person of rank in the place.⁸²

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:

She was very much affected, but very much gratified, and desired me, with tears running down her cheeks, how deeply she felt the interest and friendship with which you expressed yourself about her daughter … I am sure that if you had seen the old lady in the scenes which I have seen her you would think as highly of her as I do. I never saw anybody feel more acutely or make greater efforts to appear composed. She is a woman of a lofty mind, and of a heart and understanding of a very high order indeed. She and her daughter were the only native women of birth I ever had the opportunity of being personally acquainted with. In any country and any class of life they would have been extraordinary persons; and although the women of rank in India are very superior to what Europeans generally think, there are few, I imagine, if any who are equal to them. I never recollect an instance of a death at Hyderabad which excited so general an interest or called forth such marked and universal tributes of respect... ⁸³

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.⁸⁴ 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,

and we all think the likeness strong, though it is eight years since the children left us. The girl is handsome, and seems to be getting like her mother, as everybody here who remembered her mother as a child always said she would be. The boy is exceedingly handsome, and very like his father. The old lady is delighted with the picture, and I do not believe her eyes were off it for five minutes during the first day she had it … Her notion seems to be that the children when they grow up will themselves come to take up their property [the estates they had now inherited from their mother]. It would be cruel to darken the only bright spot that the prospect of her life affords her … The boy was decidedly the grandmother’s favourite, and I confess that I have not the courage to tell her how doubtful I think it whether she will ever see him again... ⁸⁵

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