III

From the parapet of the wall that surrounded the British Residency in Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick could look down over the River Musi, a raging torrent during the monsoon, but a gentle, fordable stream in summer. On the far bank of the river rose the great city of Hyderabad: a seven-mile loop of walls, and over the top of its watchtowers, stretching far into the distance, a magnificent panorama of white mosques and palaces, monuments and tombs, domes and minarets, their gilt finials glinting in the summer sunlight.

For one hundred years from the late sixteenth century, thanks at least partly to the profits of the diamond trade, Hyderabad had been one of the richest cities in India; it was certainly the most prosperous town outside the Mughal Empire. Sultan Quli Qutb Shah had planned his new city in 1591 as ‘a metropolis which would be unequalled the world over and a replica of paradise itself’.¹ When the French traveller M. de Thevenot passed through in the late 1650s he described how far the Sultan’s plans had succeeded: elegant, clean, opulent and well planned, the still-young city of Hyderabad was filled with grand houses and gardens, and miles of bazaars humming ‘with many rich merchants, bankers and jewellers and a vast number of very skilful artisans’.

Beyond the walls, the scene was equally seductive. The pleasure gardens and the country retreats of the rich extended for miles in every direction; beyond, to the south-west, lay the citadel of Golconda with the swelling hemispheres of the great Qutb Shahi tombs at its base. European merchants flocked there ‘and make great profits … the Kingdom may be said to be the Country of Diamonds’.² One of these merchants was William Methwold, the English factor at the sultanate’s seaport of Masulipatam. On his first visit to Golconda he was astonished by what he saw, describing it as

a citie that for sweetnesse of ayre, conveniencie of water and fertility of soyle, is accounted the best situated in India, not to speake of the Kings Palace, which for bignesse and sumptuousnesse, in the judgement of such as have travelled India exceedeth all belonging to the Mogull or any other Prince … built of stone, and, within, the most eminent places garnished with massie gold in such things as we commonly use iron, as in barres of windowes, bolts and such like, and in all other points fitted to the majesty of so great a King, who in elephants and jewels is accounted one of the richest Princes of India. [The Sultan] married the daughter of the King of Bijapur, and hath beside her three other wives, and at least 1000 concubines: a singular honour and state amongst them being to have many women, and one of the strangest things to them I could relate, and in their opinions lamentable, that his excellent Majesty our Gracious Sovereigne should have three kingdoms and but one wife … ³

After a prolonged rivalry between Golconda and Mughal Delhi, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb finally captured and sacked Hyderabad in 1687, stabling the horses of his cavalry in the Shi’ite mosques and ashur khanas (mourning halls) as a deliberate insult to the city’s Shi’a (and thus, in Aurangzeb’s orthodox Sunni eyes, heretical) establishment.^ay After this, the city underwent a temporary eclipse. The focus of the region moved to Aurangzeb’s new Mughal headquarters town at Aurangabad, and for eighty years Hyderabad was left a melancholy shadow of its former glory, with whole quarters of the city deserted and ruined. But on the accession of Nizam Ali Khan in 1762, Hyderabad was again made the capital of the region, and this time of a domain which now embraced a far wider slice of central and southern India than the old Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda had ever done.

Despite the intermittent warfare of the period, the city quickly began to recover its former wealth and splendour. The ruins of the Qutb Shahi palaces and public buildings were renovated and restored, the mosques rebuilt, the gardens replanted and, crucially, the city walls were strengthenedand patched up. By the 1790s Hyderabad, with a population of around a quarter of a million, was once again both a major centre of commerce and the unrivalled centre of the hybrid Indo-Muslim civilisation of the Deccan, the last link in a cultural chain stretching back to the foundation of the first Muslim sultanates in the region in the fourteenth century.

At Hyderabad’s centre stood the great Char Minar, a monumental gateway formed by a quadrant of arches rising to four domed minarets. The Char Minar marked the meeting of the city’s two principal bazaars, where the road from the craggy citadel of Golconda crossed with that coming from the great port of Masulipatam: ‘There are drugs here of all sorts,’ wrote one visitor, ‘every kind of spice, book, paper, ink, pens, gingham, cloth, silk fabrics and yarn of all colours, swords and bows, arrows and quivers, knives and scissors, spoons and forks, thimbles and dice, needles large and small, gems fine and false—in short, all that one may desire.’⁴

Here merchants and traders from all over the Middle East as well as from France, Holland, England and even China came to buy from the spice bazaar where mountains of cloves, pepper, ginger and cinnamon were all on display, the necks of hessian sacks rolled down to reveal shiny black carob sticks, lumpy ginger stems, aromatic slivers of sandalwood or small hillocks of bright orange turmeric. Other merchants came to Hyderabad to purchase silver and copper, the famous blades of its unrivalled ‘Damascus’ swords, exquisite gold brocades and shatranji (chessboard) carpets.

In the streets crowds of Persians and Arabs in flowing robes joined turbaned Mughals from Delhi and Lucknow, Portuguese horse-traders from Goa and parties of Dutch jewellers up from their base on the coast at Masulipatam. Together they explored the bazaars, testing the delicacies of the city’s famous confectioners or lingering before the fragrant stalls of the perfumers, where the scents and aromatic oils were mixed to suit the season, and their ingredients altered depending on the heat or the degree of humidity.^az

Beyond stretched the shops of the filigree-dotted gold and silver merchants,which led in turn into the richest of all the bazaars: that of the jewellers and the diamond mart. The great Golconda diamond mines—from ancient times until the early eighteenth century the world’s sole supplier of these most coveted of all precious stones—were not yet exhausted, and the same seams that had produced the legendary Koh-i-Noor as well as the Hope and the Pitt diamonds were still active enough in 1785 for Nizam Ali Khan to send King George III the newly discovered 101-carat Hastings Diamond as a small diplomatic gift.⁵ Stones of that size were always rare, even in Hyderabad, but the heavily guarded workshops nevertheless groaned with lesser treasures: gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds, superbly inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers, champlevé scabbards and manuscripts of the Koran, their bindings inlaid with burnished gold and empurpled ebony. There were other more effete fopperies too: bejewelled and enamelled flywhisks, and bazubands (armbands) set with the Nine Auspicious Gems, including yellow topaz and the rarest chrysoberyl cats’ eyes.⁶

Palaces stretched off down the narrow sidestreets towards Mughalpura, Shah Gunj and Irani Gulli, some magnificent, but most plain on the street frontage, hiding their richly latticed treasures for those admitted within. Many were huge—‘some of them are three times the length of Burlington House’, reported one astonished British traveller⁷—and contained within them wide expanses of garden, cool and quiet after the bustle of the streets. Throughout ran rippling runnels punctuated by slowly dribbling marble fountains and filled with ‘rows of mango trees, date-palms, coconuts, fig trees, bananas, oranges, citrons, with some yew trees … and very fine circular reservoirs. Around the reservoir are dotted pots of fragrant flowers’.⁸

Where there are the rich in India, there are always the poor too. The magnificent architecture of Hyderabad’s palaces and mosques created a façade of order and grandeur which hid the thieving, the sickness, the hunger and the pain that lay behind. On his arrival in the city several years earlier William Steuart had been very struck by its extremes of wealth and poverty—something that travellers in the Nizam’s dominions continued to notice right up until the middle of the twentieth century: ‘There is perhaps a stronger contrast of extravagant profusion & of wretchedness at this durbar than anywhere in India,’ Steuart wrote in 1790.

By the former I mean the Nizam’s pomp & state: he has a swaree^ba of 400 elephants, several thousand of horsemen near his person who receiveupwards of 100 Rs nominal pay who are extremely well mounted & richly caparisoned. His other chiefs also show marks of pomp. But I have to observe that except the chiefs all are wretched & miserable; grain seldom cheeper than 15 seer a rupee & since my arrival never above 12—the poor devils are sadly put to it for a livelihood.⁹

Leading out from behind the grand bazaars ran a warren of filthy lanes and unswept sidestreets—the preserve of the rats, the pickpockets and the lower sort of prostitute. Even the lane leading to the royal stabling yard was known as ‘Muthri Gulli’—Urinating Lane—and the road that led from the main gate of the palace was ‘fit for horse and carriage traffic only’.¹⁰ Along this route sat the beggars, the lepers, the lame, the halt and the blind. Maimed sepoys flanked landless peasants and the mentally ill, ejected from the Sufi shrines as unhealable and beyond the powers even of the city’s renowned exorcists. From the palace to the gates of the Mecca Masjid they sat in lines, crying for alms and raising their bandaged hands in supplication to passing palanquins, out of which, if they were lucky, might be thrown a small shower of silver annas.

For these people, as for the other Hyderabadis, there were the festivals. To one side of the Char Minar was the Maidan-i-Dilkusha, or Heart-Rejoicing Square, where on holidays such as Id and the Prophet’s birthday the ground would be swept clean and bhistis(water-carriers) sprinkle the warm earth with water. After this canopies and awnings would be raised and food provided free to the entire populace. Elaborate displays of fireworks would round off the evening.¹¹

Nearby was the city’s renowned Dar ul-Shifa, or ‘house of healing’, a four-hundred-bed teaching hospital open to all for no charge and famous as one of the most sophisticated centres of yunani^bb and ayurvedic medicine. Beside it stood a wide garden, the Bagh i-Muhammed Shahi, specially planted with healing herbs and aromatic plants, as well as with flowers whose purifying and uplifting scent was believed to help the patients recover.¹²

There were other scents too, as well as the gardens, the whiff of spices from the bazaars and the darker smells emanating from Muthri Gulli. From nearby street stalls came the all-pervading smell of grilling kebabs, and another smell still more specific to Hyderabad: the scent of slowly-cookingbiryani: ‘In truth,’ admitted a patriotic Delhi-wallah, abandoning for a moment his metropolitan Mughal hauteur, ‘no better dish is cooked anywhere throughout India.’¹³

One of General Raymond’s French officers found this smell particularlyirresistible: ‘There are dishes consisting of bread made à la manteque [naan], stew, and the liver of fowls and kids, very well dressed,’ he wrote, ‘[but most renowned of all is the] rice boiled with quantities of butter, fowls and kids, with all sorts of spicery … which we found to be very good, and which refreshed us greatly.’¹⁴

In his conversations with Wellesley at the Cape, James’s brother William Kirkpatrick painted a straightforward picture of Anglo-French rivalry in Hyderabad, where the beleaguered Union flag of the Residency fluttered bravely against a rising tide of French Revolutionary tricolore. The reality on the ground was a little different.

It is clear from a variety of sources that by the late 1790s both the French officers of the Corps de Raymond and their counterparts in the British detachments stationed in Hyderabad, as well as the staff of the British Residency, had all, to different extents, begun acclimatising themselves to their Hyderabadi environment and to Hyderabadi ways of living.

By 1797, when William left Hyderabad, his brother James had already begun wearing what Arthur Wellesley described as ‘a Mussulman’s dress of the finest texture’ for all occasions ‘excepting when he was obliged to receive the officers of the [British military] detachment, or upon certain great occasions when the etiquette of the Nizam’s durbar required that the English Resident should appear there in the dress of an Englishman’.¹⁵ He smoked a hookah, wore Indian-style ‘mustachios [and] has his hair cropped very short & his fingers dyed with henna’, as one surprised visitor recorded in his diaries. Moreover, James had taken on the Eastern habit of belching appreciatively after meals, which sometimes took visitors to the Residency aback, as did his tendency to ‘make all sorts of other odd noises’, possibly a reference to him clearing his throat (or even nostrils) in the enthusiastic and voluble Indian manner.¹⁶ According to the contemporary Hyderabadi historian Ghulam Imam Khan in his Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi:

I must mention that the Resident [James Kirkpatrick] had a great liking for this country, and especially for the people of Hyderabad. He was very close to the Prime Minister and a great favourite of the Nizam who used to call him ‘beloved son’. It is said that in contrast to many of the English who are often proud, haughty and snobbish, Kirkpatrick was a very cordial and friendly person. Anyone who had spent a little time with him would be won over by his pleasant manners. In the very first meeting, he would make the other person feel he had known him for years, and take him for an old friend and acquaintance. He was completely fluent in the language and idiom of these parts, and followed many of the customs of the Deccan. Indeed he had spent so much time in the company of the women of Hyderabad that he was very familiar with the style and behaviour of the city and adopted it as his own. Thanks partly to these women he was always very cheerful. ¹⁷

Over at the French cantonments on the other side of the Musi, there was a similar situation. Raymond was believed to be a practising Muslim by many of his sepoys, though a few took him to be a Hindu; his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron was also reported to be ‘wanting to turn mussulman’, though it is unclear if he ever did so.¹⁸ The doctor of the French corps, Captain Bernard Fanthôme, seems to have specialised in ayurvedic and yunani cures, and had seven Indian bibis, the most senior of whom was a daughter of the Mughal Prince Feroz Shah. Fanthôme, who was known at court as Fulutan Sahib due to his wisdom—‘Fulutan’ is the Persian name for Plato—later became a doctor in the service of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah II, and fathered a dynasty of notable Urdu and Persian poets, including ‘Jargis’, ‘Shaiq’ and ‘Sufi’, most of whom were pious Muslims and whose masnavi were treasured in the royal libraries at Lucknow and Rampur.¹⁹ Like Fanthôme, most of the French, and a great many of the British, had married or lived with Hyderabadi women, by whom they had large families and through whom they gained Hyderabadi roots.²⁰ The image conveyed by William Kirkpatrick’s official despatches of two fiercely opposed national camps soon fractures on examination into a more nuanced reality of a pair of isolated European outposts slowly assimilating themselves with their surroundings, while retaining their national rivalries and a few other features of their European origins.

In the British Residency this unlikely amalgam of Mughal and European cultures was particularly striking: one visitor in 1801 wrote that ‘Major Kirkpatrick’s grounds are laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan.’²¹ The Hindustani part of the compound was defined by the remains of the ancient pleasure garden in which the Residency was built. In its centre was a large Mughal-style baradari ^bc pavilion which the British had turned into ‘a dining hall and place of public entertainment’, while nearby stood a Mughal-style mahal or sleeping apartment from which led a pair of mature cypress avenues. From this axis ran various runnels, fountains, pools and flowerbeds, all of which had survived from the garden’s earlier incarnation as a pleasure retreat.²²

During the sixteenth century, under the rule of Hyderabad’s founders, the Qutb Shahi sultans, the entire bank of the River Musi at this point had been decorated with long lines of elegant Mughal-style gardens and country houses, cascades and chattris.^bd The remains of this crumbling Arcadia stretched northwards as far as the eye could see, though during the chaos of the early eighteenth century a number of the gardens had been encroached upon by villagers and turned into paddy fields. The whole area was dominated by the vast skeleton of Tana Shah’s pleasure palace. According to Edward Strachey:

Near the Residency, within a mile, are the ruins of a palace and garden which were formerly celebrated for their elegance and magnificence. It is now known by the name of Tannee Shah’s garden. Tannee Shah was the last of the Kuttub Shah Kings. It is related of him that after hunting, his tent being pitched at this place, he slept and in a dream he saw a beautiful palace and garden with fountain and aquaduct. When he awoke he gave orders that a similar palace and garden should be begun immediately.²³

If the remains of ruined Qutb Shahi Gardens gave the British Residency the ‘Hindustani’ part of its character, a scattering of elegant neo-classical bungalows and stable blocks provided the other, Islington, part of its identity. The most prominent of these buildings was a two-storey house intended for the personal use of the Resident. William Kirkpatrick had had it made during his absence on the Khardla campaign; but, unsupervised, it had been quickly and cheaply built, and though barely four years old was already in a semi-ruinous condition. Within a year James was writing to William seeking his help to get the funds out of Calcutta to renovate it:

The upper storey you built to the house at the Residency is now scarcely habitable, as it leaks in all parts so that I am obliged to proof it to prevent it falling in on the lower storey, which itself gives strong symptoms of decay. I have been for these two or three months past patching up what the rains have caused to moulder away, but this patchwork is neither durable, comfortable nor creditable, and as I cannotsuppose that it is wished that my accommodations should be either uncomfortable or uncreditable, it must end in my sending in an estimate.²⁴

Although the bungalows provided for the Residency staff were Western in design, they had one very Eastern feature which would perhaps have surprised Lord Wellesley, or at least his masters in London: all had separate zenana wings for the Indian wives and mistresses attached to the staff. James complained to one friend that these were much smaller than necessary for the accommodation of the full zenana apparatus—the enormous entourage of aseels,^be eunuchs, handmaids, ayahs and wetnurses which seems to have been the norm at this period: one of Kirkpatrick’s English visitors, for example, turned up to stay with ‘at least a dozen females’, although how many of these were bibis, and how many the bibis’ families and attendants, is unclear.²⁵

These bibis came from across the Indian social spectrum, and the relationships they formed with the Residency staff varied accordingly. At the most basic level, there was a mechanism in place for procuring common bazaar prostitutes—or possibly the city’s famously refined courtesans—from the city for passing British travellers: when Mountstuart Elphinstone stopped in at the Residency in August 1801 on his way to Pune he wrote in his diary that the ‘whore whom I am going to keep was to have come to be looked at but did not’. (This, incidentally, was probably just as well for the woman in question as Elphinstone was then suffering from a bad attack of clap and spent much of his time rubbing sulphur and mercury into the affected area, though he remarked in his diary that ‘I ereqtate comfortably enough considering.’^26bf)

Other British officials and soldiers in Hyderabad, however, had more serious monogamous relationships with educated women from the upper reaches of Indian society. Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, the commander of the British troops in Hyderabad (and a cousin of Anne Barnard, Lord Wellesley’s host at the Cape), was married to Mooti Begum, the daughter of the Nawab of Masulipatam. It seems to have been a measure of the equality of their marriage that the two agreed to split the upbringing of their five children according to sex: the boys were sent to Madras to be brought up as Christians, eventually to be sent back to East Lothian to join the ranks of the Lowland Scottish gentry, while the only girl from the marriage, Noor Jah Begum, was brought up as a Hyderabadi Muslim and remained in India where she eventually married one of her father’s sepoys, a ‘Cabulee havildar^bg named Sadue Beig’.²⁷

Likewise, William Linnaeus Gardner, who began his freelance career in the Nizam’s army in 1798, was married to Begum Mah Munzel ul-Nissa, the daughter of the Nawab of Cambay, and Gardner seems to have converted to Islam to marry her. The two had met in Surat a year earlier, where the fourteen-year-old Begum had fled to with her mother from a palace coup. Gardner had glimpsed the Princess while he was sitting through the interminable negotiations of a treaty:

During the negotiations a parda [curtain] was gently moved aside, and I saw, as I thought, the most beautiful black eyes in the world. It was impossible to think of the Treaty; those bright and piercing glances, those beautiful black eyes completely bewildered me.

I felt flattered that a creature so lovely as she of those deep black, loving eyes must be should venture to gaze upon me … At the next Durbar, my agitation and anxiety were extreme again to behold the bright eyes that haunted my dreams by night and my thoughts by day. The parda was again gently moved, and my fate was decided.

I asked for the Princess in marriage; her relations were at first indignant, and positively refused my proposal … however on mature deliberation, the hand of the young Princess was promised. The preparations for the marriage were carried forward: ‘Remember,’ said I, ‘it will be useless to attempt to deceive me, I shall know those eyes again, nor will I marry any other.’

On the day of the marriage I raised the veil from the countenance of the bride, and in the mirror that was placed between us, beheld the bright eyes that had bewildered me; I smiled—and the young Begum smiled also.²⁸

It was a happy and long-lasting marriage. Years later, living with his Anglo-Indian family on his wife’s estates at Khassgunge near Agra, with his son James married to a niece of the Mughal Emperor, Gardner wrote to his cousin Edward:

At Khassgunge I anticipate very great happiness. I am fond of reading and I am fond of my garden and (there’s no accounting for taste) have more relish in playing with the little brats than for the First Society in the World. The Begum and I, from 22 years constant contact, have smoothed off each other’s asperities and roll on peaceably and contentedly … Man must have a companion, and the older I get the more I am confirmed in this. An old age without something to love, and nourish and nurse you, must be old and uncomfortable. The house is filled with Brats, and the very thinking of them, from blue eyes and fair hair to ebony and wool makes me quite anxious to get back to them again.²⁹

He added: ‘Few [men] have more occasion to congratulate themselves on their domestic comfort.’³⁰ Eight years later he was able to joke how ‘my having been married some thirty years and never having taken another wife surprises the Musselmans very much, and the ladies all look upon me as a pattern: they do not admire a system of having three or four rivals, however well pleased the gentlemen may be with the custom’.³¹

If there appears to have been no shortage of beautiful Muslim Begums in Hyderabad, their European counterparts seem to have been in shorter supply—and to have been something of a mixed blessing. Hyderabad at this period was no place for a demanding, or fashionable, or socially ambitious European woman. Unlike Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, there were no milliners or portrait painters, no dancing or riding masters, no balls, no concerts, no masquerades. Boredom and loneliness led to depression, or dissipation, or that sour, embittered ennui that Kipling depicted in his Mrs Hauksbees and Mrs Reivers a hundred years later: ‘Among the nations of the world, the charms of our fair countrywomen are unrivalled,’ wrote the young Henry Russell, one of James’s Assistants at the Residency, on his arrival at Hyderabad. ‘Unfortunately for us [in this city] we possess but the very dregs … Mrs S____ contaminates the atmosphere which she breathes and pollutes the very earth on which she treads.’³² Her friend Margaret Dalrymple, wife of James Dalrymple’s cousin Samuel, seems to have been little better, and struck Elphinstone as ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.

Mrs Ure, the wife of the Dr George Ure who had been besieged with William Kirkpatrick at Khardla, was less poisonous than these two—James thought she was ‘perfectly unassuming and more devoid of affectation than almost any woman I ever met with’; but her drawback was her vast and apparently unquenchable appetite.³³ Together with her portly husband, she ate up as much as the rest of the Residency staff altogether: ‘The young couple’s consumption of tea and sugar alone is at least double mine,’ wrote Kirkpatrick soon after their marriage, when Mrs Ure first became a regular at the Residency dining table. ‘The khansaman^bh tells me a couple of grilled chickens were regularly served up by their direction at their breakfast table. And two fowls boiled down into Mollygotauny soup for their tiffin!! The consequence of which is, as might well have been expected, that the lady was seized with a fever which according to Greene’s and Ure’s account absolutely endangered her life. It has now however left her, and though extremely weak, the khansaman has received directions to provide daily calves’ feet jelly’s until further orders. You may recollect from experience what a costly dish these calves’ feet jelly’s are at Hyderabad … ’ Later Kirkpatrick reported that during her illness, Mrs Ure complained of a lack of appetite but still managed to put away every day ‘poultry, rice, milk, butter, vegetables &c, &c, &c, &c’ as well as ‘two plum cakes, a goose, a turkey and ducks innumerable besides fowls and mutton’.³⁴

Judging by this list, it would seem that the cooking at the Residency was overwhelmingly European in character; however, the Nizam knew that James personally preferred Indian food, and took to regularly sending him a Hyderabadi speciality made frombrinjauls (aubergines), for which he had expressed a particular liking.³⁵ Moreover, despite the European cuisine, the Residency kitchens were run so as not to break any Indian notions of purity, with strict caste rules in operation, presumably so as not to put off Indian guests. Years later, when Henry Russell was made Resident, he wrote to his brother that he planned to bring back the regulations that James had put in place: ‘Among other improvements,’ he wrote, ‘pray take great pains to purify every place in the Residency from the pollution of dhains, chamars [i.e. sweepers and untouchables] and other vagabonds of that type. Upon that subject I intend to be quite as particular as Colonel Kirkpatrick was. Your cooks are all that they ought to be; but Rakeem Khan tells me that dhainsare still allowed to go where they ought not to go, and to touch what they ought not to touch.’³⁶

The pastimes of the Residency staff also intriguingly mixed the customs of Georgian England with those of late Mughal India. There was a great deal of obsessive card-playing and gambling, as if the Residency were a gentlemen’s club in St James’s: whist, dunby and ‘Pope Joan’ alternatedwith backgammon and billiards as a way of transferring winnings and debts from one member of the Residency to another, and so filling the long, hot Indian nights. But Georgian pursuits often dovetailed with Mughal ones: after a Saturday morning spent shooting sand grouse (‘The Resident is a capital shot,’ reported Elphinstone³⁷ ), Kirkpatrick would go hunting the black buck with his tame cheetahs: ‘The cheetahs are kept hood winked on a cord,’ wrote Edward Strachey,

and when they get near enough to the deer the hood is taken off and they are slipped at the game. They run perhaps two or three hundred yards. If they don’t catch the animal, (which they have singled from the herd) in that time, then they crouch and do not attempt to take another. The first time the cheetah failed but a second attempt had better success; he ran a considerable way after a deer, then sprang on him. When we came up he had the deer’s throat in his mouth & its body between his legs. He gave up his prey more readily than one would expect & it was lain on the cart with him but out of his reach.³⁸

In the evenings after returning from the hunt, Kirkpatrick would invite troops of Hyderabad’s famous nautch girls to the camp to perform. In matters of Deccani dance and music, many members of the Hyderabad Residency became connoisseurs—so much so that Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, Hyderabad’s most celebrated dancer and courtesan as well as the first major woman poet in Urdu, dedicated her divan to one of Kirkpatrick’s Assistants, Captain John Malcolm. This was a matter of some political delicacy: Mah Laqa Bai was the lover of Mir Alam, and may also have been, at different times, the inamorata of Nizam Ali Khan and possibly Aristu Jah too. How Mir Alam felt about Mah Laqa giving her divan to Malcolm—the dedication took place at a private nautch at Mir Alam’s house—is not recorded.^39bi

An alternative to nautches were the bhands (buffoons or mummers), whom Elphinstone was particularly taken with when they performed after one of James’s hunting expeditions: ‘They played many parts such as a woman trying to force her way into a zenana, a profligate nephew and his uncle, a foolish horseman wheedled out of his money and clothes by singers.’⁴⁰ Such entertainments alternated with more conventional Georgian fare such as ‘reading Dryden out loud’ and ‘Mrs. Hewitt singing after dinner aires’.

Kirkpatrick—and no doubt many others on the Residency staff—spent other evenings visiting friends in the old city, though it was necessary to get the express permission of the Minister for members of the Residency to enter the city after sunset. James was especially fond of visiting his friend Tajalli Ali Shah, the Nizam’s court painter, poet and historian, whose grand courtyard house—or deorhi as they are known in Hyderabad—was ‘the coffee house of Hyderabad’ according to James, and the place where everyone came to exchange political gossip.⁴¹ With Shah’s help, he collected Hyderabadi miniatures, and attended mehfils and mushairas—poetic symposia. He also regularly attended the Tuesday cockfights at Aristu Jah’s mansion, and visited the Minister at other times to play chess and fly pigeons.

Under James the Residency also participated in the life and yearly cycle of seasons and festivals of Hyderabad to an extent that it was never to do again. James saw to it that the Residency gave regular donations to the Sufi shrines of the city. He also took parties to join in the festivals: to break the Ramadan fast by eating ’iftar with the Nizam or the Minister, to travel with the durbar up to the Shi’a shrine of Maula Ali during its annual ’urs (festival day), and to present himself, head covered, at the city’s ashur khana during Muharram.

If, under James Kirkpatrick, the Residency’s participation in the social and cultural life of Hyderabad led to much cross-fertilisation of ideas and the growth of a number of deep friendships between the Residency and the omrahs (nobles) of the court, it also led to some very real political benefits. European ignorance of the complex codes of Mughal etiquette often caused unexpected and diplomatically disastrous offence at Indian courts: in 1750 for example the Hyderabad durbar completely broke off relations with the French after the Nizam received an inadequately deferential letter from the Governor of Pondicherry. The Hyderabad Prime Minister of the time wrote a curt note to the Governor, returning the offending letter and noting: ‘Your letter was not politely written. Even the Sultan of Rum^bj writes respectfully [to the Nizam]. How great the difference between you, the master of one seaport and [the Nizam], the Governor of the entire Deccan! Should you not therefore treat him with due deference?’⁴² James’s increasing absorption into Mughal society meant that he would never make such basic errors of etiquette.

Likewise his personal knowledge of harem life meant that he avoided the crucial mistake made by many of his contemporaries: of regarding Muslim harems merely as places of pleasure, and so underestimating the power of the Nizam’s women in the Hyderabad political process. In his very first report for Wellesley, James wrote not only about the Nizam and his advisers, but also devoted many pages to analysing the distribution of power within Nizam Ali Khan’s harem:

Among the wives and concubines of the Nizam, two dominate the zenana. These are the Bukshee Begum and Tînat un-Nissa Begum, the former of whom has the charge of the privy purse, and control of all Mahl [zenana] disbursements, and the latter the custody of the family jewels which are valued at the lowest at two crores of rupees. They are both advanced in years … and are thought to possess much influence with the Nizam, which they have never been known (it is said) to exert to bad purposes, and they are both much respected. For some years past the Bukshee Begum has entirely refrained from all interference in public matters, employing the whole of her time in acts of charity and devotion. Tînat un-Nissa on the other hand, takes a deep interest in the affairs of the state, and has not failed to avail herself of the share she enjoys in the Nizam’s confidence, and of that weight which her rank in the Mahl gives her at court, where her influence is all pervading.^43bk

James’s writings show that he correctly understood the very precise and intricate hierarchy in the Nizam’s harem, where elderly postmenopausal women, particularly those with adult male princely children, had considerable influence—much more so, perhaps surprisingly, than their younger, more sexually active rivals.⁴⁴ This knowledge enabled him successfully to predict the outcome of power struggles and succession disputes.^bl

Kirkpatrick’s intimate knowledge of Mughal society also allowed him to participate in Hyderabadi court ritual in a way that earlier Residents had been unqualified to do, and later generations would find impossible. So when the Nizam recovered from an illness, James did not just go and congratulate him as other diplomats of the period might have done. Instead, as he reported to Calcutta:

After paying my respects to his Highness and expressing my Joy in his happy Recovery, I passed a Bag containing a thousand Rupees with the usual ceremony thrice round his Highness’s head, and then desired that it might be considered as a Tussaddookh or health-offering on the present Joyful Occasion; a mode of manifesting the interest which the Government I represent takes in his Highness’s welfare, that was highly applauded by all present, and appeared to excite a pleasing emotion even in his Highness himself as far as could be perceived in his low and listless condition.⁴⁵

It was a small gesture, but clearly one that was appreciated. By wearing Islamic dress, using Mughal styles of address, larding his speeches with the Persian aphorisms of ‘the wise Shaikh Sady’, and accepting and using Persian titles, James Kirkpatrick made himself intelligible in the politicallingua franca of the wider Mughal world. Equally important was his willingness to submit to the ritual subordination of Mughal court procedure—the giving of nazrs (symbolic gifts) and the accepting of khilats (symbolic court dress supposedly taken from the Nizam’s own wardrobe) all had profound political significance in Mughal court ritual.

By mastering the finer points of etiquette of the court and submitting to procedures that some other Residents refused to bow to, James quickly gained a greater degree of trust than any other British Resident of the period, and so was able to reap the diplomatic rewards.

In the crucial period immediately after William Kirkpatrick left for the Cape, and General Raymond’s rise at court seemed irresistible, these small diplomatic advantages were much needed.

By 1797 Raymond’s personal income was vast—his estates on their own yielded fifty thousand rupees a year—and according to one observer, ‘in the style of his domestic life he collected around him every luxury and elegance within the reach of a European in India’.⁴⁶ Indeed Raymond’s corps was so well financed that he was able to outbid the British not only for the services of their best sepoys, but was even able to bribe several senior British officers to defect from the two British battalions stationed in Hyderabad to take up service with the French corps for increased wages. These defections were a great blow to both British morale and British prestige in the city. In August 1797 James reported that three more Englishmen had deserted and that something must quickly be done to stop ‘the growing power and influence of the French here which if not speedily overthrown will be productive of the most serious mischief for us … Surely no one in his senses can doubt that the French will now bend the whole of their own exertions and those of their allies to shake our power in India to the very foundations.’⁴⁷

In the early months of 1798 Raymond persuaded the Nizam again to increase the size of his force, this time to over fourteen thousand men, with a complete train of cannon and its own bespoke gun foundry, all drawn by five thousand of its own bullocks. The force also manufactured its own swords, muskets and pistols besides its excellent artillery; there was even a small cavalry group numbering six hundred. To make matters worse, Raymond was personally very popular in the durbar. One of the most senior of the princes, Sikander Jah, who since the rebellion and subsequent suicide of his brother Ali Jah was now one of the two possible heirs apparent, was so enamoured of the Frenchman that he went as far as swearing ‘by the head of Raymond’.⁴⁸

Moreover there were worrying signs that Raymond was planning some sort of pre-emptive strike on the two British battalions in Hyderabad. As James reported to his brother: ‘Three nights ago Raymond sent between the hours of eleven and twelve a Moheer(answering to a havildar major) with six sepoys to reconnoitre the English camp, which he did accordingly and returned with his report to his chief. R has a spy in our lines. I hope he will soon be apprehended.’⁴⁹

James had good reason to believe that Raymond’s loyalty to France far outweighed his loyalty to the Nizam. After all, the French corps fought under the Revolutionary tricolore rather than the insignia of the Nizam, and Raymond himself made no secret of the fact that he regarded his troops not as Hyderabadi but instead ‘a French body of troops employed and subsidised by the Nizam’. Raymond personally owned all the guns and military equipage used by his force, and could in principle walk away with both the arms and the men at any time he wished. It would, James feared, be very easy for him to use his force to attempt some sort of coup d’état against the Nizam.

The news that Raymond was scouting out the English camp and clearly considering an attack on the English in Hyderabad confirmed all Lord Wellesley’s suspicions. He was quick to see a wider French conspiracy behind the moves, writing to James that ‘the junction between the French officers with their several corps in the respective services of the Nizam, of Scindiah, and of Tippoo might establish the power of France in India upon the ruin of the states of Poonah [the Marathas] and of the Deccan [Hyderabad]’.⁵⁰

Although many of Wellesley’s writings at this period have an air of Francophobe paranoia to them, the new Governor General was in fact quite correct about the threat posed by Raymond. As a recently discovered cache of papers has shown, Raymond was indeed in correspondence both with the French officers of de Boigne’s corps in Scindia’s service and with those working for Tipu at Seringapatam, where Raymond had himself been employed before entering the Nizam’s service fourteen years earlier.

The scale of Raymond’s ambitions is revealed in a series of passionately patriotic letters he wrote in the early 1790s to the Compagnie des Indes Orientales headquarters at Pondicherry, pledging his loyalty to France and the Revolution: ‘I am ready to sacrifice all,’ he wrote to the Count de Conway, the Governor of Pondicherry, ‘if I am so fortunate that circumstances may ever put it in my power to prove the zeal for my country which animates me.’ A later letter was even more explicit about his hopes that the different French corps in India might one day be able to act in concert: ‘My troops are the only ones in the capital … I pray that my fellow citizens may place at your disposal in India the means for acting on the first necessity. Then, my General, the modest strength of the machine which I have put together may display itself.’

To the Chevalier de Fresne, Governor of the important French base on the Île de France (modern Mauritius), Raymond was even more explicit about his aims and intentions: ‘As for me, my General, I shall always follow as my first duty whatever [orders] you wish to give me … If ever I can still be useful to France I am ready to pour my blood once more for her. I labour only to discharge this duty and gain your good opinion.’⁵¹

In the late summer of 1797, just as things seemed to be spinning out of James’s control, the increasingly fragile position of the British in Hyderabad was suddenly steadied when Aristu Jah, the former Prime Minister who had been imprisoned in Pune for over two years, sent some extraordinary news to the Nizam: not only had he succeeded in negotiating his own release, he had managed to get the Marathas to agree to return almost all the land and fortresses that had been ceded to them after the Battle of Kharlda. They had even waived the enormous indemnity owed to them by the Nizam.

So astounding was the news, and so remarkable was Aristu Jah’s achievement in negotiating it from confinement, that many of his contemporaries assumed that he could only have achieved this major diplomatic coup with the aid of sorcery. Even Abdul Lateef Shushtari, one of the most intelligent and least credulous Muslim observers of the period, believed that Aristu Jah was a master of the dark arts, and that ‘the balance of his mind was overthrown by his obsession with alchemy to make gold and magic to have power over angels’.⁵² The historian Ghulam Husain Khan was more explicit. In the Gulzar-i-Asafiya he wrote how for two years Aristu Jah was imprisoned in his garden outside Pune, forgotten by the Nizam’s durbar and ignored by the Marathas, until eventually he decided that his only hope of escape was by using his occult arts:

He began the litanies of the Prayer of the Sword breathing on a bowl of water, which he then threw over a desiccated wood apple tree in the hope that, if after 20 days the tree started sprouting green shoots, then after completing the 40 days of the litanies, this obstinate misfortune would turn out according to his wishes. So he began reciting and indeed after twenty days, the desiccated wood apple, whose branches were withered as if they had not had any rain for many years, suddenly put out green shoots and fresh leaves—a miraculous demonstration of the power of the Almighty! Those who knew of Aristu Jah’s vow praised God and grew hopeful that his prayers would be granted. Then Aristu Jah, his heart fortified with hope in God’s merciful grace, stopped eating meat and in a constant state of purification, recited his litanies with devout sincerity and brought his 40 days’ devotions to completion.

It is said that on the very day the 40 days were completed, in the first watch of the day, a messenger suddenly brought the news that [the young Maratha Peshwa] Madhu Rao had fallen off the roof and was dead. While flying a kite, he had slipped from the parapet and toppled onto the fountain below, whose spout had pierced him to the liver. Aristu Jah was astonished, for the secret intention of his reciting the litanies had been that there should be a revolution in the leadership in Pune so that he could be freed. For without a change of ruler and the ensuing squabbles among the nobles, it was uncertain how he could be released. God most Holy, who has power over all things, realised his desires and manifested a miracle according to his prayers. ⁵³

British observers in Pune took a different view. They believed that the young Peshwa’s death was neither an accident nor an act of black magic, but a very deliberate suicide brought on by Madhu Rao’s frustration at the restrictions imposed on him by his guardian, the Maratha Minister Nana Phadnavis. Though Madhu Rao was now twenty-one and old enough to rule in his own name, the Minister had kept him from all real power and left him to play impotently in the gilded cage of his palace, his every move watched by Nana’s spies. Madhu Rao’s suicide was his ultimate revenge on his jailer, for without his ward, Nana instantly lost his authority to govern.

From his garden prison, Aristu Jah realised his chance had come and expertly exploited the confusion, playing the different factions in Pune against each other with a talent for intrigue and manipulation that came close to genius. The day after Madhu Rao’s death he managed to lure Nana’s young rival, Daulat Rao Scindia, to come and visit him by offering him as a gift a celebrated stallion which Scindia had once expressed an admiration for. Alerted by his spies, as Aristu Jah knew he would be, Nana soon paid a visit to Aristu Jah’s garden prison to try to discover the purpose of Scindia’s visit. He suspected that Scindia had been trying to get the backing of Hyderabad in the coming succession struggle. According to Ghulam Husain Khan:

Nana asked Aristu Jah: ‘What was all this? Why did Daulat Rau come to see you?’

Aristu Jah replied, ‘Your spies were present, no doubt they heard my peerless stallion mentioned. He came to fetch it, nothing more!’

Nana refused to believe this. ‘For God’s sake, tell me the essence of the matter, and so calm my worries!’

However much Aristu Jah denied, Nana didn’t stop insisting. Finally Aristu Jah hinted that Scindia was plotting Nana’s ruin. Nana was aghast: ‘As your Excellency is my friend and the wisest of this generation, ’ he said, ‘tell me whatever you think is advisable for me to do at this time, and don’t hold back.’⁵⁴

Aristu Jah duly advised Nana to flee to a remote fort for his own safety. Terrified, Nana left Pune that night, taking the Arab troops which guarded Aristu Jah as his escort. By the following morning, Aristu Jah found himself left unguarded and in a perfect position to escape. But rather than fleeing back to Hyderabad, he chose to stay in Pune, continuing to play faction off against faction, promising each the support of the Nizam. By the time the succession dispute was finally resolved in the summer of 1797, and Nana reinstated as Minister at Aristu Jah’s express request, the latter had managed to persuade all the different parties in the Maratha court to annul the humiliating Treaty of Khardla and release the Nizam from nearly all his obligations. Aristu Jah left Pune with full honours and headed off towards Hyderabad, where he was received as a national hero. The Nizam reinstated him as Prime Minister and showered him with titles, estates and jewels.

Aristu Jah’s release came just in time for Kirkpatrick. A week earlier, the Nizam had finally given way to pressure from the pro-French and pro-Tipu parties at court, and announced that he was going to dismiss the English troops from Hyderabad. Aristu Jah heard the news midway between Pune and Hyderabad, and sent an urgent message for the Nizam to rescind the order, which the indecisive Nizam duly did. The Company sepoys who were already on their way to the coast marched back to their old camp and the British presence in Hyderabad was saved; but Aristu Jah made it immediately apparent to James that there was a price to pay for this. The Company would have to decide whether or not it was a full ally of the Nizam, and whether in future it would be prepared to defend Hyderabad against the Marathas. Only then would Aristu Jah be able to persuade the Nizam to jettison Raymond and disband the French corps. James was able to reply to the Minister’s ‘very earnest proposal’ that he had already been given the authority to begin negotiations by the Governor General, and lost no time in presenting a draft treaty to the Minister.

For others in Hyderabad, Aristu Jah’s release was less good news. Raymond had secretly conspired with the pro-French nobles at the Hyderabad durbar to bribe the Maratha court to prolong Aristu Jah’s captivity in Pune.⁵⁵ There was also evidence that Aristu Jah’s former protégé Mir Alam was involved: after all, he had been one of the principal beneficiaries of the Minister’s absence, and had assumed many of his administrative functions. Aristu Jah had learned about their treachery from Nana, and returned to Hyderabad determined to exact revenge on all his enemies.

The Minister was particularly angered by Mir Alam’s behaviour: though he owed his position at court entirely to Aristu Jah’s patronage, throughout the latter’s entire captivity, Mir Alam had not once written to him. From now on, Aristu Jah’s considerable talent for intrigue would be dedicated single-mindedly to revenging himself on Mir Alam. James could have little inkling how far he himself would be caught in the trap Aristu Jah began to lay to accomplish this aim.

From the moment Aristu Jah arrived back in Hyderabad, events began to move quickly. Only the tortuous weeks it took to get letters and drafts of the new treaty to and from Calcutta, and the need for extreme secrecy, slowed the frenetic pace of negotiations, as James worked to replace Raymond as the centre of influence in the Hyderabad durbar.

Lord Wellesley, by May 1798 installed in Calcutta and anxious to get on with what he saw as his principal task of reducing French influence in the subcontinent, sent James a series of lengthy despatches minutely laying down the exact boundaries within which James was to work. He did not approve when James allowed himself the slightest discretion to verge even marginally from these guidelines, and at one point wrote to General William Palmer, the new Resident at Pune: ‘I find that Captain Kirkpatrick has departed very widely both from the spirit and letter of my instructions to him.’⁵⁶ But as the treaty neared the moment of signing, and as the Nizam agreed one by one to almost all of Wellesley’s terms, James gradually returned to favour with his irascible new master. By the end, the Nizam was holding out on only one of Calcutta’s demands: that the French corps be immediately dismissed. Raymond was personally well liked by the old man, and he was determined not to lose him, despite the urgings of his Minister. He seemed oblivious to the fact that destroying Raymond was the Company’s principal aim.

As the negotiations gathered pace, both Wellesley and James remained worried that events on the ground might overtake their schemes. The main worry remained a French coup, possibly combined with an attempt to assassinate the elderly Nizam and replace him with one of his more pliable sons. One son, Ali Jah, had revolted in October 1795; another senior family member, Dara Jah, had come out in rebellion the following March, raising the flag of revolt from the reputedly impregnable hill fort of Raichur until dislodged and captured by Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple on 20 April.⁵⁷

Then in September a plot was uncovered in the palace aiming to do away with the Nizam with the aid of black magic. This was taken every bit as seriously as the two rebellions. To the great alarm of the Minister and the Nizam’s zenana, it was found that (as James reported to Calcutta)

malignant sorcery was being practised against the Nizam … inquiries are still being prosecuted to get to the bottom of the necromantic practices being used against His Highness. Images of paste have been dug up [in the palace] with powdered glass in their bodies & dogs hair.

Since they have been discovered His Highness says he feels better, eats better and sleeps better. But they have not yet found the promoter of the sorcery.⁵⁸

However much the British might dismiss the sorcery as hocus pocus, it added to the growing perception in Hyderabad that the Nizam’s days might well be numbered.

Hyderabad in 1798 had something of the feel of post-war Berlin or Vienna: a city alive with intrigue and conspiracy, where no one could trust anyone else. At the centre of the city, like the spider at the heart of his web, lay the Nizam himself, assisted by a very efficient intelligence network.^bmNizam Ali Khan kept a secret ‘intelligencer’ known as a khufia navis in every fort, village and city in his dominions, as well as in the palaces of the more important nobles; like his father he probably also received information from the pirs (holy men) of the Sufi shrines across his territory. ⁵⁹From outside his lands, from the Mughal capital of Delhi and the Maratha court in Pune, he was sent a daily newsletter from a professional Hyderabadi akhbar navis, or ‘newswriter’.⁶⁰ This intelligence department had a considerable budget. One of Aristu Jah’s successors as Prime Minister, Rajah Chandu Lal, was to spend at least ‘seven lakhs of rupees annually’ getting sensitive information from Calcutta alone.⁶¹

Nor was it just a question of information: abductions, assassinations and poisonings were regularly used by the spies of Indian rulers at this period to accomplish their aims. Poisoning in particular has a long history in India, being recommended as a vital instrument of statecraft by ancient India’s Machiavelli, the great political philosopher Chanakya^bn (c.300 BC), who in his Artha Shastra suggested that courtesans were particularly useful for administering slow-acting toxins to selected clients when they were asleep.⁶² Certainly there is evidence that Aristu Jah was prepared to consider more dramatic forms of intelligence work than simply spying. At one point two prominent figures from Hyderabad escaped from the Nizam’s territories to Pune, from where Aristu Jah discovered that they were plotting to have him assassinated. He responded by proposing the sort of operation more usually associated with modern intelligence agencies, ordering that ‘the motions of both these intriguers [should be] most strictly watched for the purpose of having them carried off if a fair opportunity should offer, and conducted on horses or camels with all expedition to Hyderabad’.⁶³

The Nizam was not the only one who employed informers in Hyderabad: several different groups kept networks of spies at work. Raymond, for example, had successfully placed a spy in the English military camp, who had yet to be apprehended although the fact of his existence was acknowledged—through Kirkpatrick’s own agents in the French camp. Moreover, quite unknown to James, Tipu Sultan had succeeded in placing a paid informer within the Residency staff who throughout this period was busily copying sensitive documents from the Residency daftar or chancellery, and despatching them to Seringapatam via ‘the Fakir’, a nephew of the Nizam named Imtiaz ul-Omrah who was the head of the pro-Tipu faction at court.^bo In his more facetious moments, James referred to ‘the Fakir’ as ‘the Doctor of Divinity’,⁶⁴ but he did not underestimate Imtiaz, recognising him as his most formidable enemy within the durbar.⁶⁵

James was aware that intelligence leaks were occurring somewhere between Calcutta and Hyderabad, though he did not yet realise his own office was responsible for them. For this reason he took the precaution of writing almost all of his politically sensitive letters in cipher.^bp

Perhaps James might have done well to employ such precautions, for he continued to discover evidence of the lack of security surrounding the Residency’s affairs. He was horrified when Mir Alam’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari, told him of a letter James was about to receive from Calcutta before it actually arrived. More worrying still, William Gardner, then a new recruit in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, managed to discover some of Wellesley’s decisions on details of the new treaty before James did.⁶⁶ James thought the leaks were occurring in Madras, and wrote angrily to his brother William about the lack of security there, especially when the details of his plans to take on Raymond came quickly to be an open secret in Hyderabad.^bq It was not for another year that James realised he had a mole at work in his own staff.^67br

Kirkpatrick was however no innocent in the game of espionage. One of his first jobs in Hyderabad had been to set up his own network of informers. Within the Nizam’s mahal he had spies, probaby burarun: ‘female domestics or slaves of the seraglio who collect a daily budget of [often scandalous] tittle tattle not always of a description to be given to the world’, as another British intelligence officer of the period described them.⁶⁸ He also bribed the palace sweepers to pass on information and documents from the Nizam’s inner apartments, and his letters are full of references to ‘my information from the interior of the palace’.^bs

But it seems unlikely, judging by his letters, that James would have been prepared to contemplate more devious and Machiavellian methods of conducting his business. So when, on the morning of 25 March 1798, General Raymond was found dead aged only forty-three, in highly suspicious circumstances, all the evidence pointing to the use of some agonising slow-acting toxin or poison, there is every reason to believe that James was as surprised as everyone else.

Everyone else, that is, except perhaps Aristu Jah, who without blinking announced the confiscation of Raymond’s extensive estates that same evening.

Raymond was buried in a perfect classical Greek tomb on a hilltop at Malakpet, just outside the city of Hyderabad. It lay immediately above the French cantonments he had founded and supervised. Beside it was raised an obelisk. Both tomb and obelisk were left free of the iconography of any religion; only the same simple monogram which can be found on Raymond’s hookah—a looped and italicised ‘JR’—breaks the purity of its line.^bt

Raymond was succeeded by his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron, a rougher and less sophisticated man than his former commander. Piron lacked Raymond’s great charm, and was less clever at concealing both his feelings and his ambitions. His first action on succeeding Raymond was to send his counterpart in Scindia’s service a republican silver tree and a Cap of Liberty. This, once reported back to Calcutta by British spies in Pune, fed Wellesley’s increasingly paranoiac belief that a worldwide republican conspiracy was afoot, encouraging him to speed up his plans to topple the French party at Hyderabad.⁶⁹

Reporting the death of Raymond to Calcutta, James wrote that the French corps remained formidable despite its founder’s death:

The officers commanding this numerous and in a comparative view, well disciplined and appointed Body of Infantry, are not only most of them violent Republicans themselves, but have even contrived (I think) to infuse some of their spirit and animosity towards the English in their Men, many hundreds of whom, particularly the Native officers, are old Pondicherry sepoys. The arms commonly used by these French Corps are certainly not of the best, but according to information I have received, there are complete spare sets in store, ready to be issued to them in cases of emergency.⁷⁰

In fact the French corps was later discovered to have in store enough equipment to arm twelve thousand more troops—a measure of Raymond’s hopes and ambitions.⁷¹ Yet James soon realised that Raymond’s death was going to make his job much easier. He first detected signs of laziness creeping into the routine of the French camp in the middle of the summer. Reviewing his intelligence on the French cantonments six months later, just after the text of his new treaty had finally been agreed by Calcutta, he wrote to William: ‘Things in Piron’s lines go on as usual, and the daily detail of duty continues without any alteration since Piron succeeded to the Command of the Party. During Raymond’s time, however, there was more vigilance for he always kept spies abroad to advise him what was doing, but Piron has not a single Harkarrah [runner or spy] employed.’

This, wrote James, was just as well, as the news from outside Hyderabad was far from heartening: ‘The report of the day is that the French are triumphant in Europe, have entirely humbled the English, and that Tippoo is prepared for war, having been joined by 12,000 Frenchmen who landed at one of his ports.’

The reports turned out to be exaggerated; but some French soldiers and sailors had indeed turned up, and Tipu quickly wrote to the French commander in Mauritius asking for more.

Aristu Jah, meanwhile, was pressing ahead with his own schemes to ease the removal of the French officers from Hyderabad. His plan was to establish two new mercenary regiments under a pair of Irish and American adventurers who had formerly guarded him in his garden prison in Pune. He hoped that in due course, after the treaty with the Company had been signed and the French officers were rounded up, most of the rank and file sepoys of Raymond’s corps could be re-assigned to these two new English-speaking corps.

One regiment, of five thousand men, was raised by the thirty-six-year-old Michael Finglas, an Irish mercenary ‘possessed of very little talent or education’, according to James, but blessed with what in James’s eyes was the great redeeming quality of not being French. Aristu Jah had lured him to Hyderabad from Pune and given him the singularly inappropriate title of Nawab Khoon Khar Jung, ‘the Falcon’.^72bu James approved of the move, and at first regarded Finglas as a good-natured if slightly ineffective figure, only later coming to deprecate what he termed Finglas’s ‘deplorable weakness and infirmity both mental and bodily’.⁷³

Finglas appointed as his deputy the young William Linnaeus Gardner, now newly married to his Cambay Begum. Gardner had been born in Livingstone Manor in New York State, between the Catskills and the Hudson, a godson of the Swedish botanist and a nephew of the British Admiral Alan Gardner, Baron Uttoxeter. At the age of thirteen he had had to flee the New World after the Patriot victory in the War of Independence, in which his father had fought prominently—and initially very successfully—for the British government. James at first thought William Gardner ‘a young man of honour as well as ability’; but the two men—so similar in many ways, with their Indian wives and shared love of Mughal culture—fell out after Gardner began manoeuvring to replace Finglas as head of the newly formed corps. By November James was writing that Gardner had planned a series of ‘unjustifiable and villainous intrigues with a view to terrifying his chief [Finglas] into a resignation of his Command, [and so] has disorganised the whole Party’.⁷⁴ By the end of the year Gardner had secretly slipped out of Hyderabad to try his luck elsewhere.^75bv

Aristu Jah’s second regiment was raised by another independent-minded American exile: an intermittently violent and short-tempered Yankee from Newburyport, Massachusetts, named John P. Boyd.⁷⁶ Boyd raised and trained a corps of 1800 men before being discharged by Aristu Jah in July 1798 due to his ‘refractoriness, disobedience and unreasonableness’. ⁷⁷ He promptly stormed back to Pune with his corps, where he rejoined the Peshwa’s service.^bw

The freelances and adventurers in Maratha service from which Aristu Jah had plucked Boyd, Finglas and Gardner were, in general, a markedly unmanageable and unreliable lot of ruffians. William Gardner was a rare exception in coming from an educated background: most of his fellows were ne’er-do-wells from the furthest margins of Western society, men like Michael Filoze, ‘a low-bred Neapolitan of worthless character’ who had formerly been employed as muleteer in the Apennines; or Louis Bourquoin, a part-time fireworks salesman and former French pastrycook, ‘his skill in culinary matters being superior to his skill in military ones’.⁷⁸ These adventurers almost all came to India to seek their fortunes, and moved employers and changed sides as they wished; as James put it, ‘Europeans in the native services acquire such a spirit of wandering’ that they were impossible to keep track of. One of the most prominent, the raffish Chevalier Dundrenec, changed sides no fewer than seven times in fifteen years.

Most freelances adopted Indian ways of living, and several converted to Islam: Colonel Anthony Pohlmann, originally from Hanover, ‘lived in the style of an Indian prince, kept a seraglio, and always travelled on an elephant, attended by a guard of Mughals, all dressed alike in purple robes, and marching in file in the same way as a British Cavalry regiment’. ^79bx

A few of these men became distinguished poets in Urdu—one, whose pen name was Farasu, was the son of a German Jewish soldier of fortune, Gottlieb Koine, by a Mughal Begum; according to a contemporary critic this unlikely poet left behind him a ‘camel load of poetic works’.⁸⁰ Others continued to write in their native European languages, and their letters give wonderful glimpses of the enviably anarchic and at times almost piratical life they led. As Pohlmann wrote to a freelance friend while trying to decide whether to move on from one prince to another: ‘I believe this part of the country will be given away to some rajahs, and if that takes place I am inclined to volunteer to take [service in] the Cachmeere country, where the best and handsomest ladies are … As soon as I get the order for returning I shall be with you in a jiffy, as the cold nights are setting in and I dare say you join in my opinion that a beautiful Cashmereian woman would not be a bad acquisition. I really think it would be a very agreeable amusement.’⁸¹

It was this wildness, this resolute refusal to play by the rules, that made the mercenaries’ relationship with the Company officials so difficult and complicated. On the one hand they had much in common: they were from the same culture and had both learned to accommodate themselves to another. On the other, a Resident like James lived on his prestige at court, and could not afford to mix too intimately with the deserters, criminals and charlatans who tended to make up the freelance battalions. As James observed rather stiffly at the time to William:

I have always and ever shall make it a rule to maintain the consequence and respectability of my station towards all descriptions of men; my invitations to anyone whatever of Finglas’s corps have and shall continue to be very rare indeed; not only because it is what I think I owe to myself as Resident, but to them as servants of this state which I know does not relish any close intercourse between us. I have abundant means without seeing any of them very often, of keeping the party in proper order.⁸²

As well as adventurers, criminals and runaways, a sizeable minority of the freelances in Finglas’s battalions, as elsewhere, were Anglo-Indians. Since Cornwallis had passed legislation banning Anglo-Indian children of British soldiers from entering the East India Company’s army between 1786 and 1795, increasing numbers of the unemployed sons of Indian mothers and British soldiers too poor to send their children ‘home’ sought out service with one of the Indian princes. The increasingly racist and dismissive attitude of the British to their mixed-race progeny was something that struck the French General Benoît de Boigne, who had been one of the first to recruit adventurers and to train them into formidable fighting units for Scindia. Sending a newly orphaned Anglo-Indian recruit to one of his officers who was then the qiladar (fort keeper) at Agra, de Boigne observed that the boy had no introduction, but ‘appears to have good will and inclination [and] you may try him … I have already sent you many of these young men, sons of European officers which can’t prevent me from observing how few [British] fathers can leave anything to their [Anglo-Indian] children at their death. There are hundreds more at Calcutta who wish to enter into the service, but have no friends to recommend them and no other means to go up [to Agra from Calcutta].’⁸³

One rather unusual Anglo-Indian who turned up in Hyderabad around this time looking for a commission in Finglas’s regiment was the young William Palmer. He was the Anglo-Indian son of James Kirkpatrick’s opposite number in Pune, General William Palmer, by his beloved Mughal wife Begum Fyze Baksh of Delhi. As fluent in Persian and Urdu as he was in English and French, and educated in both India and England, where he had attended Woolwich Military Academy, William was equally at home in Mughal and English culture, and was able to switch from one to the other as easily as he changed from his jacket to his jama. He was also extremely intelligent, with a flair for entrepreneurial innovation that would later blossom into a banking fortune of almost unparalleled magnitude.

At the time, with the confrontation with the French corps looming imminently, James hardly took in Palmer’s arrival in Hyderabad, beyond noting that ‘he is dark but clever and cultivated’.⁸⁴ In due course, however, William Palmer was to play a major role not only in Kirkpatrick’s story, but that of his entire extended family.

Nizam Ali Khan finally signed the Preliminary Treaty with the East India Company on 1 September 1798. The treaty authorised the Company to provide six thousand regular East India Company troops for the Nizam’s use, in addition to the two battalions already stationed in Hyderabad. The troops were to be under British officers, but available to the Nizam both for internal peacekeeping and tax-collecting work, and for campaigns outside the state in the event of aggression by a third party. In return the Nizam was to pay the Company an annual subsidy of £41,710, and to dismiss the French corps, whose officers—along with the British deserters under them—were all to be transported to Europe as prisoners of war. Exactly how or when this was to be done, however, was not made explicit in the text of the treaty document.

Following the signing, an uneasy month passed as the new British force of four full-strength battalions—some six thousand troops along with a train of artillery—made its way up the 150 miles from Guntur. This was the nearest Company-controlled town, where Wellesley had ordered them to collect two months earlier in readiness to seize the moment and march to Hyderabad to confront the French.⁸⁵

As rumours of the secret treaty began to leak out, Aristu Jah moved Finglas’s two English-officered battalions to camp beside the Residency compound, and so offer some protection in the event of a pre-emptive French attack—a prospect which began to look increasingly likely.

Despite having obtained the Nizam’s signature on the treaty, James remained unconvinced that the Nizam would actually disband the French forces when the new Company battalions arrived, and began to make contingency plans in case the Corps Français put up resistance. On 26 September he wrote in cipher to William:

I am prepared for difficulties being made when things come to a pinch (both by Aristu Jah and others, both from fear and from other motives) not only as to the delivering up to me of the French officers but also to my using any coercion for the purpose of bringing the delicate business to an early and completely successful issue. You may depend on it however that should this prove the case, I will be as firm and inflexible as you could wish me. I have always felt the importance of securing as many of the French officers as possible and for this reason have always thought that it was better to run the risk of resistance by drawing the whole party together at Hyderabad than by dispersing it to run the hazard of both officers and sepoys going off to Tippoo and to Scindeah where they would leave no stone unturned to be revenged on us. ⁸⁶

For this reason James got Aristu Jah to concentrate the French troops in their cantonments in Hyderabad, and to avoid sending any out on tax-collecting missions, or any other assignment.

It was, of course, a risky strategy. If there was serious resistance, concentrating the French forces would make the task of disarming them all the more difficult.

At this crucial moment, on 6 October 1798, with the British reinforcements just three days’ march from Hyderabad, the extraordinary news arrived in the city of Napoleon Bonaparte’s landing in Egypt, and his subsequent spectacular capture of both Alexandria and Cairo.

Napoleon was quite clear as to his aims. In a book about Turkish warfare he had scribbled in the margin before 1788 the words, ‘Through Egypt we shall invade India, we shall re-establish the old route through Suez and cause the route by the Cape of Good Hope to be abandoned.’ Nor did he anticipate many problems: ‘the touch of a French sword is all that is needed for the framework of mercantile grandeur to collapse’.⁸⁷ From Cairo he sent a letter to Tipu, answering the latter’s pleas for help and outlining his plans:

You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an innumerable and invincible army, full of the desire of releasing and relieving you from the iron yoke of England. I eagerly embrace this opportunity of testifying to you the desire I have of being informed by you, by the way of Muscat and Mocha, as to your political situation. I could even wish you could send some sort of intelligent person to Suez or Cairo, possessing your confidence, with whom I may confer. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!

Yours &c &c
Bonaparte⁸⁸

It was exactly the sort of imaginative coup against British interests in the East which Raymond had long been waiting for, and which came just three months too late for him. Nevertheless, it immediately changed the complexion of events in Hyderabad, galvanising the sinking spirit of the French in their cantonments, and creating great anxiety for James and the British. In Pune, too, the French mercenaries in Maratha service prepared themselves to aid their motherland; their new republican commander even sent a detailed invasion plan to Bonaparte. As one of the Pune Frenchmen, the former pastrycook Louis Bourquoin, wrote many years later:

Several Frenchmen discussed this expedition and the feasibility of giving it some support … General Bonaparte, following the footsteps of Alexander would have entered India not as a devastating conqueror … but as a liberator. He would have expelled the English forever from India so that not one of them would have remained and by depriving them of the inexhaustible wealth of this vast country would have restored independence, peace, and happiness to Asia, to Europe, and to the whole world. These projects were no idle dreams. All the Princes in India were longing for French intervention, and that formidable enemy of the English, Tipu Sultan, was still alive … ⁸⁹

Though they would have disputed the Anglophobe invective, the British in Hyderabad were under no illusions as to how easily Bonaparte’s ends could be achieved. Not only was there no effective British naval unit guarding the Malabar ports, the journey down the Red Sea was an easy one. Indeed, as James wrote to his brother William, it was the very route by which William Linnaeus Gardner had come to Hyderabad only a few months earlier: ‘The more I think of this damned Egyptian Expedition of the French the more uneasy it makes me,’ wrote James.

I shall not be surprised at the French who will attempt anything to wreak their vengeance, coming down the Red Sea in large boats and landing at Mangalore. They can get thousands of donies [rafts] I understand at Suez and could I am told without any great effort have small gollies [transports] dragged across the isthmus. Captain Gardner who himself came down the Red Sea in a doney tells me that two frigates would block the straits Babelmandel, and that there is moreover an uninhabited island three or four miles in circumference at the mouth of it, strong by nature, and which might be rendered exceedingly so by art. It appears to me to be a material object to us under present circumstances, to get possession of that island with all possible dispatch, and to render it as strong as possible; but the stationing of some ships of war there without a moment’s loss of time appears still more indispensably requisite.⁹⁰

Three days later, on 9 October, the new British troops finally marched into Hyderabad. With them came Captain John Malcolm, who was to be James’s new Assistant, and who joined him that night for dinner at the Residency. Malcolm was one of seventeen children of a Scottish farmer. He had attracted Wellesley’s attention with a political essay he had sent to Calcutta, and which Wellesley had judged ‘very promising’. He got on well with James, but the two had very different political views. Malcolm was an enthusiastic and unrepentant supporter of Wellesley’s new ‘Forward Policy’, that believed in expanding British dominion and influence in India wherever and whenever possible. It was an approach James came to be increasingly uneasy with, and as his political views changed so did his relations with Malcolm.⁹¹

News soon arrived of a further mishap which seriously endangered James’s fast-fading hopes of intimidating the French into peacefully laying down their weapons. The British had marched into Hyderabad in two parties, and the first regiment forded the Musi in heavy rain on the evening of the fourteenth. But the following morning when the second regiment came to the river they found that it had risen dramatically overnight. There was no way they could join the first regiment. One was on the Residency bank, the other on that of the city and the French cantonments. At the same time, James learned from his spies that Piron had finally learned the full terms of the treaty, including the clause abolishing his corps.⁹² If ever he was going to make a pre-emptive move on the British, now would be his moment.

At this vital juncture, when they were at their most vulnerable, the British forces in Hyderabad found themselves split in two.

For the next uneasy week the waters of the Musi remained too high for the artillery to be safely transported across it. Yet still the French—apparently paralysed by indecision—made no attempt to attack the divided British force.

With no sign yet emerging from the palace that the Nizam was ever going to issue the order instructing the French to disarm, James decided to take the initiative and wrote to Aristu Jah, formally asking him to fulfil the terms of the treaty. For several days no reply was received, and no action was taken beyond the Nizam opting to leave Hyderabad and take shelter within the more defensible walls of his fortress of Golconda. On the sixteenth James wrote to his brother: ‘I wait impatiently for an answer to my last letter to the Minister, which I think you will allow is as strong as it could be. If it fails of the success I look for from it, I shall make a point of seeing him immediately, and of not leaving him until I have gained my point.’ By the nineteenth there was still no reply, and James had become convinced that the inaction was deliberate, that the news of Bonaparte’s triumphs in Egypt was leading the Nizam seriously to reconsider his decision to sign the treaty with the Company.

Knowing that any hesitation could now be fatal, James finally went in person to Golconda on the evening of the nineteenth and gave an ultimatum to an anxious-looking Aristu Jah: if the Nizam hesitated any longer he would have no option but to order an attack on the French cantonments. He also set his spies to work, telling William in cipher: ‘I am employing every engine both to prevent the possibility of stubborn resistance and to render it ineffectual even in case of its being attempted. ’⁹³ To this end he arranged for a small mutiny to take place in the French lines on the morning of the twenty-first, calculating that the chaos it caused would disrupt any attempt at resistance. He had other plans for subterfuge too, writing to William that ‘I shall take good care the night preceding this business that the [French] party be unable either to move one way or the other with its guns as I have provided for the bullock traces [harnesses] being all cut to pieces.’⁹⁴

The threat of violence had the effect James calculated it would have. On the following night, 20 October, at about ten o’clock, the Nizam finally issued a formal order to the troops of the French corps that he had dismissed their European officers, and that the troops had thus been released from their obedience to their superiors. If they continued to obey them, wrote the Nizam, they would be shot as traitors.

What James had not calculated on was the speed with which Piron decided to make terms. That same evening he sent two French officers to the Residency to tell Kirkpatrick that he was ready to surrender, ‘well knowing that, though the general policy might dictate their removal from the Deccan, they [hoped they] would be individually considered to every justice and indulgence that could with propriety be extended to them’.⁹⁵ With this single proviso, they meekly asked for a British officer to go to the French lines the following morning to take charge of their property. It was at this point that things began to go badly wrong.

James was unable to get word to his spies in the French camp about the offer to surrender, so that when Malcolm turned up as arranged on the following morning, the twenty-first, expecting to oversee the collection of French arms, he found instead that the mutiny which James had arranged had indeed taken place—but in a form very different to that which James had planned. The sepoys had arrested and imprisoned their superiors just as they were about to leave the camp to surrender, and were now making attempts to defend the cantonments. Worse still, Malcolm was seized by the rebellious sepoys and taken into custody along with Piron and all the other French officers.

For the rest of that day, James waited to see whether the sepoys would release their captives and surrender. By nightfall there was no sign that they were planning to do so. He came to a decision: the only remaining hope of a peaceful surrender would be for him to seize the initiative and frighten the sepoys into laying down their arms. This decision was confirmed when John Malcolm, accompanied by Piron and several other French officers, turned up at the Residency at midnight, having been sprung from their confinement by a small group of the sepoys, deserters from British regiments who had once, by pure good fortune, served under Malcolm and had remained fond of their former officer.

Before first light on the twenty-second, the half of the British force on the French side of the Musi surrounded the French cantonments, arranging their guns on the ridge above the French lines, not far from Raymond’s tomb. The other half of the British force, that on the Residency side, brought up their guns to what Malcolm described as ‘a strong post, about four hundred yards in the rear of Monsieur Piron’s camp, between which and him there was the River Moussy, which could only be forded by infantry; the guns could however play from the bank of the river with excellent effect, on the principal [French] magazine, and right of the camp’.⁹⁶

When dawn broke, the French corps woke up to find themselves completely surrounded. At nine o’clock James offered the mutineers payment of all money owing to them, and employment in Finglas’s corps if they would now surrender. They had ‘one quarter of an hour to stack their arms and march off to a cowle or protection flag, which was pitched by one of the Nizam’s principal officers, about half a mile to the right of the camp. If they did not comply with the terms of the summons, they were immediately to be attacked.’⁹⁷ For thirty minutes the sepoys remained undecided. Two thousand cavalry massed under Malcolm on the right flank; five hundred more waited on the right. In the centre were four thousand infantry. There was complete silence. Then, just after 9.30, to James’s great relief, the sepoys finally sent out word that they accepted the terms.

The British cavalry rode in quickly and took possession of the magazine, storehouses, powder mills, gun foundries and cannon, while the French sepoys fled to the flag under which they were to surrender themselves: ‘at once a glorious and piteous sight’, thought James.⁹⁸ Within a few hours, the largest French force in India, more than sixteen thousand men strong, was disarmed by a force of less than a third that number. Not a single shot had been fired, or a single life lost.

James watched the soldiers laying down their arms all afternoon by telescope from the roof of the Residency. That evening, in a state of mixed exhaustion and elation, he wrote to William that ‘I am too much fagged to write you a long letter … ’, but he wanted William to know that the ‘turning adrift of thousands of Raymond’s troops, all of which I saw this evening from the roof of my house with my spy glasses as plain as if I had been on the spot, was the finest sight I ever saw in my life’.

In a postscript written two hours later, there came even better news: had William heard yet the report that had just arrived from Bombay, ‘of Admiral Nelson’s glorious naval action’? In the Battle of the Nile, Nelson had sunk almost the entire French fleet in Aboukir Bay, wrecking Napoleon’s hopes of using Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. It was a quite amazing turn of events. For two weeks it had suddenly looked quite possible that India was going to become a French colony. Now, equally suddenly, that threat was extinguished. As James wrote to Calcutta, it was extraordinary to think that ‘only three days ago things wore a very dismal appearance’.⁹⁹

In the weeks that followed, Wellesley wrote to congratulate James, formally appointing him Resident in his brother’s place, and recommending him to London for a ‘mark of Royal Favour’, in other words a baronetcy. Wellesley was delighted—as well he should have been, as the Company granted him £500 a year for twenty years as a reward for what James had done: ‘I am happy to express my entire approbation of the judgement, firmness and discretion you have manifested,’ he wrote to James. In the meantime Wellesley made James an honorary ADC, then an almost unique honour.

The news of this arrived on Christmas Day 1798, and James wrote back to William, ‘pray make my most grateful acknowledgement to my Noble Patron and Master [Wellesley] for this new mark of approbation he has been pleased to confer on me, and which I assure you I am not a little proud of’.¹⁰⁰

It was about this time, sometime in December 1798, that something of even greater significance to James took place, an event that would in due course utterly change the course of his life, as well as completely undermine his newly forged relationship with Wellesley.

Two years earlier, while Aristu Jah was still in captivity in Pune and Mir Alam had taken over the management of the Nizam’s British affairs, the Mir had appointed as bakshi or paymaster of the British detachment in Hyderabad an elderly Persian cousin of his. This was Bâqar Ali Khan, titled Akil ud-Daula, the Wisest of the State. The old man was a little deaf and short-sighted, but a good-natured and jovial figure who quickly became popular with the British officers in Hyderabad. William Kirkpatrick and he had become great friends, and before he left Hyderabad William had written a pen portrait of him to a friend in Masulipatam:

This gentleman is deservedly a great favourite with all the officers; on which account, as well as because he is a relation of Meer Allum, and a very hearty friend of our nation, I beg you to pay him every attention in your power. You will find him a very jolly conversable man; and if you have any relish for Persian poetry a mighty pleasant companion since he has all the anacreontic tribe at his finger ends. He drinks (under the rose) three glasses of wine after dinner, provided there be no black-visaged lookers on: and among the ladies is a very gallant fellow. In short, though you have visited the Court of Lucknow, I think you will allow when acquainted with him, that his equal is rarely to be met with among the Asiatics.¹⁰¹

Bâqar Ali Khan had one daughter, a young widow named Sharaf un-Nissa, who had—unusually—returned to the family deorhi with her two teenage daughters after the death of her husband Mehdi Yar Khan.¹⁰² Like her father, Sharaf un-Nissa appears to have been very well disposed towards the British, and used to invite the wives of the Company officers to visit her in her zenana. They in turn reported that she was ‘unusually free of the prejudices of her sect’.¹⁰³

Although Bâqar Ali was only the maternal grandfather of Sharaf un-Nissa’s two daughters, and so under no legal obligation to be responsible for them, the old man had generously taken upon himself the business of arranging his granddaughters’ marriages: as always an expensive business in India.^by By the end of 1798 Bâqar Ali Khan had negotiated marriages for both girls with members of the Hyderabad nobility, and the wedding ceremony of the elder of the two, Nazir un-Nissa, was celebrated sometime in December. James attended the marriage party.

His own account of it is very brief and gives little away. Indeed he only mentions it to William in an aside when he writes that Bâqar’s wife, Durdanah Begum, had asked for a loan to help meet the expense of the wedding, and that, in view of the family’s loyalty to the British, James had ‘sent the sum requested as a loan, as a marriage portion for the Begum’s granddaughter—say, did I do wrong?’¹⁰⁴

But James almost certainly had other things in his mind when he arrived at the celebrations. For, according to Sharaf un-Nissa, he had already heard about the extraordinary beauty of her newly betrothed younger daughter, Khair un-Nissa, from one of the Company officers’ wives who had met her in her mother’s zenana. Forty years later, as an old woman of eighty, Sharaf un-Nissa remembered that

my father was the bakshi appointed by the Nizam’s government to attend the English Gentlemen. In consequence of the appointment which he held, several of the English Gentlemen were in the habit of coming to entertainments at his house. On one occasion an entertainmentwas given to Colonel Dallas and about twenty gentlemen and their ladies came to my father’s house. Colonel Dallas’s lady came to the women’s zenana apartments, and visited us ladies. She greatly admired my daughter; and said she reminded her strongly of her own sister. After this on her return to her own house she praised the beauty of my daughter to Hushmut Jung Bahadur [James Kirkpatrick]. After this Colonel Kirkpatrick sought out my daughter. ¹⁰⁵

Only one contemporary picture of Khair un-Nissa survives, and it dates from 1806, a full eight years after the entertainment Bâqar Ali Khan gave for Colonel Dallas. Yet even then, when she was aged about twenty, Khair un-Nissa still looks little more than a child: a graceful, delicate, shy creature, with porcelain skin, an oval face and wide-open, dark brown eyes. Her eyebrows are long and curved, and she has a full, timidly expressive mouth that is about to break into a smile; just below it, there lies the tiny blemish that is the mark of real beauty: a tiny red freckle, slightly off-centre, immediately above the point of her chin. Yet there is a strength amid the look of overwhelming innocence, a wilfulness in the set of the lips and the darkness of the eyes that might be interpreted as defiance in a less serene face.

A later Hyderabadi source reveals that it was at the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa that Khair un-Nissa first saw James Kirkpatrick, from behind a curtain:

Accidentally the Resident and [Bâqar Ali Khan’s younger granddaughter] the Begum [Khair un-Nissa] saw one another and they immediately fell deeply in love … It is related by elderly persons that Mr Kirkpatrick was very handsome and [Khair un-Nissa] was renowned throughout the Deccan for her beauty and comeliness … on account of differences in religion marriage was out of the question. According to Mohamadan law a Mohamadan man can marry a Christian woman but a Mohamadan woman cannot be given in marriage to a Christian. [Moreover Khair un-Nissa was already engaged to someone else.] When the story of their amours became public, a general sensation took.

The relations of the Begum were naturally very furious and for a time the life of the lovers was in danger, but their passion for one another was not of a character as could be restrained by fear or disappointment. Every obstacle thrown in their way only seemed to make it stronger & stronger …¹⁰⁶