IV

The ancient Persian town of Shushtar lies on the borders of modern-day Iran and Iraq, in the badlands to the far south-west of the country. Flanked on one side by the marshes leading down to the River Tigris and on the other by the dry and rocky Zagros mountains, Shushtar clings to the edge of a narrow plateau, just below the confluence of the Karun River with one of its tributaries.

The town was of great importance during the classical period. The Roman Emperor Valerian, enslaved by the Persian Emperor Shahpur I after being defeated in AD 260, spent the rest of his life in captivity in Shushtar, labouring at the construction of a colossal dam. The dam still stands; but the region has been in decline since then, and its once-rich agricultural land has long been exhausted. Yet for all its poverty, Shushtar somehow managed to retain its high culture. For generations the town exported its highly educated clan of black-turbaned Sayyids across the Shi’ite world, from Kerbala to Lucknow and Hyderabad. They distinguished themselves by their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, yunani medicine and Shi’a jurisprudence, as well as other more obscure forms of esoteric learning. They were also renowned for their talents as poets and calligraphers.¹

Around 1730, Sayyid Reza, a young Shushtari mujtahid^bz left Shushtar to seek his fortune in the Mughal Empire. The road east was a well-worn route: the mosque in Shushtar, one of the oldest in Persia, dating back to AD 868, was constructed in shisham wood brought from India by medieval Shushtari traders. In the centuries following those first trading contacts, generations of Persians had been welcomed to the various Muslim courts of India, where they were honoured as bearers of high culture and inheritors of a sublime literary tradition.^ca

Following in the footsteps of this long succession of émigré Persian scholars, soldiers and confidence tricksters, Sayyid Reza found his way to Delhi. There he took service in the household of the Prime Minister of the Mughal Emperor, another Persian exile named Abul Mansur Khan Khorasani, who later took the title Safdar Jung, and whose magnificent tomb is the last great Mughal monument in Delhi.

For two decades Sayyid Reza worked in the palaces of the Mughal capital; but as the Empire began to shatter and fragment under a succession of incompetent emperors, and as Delhi slowly descended into chaos, Sayyid Reza decided to return home to Shushtar. Because the land route by Kabul and Kandahar was blocked by fighting, he made the decision to head south to the Deccan, from where he hoped to catch a ship up the Gulf to Persia. But by chance, in Hyderabad, he met Nizam ul-Mulk, the father of Nizam Ali Khan. The Nizam was impressed by Sayyid Reza’s learning and integrity, and persuaded him to stay on in India under his patronage. Sayyid Reza settled in Hyderabad, in Irani Gulli, a small colony of Persian exiles not far from the Char Minar, tucked in behind the narrow lanes of the Burkha Bazaar. There his wife gave birth to a son, Abul Qasim, known to history by his later title, Mir Alam.

In his old age Sayyid Reza gave up worldly attachments and dedicated his life to prayer and fasting. According to his nephew, the old man ‘refused all public office: however much Nizam ul-Mulk urged him to accept a position in the Hyderabad government, even the post of Chief Judge, he turned the offer down. Some fifteen or sixteen years before his death, the desire for retreat became dominant in his character, and he increasingly cut himself off from other people. He spent his days alone in his prayer room, donned an ascetic’s cloak and spent his life in worship, seeking the True God.’² He died in 1780, and was buried in the sanctified burial ground of Daira Mir Momin, beside the tomb of the great Shi’a saint Shah Chirag.

It was during the forty days of mourning for Sayyid Reza that the young Mir Alam met Aristu Jah for the first time. Aristu Jah was already in his fifties and the most powerful official in Hyderabad; Mir Alam was in his late twenties, the penniless but talented son of a respected divine. The Minister had come in person on the third day of mourning to attend the soyem ceremony at the house of Sayyid Reza, and when he took the young man aside and confirmed him in possession of his father’s estates, Mir Alam replied with a fine Persian couplet praising the wisdom of the Minister. Aristu Jah, who had both a discerning eye for talent and a great love of poetry, realised that Mir Alam was a youth of unusual promise, and invited him to attend his durbar. Before long, he had appointed him his Private Secretary, and given him the job of preparing his correspondence and journals.³

Physically, Mir Alam was a slight youth, and seemed especially so when he stood beside Aristu Jah, whose remarkable height and bulk emphasised his new Secretary’s lean and wiry build. Mir Alam had a serious, intelligent face, with a long, straight nose and a thin, finely waxed moustache. His complexion was strikingly fair, a legacy of his Persian ancestry; but it was his watchful, alert expression that people always remarked upon. It was as if he were constantly vigilant, awake for an opening or an opportunity, and few Europeans who met him failed to come to the conclusion that here was an unusually clever and ambitious young man. James Kirkpatrick was very struck by him on their first meeting, and wrote to Wellesley that ‘as a scholar he stands unrivalled, and as a man of business he would have few equals … his stile is remarkable for its strength and perspicuity, as well as elegance, and his pen is consequently always employed when state papers requiring extraordinary care and attention are called for’.⁴

Muslim chroniclers, by contrast, singled out Mir Alam’s qualities of ferasat, which is sometimes translated as intuition but which has far greater resonance in the Persian, referring to that highly developed sensitivity to body language that almost amounts to mind-reading, and which was regarded as an essential quality for a Muslim courtier. It is still an admired feature in the social and political life of the Muslim East.⁵

Despite Mir Alam’s intuition, intelligence and abilities, however, there always seemed to be a strange absence of feeling in the man, as if there were a chilling numbness somewhere in his heart. As the Mir grew older and increasingly powerful, this potential for callousness became more marked. James’s Assistant Henry Russell, who later got to know him well, had no doubts about the Mir’s qualities, writing of his ‘extraordinary capabilities’. But he was also under no illusions about his unusual ruthlessness, describing him as ‘utterly deficient in qualities of the heart’, and ‘strangely without emotions … He neither remembers his obligations, nor forgets his adversaries. Though he always craves to be popular and expects gratitude from others, he is devoid of any sympathy or compassion towards his fellow beings, be it individually, or collectively.’⁶

Mir Alam was, nevertheless, a generous patron to his friends and family, and when the news of his growing power and success in Hyderabad reached his relations in Shushtar, several of them decided to emigrate from Iran to Hyderabad and seek service there on his staff. Among these was his first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan, the son of Sayyid Reza’s elder sister, who was around twenty years older than Mir Alam. Bâqar Ali was generously received by Mir Alam, made a mansabdar,^cb and married to a Hyderabadi beauty named Durdanah Begum, the daughter of one of the city’s most powerful families.⁷ In due course two children were born of the marriage, a boy, Mahmud Ali Khan, and a girl, Sharaf un-Nissa, the mother of Khair un-Nissa.

When in 1787 Aristu Jah sent his Secretary on an important embassy to Calcutta, Bâqar Ali accompanied Mir Alam to the Company’s Bengal headquarters along with a large escort of cavalry, seven caparisoned war elephants and seventy camels laden with gifts and supplies. In Calcutta, the embassy was received by Lord Cornwallis, and Mir Alam struck up an enduring friendship with the Governor General, who was impressed by his ‘straightforward good sense and intuitive understanding, as well as by his easy eloquence’. At their parting, Cornwallis presented the Mir with a diamond-encrusted walking stick.⁸

Mir Alam and his cousin stayed three years in Calcutta, learning about the English and making a wide variety of contacts among the officials and Orientalists of the city. They became especially friendly with Neil Edmonstone, later to become Wellesley’s Private Secretary and the head of the Company’s Intelligence Service, whom they regarded, somewhat unexpectedly, as ‘a good musician and mathematician’.⁹ They were particularly impressed by the military arsenals they saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand rifles hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’¹⁰ It was a visit that made a profound impression on Mir Alam. After what he had seen, he remained convinced throughout his career that the British were effectively invincible in India, and that the best interests of the Hyderabad state—and of Mir Alam—lay in allying with them as strongly and as closely as possible.

While Mir Alam and Bâqar Ali were in Calcutta, they heard a rumour that another member of their clan had just arrived from Persia, aboard an English vessel. Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari, another first cousin of Mir Alam, and the son of one of Sayyid Reza’s brothers, had like Bâqar Ali Khan made the journey from Persia with a view to hitching his career to that of Mir Alam; unlike his cousin Bâqar Ali, however, he left a detailed and entertaining account of his Indian travels and impressions, the Tuhfat al-’Alam, or ‘Gift to the World’:

‘I had just arrived in India,’ he wrote, and as soon as he heard of this, Mir Alam spent two or three days inquiring of my whereabouts and sought me out. While he was in the city I spent most of my time in his company: his brotherly kindness made up for the dreadfulness of being in India … My cousin had become one of the great amirs of the Deccan, resorted to by petitioners from all over the Arab and Persian world. However pressing this crowd, he never became bad-tempered, and always tried to solve their problems. He is particularly remarkable for his resolution and quick-thinking, which cuts through difficulties like a sword.¹¹

Shushtari’s Tuhfat al-’Alam is one of the most fascinating texts to survive from the period: a strikingly immediate and graphic account of late-eighteenth-century India as perceived by a disdainful, fastidious and refined émigré intellectual—a sort of eighteenth-century Persian version of V.S. Naipaul. Written in 1802, when Shushtari was under house arrest in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of James Kirkpatrick’s liaison with Khair un-Nissa, and the entire Shushtari clan was in deep disgrace, it gives a highly jaundiced account of India, which Abdul Lateef regards with all the hauteur that high Persian culture was capable of: ‘Since I came to this country, I cannot begin to recount all that has happened to me by way of suffering, deception and diseases, with no one intelligent to talk to … Alas, alas, how could I know that matters would come to this present sorry state—broken and stuck in the hellish climate of Hyderabad!’

In this spirit he compares his book to ‘the flutterings of a uselessly crying bird in the dark cage of India’, remarking that ‘to survive in Hyderabad you need four things: plenty of gold, endless hypocrisy, boundless envy, and the ability to put up with parvenu idol-worshippers who undermine governments and overthrow old families’. Yet for all its sectarian animosity and intellectual arrogance, the Tuhfat is a perceptive and observant account, which brings the intrigue and faction-ridden world of courtly Hyderabad into sharper focus than any other surviving text.

It also, more pointedly, provides the best source for how Khair un-Nissa’s wider family felt about her affair with James Kirkpatrick.

Abdul Lateef’s visit to the subcontinent started badly. On arrival in India, the easily-disgusted Persian recorded his horror at the sights that greeted him at Masulipatam, his first port of call. Welcomed by a group of Iranian Qizilbash^cc traders who lived there, he remarks that he was ‘shocked to see men and women naked apart from an exiguous cache-sex mixing in the streets and markets, as well as out in the country, like beasts or insects. I asked my host “What on earth is this?” “Just the locals,” he replied, “They’re all like that!” It was my first step in India, but already I regretted coming and reproached myself.’¹²

Calcutta Shushtari liked better. He admired the Company merchants’ beautifully whitewashed villas, some of them ‘painted and coloured like marble’. Appalled by the dirt of Masulipatam, he was especially appreciative of Calcutta’s exceptional cleanliness: ‘Seven hundred pairs of oxen and carts are appointed by the Company to take rubbish daily from streets and markets out of the city and tip it into the river,’ he noted appreciatively.

Shushtari’s account is throughout surprisingly Anglophile, as he takes an interest in European science and admires the technological achievements of the British: the Tuhfat discusses such diverse subjects as polar exploration, gravity, magnetism, the scientific comparisons then being made between men and monkeys, and even sceptical atheism, which he touches on but prefers not to discuss in detail, regarding it as ‘inappropriate for this book’.¹³ He is also impressed by the fact that the British at this period were still profoundly respectful to Indian men of learning:

They treat the white-beard elders and old-established families, both Muslim and Hindu, courteously and equably, respecting the religious customs of the country and as well the scholars, sayyids, sheikhs and dervishes they come across … More remarkable still is the fact that they themselves take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of both the Muslims and the Hindus, mixing with the people; in Muharram they even enter the tazia-khane mourning-halls though they do not join in the mourning [of the death of Mohammed’s grandson Hussain at the Battle of Kerbala in AD 680]. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.¹⁴

Deferential and enquiring the British might have been, but according to Abdul Lateef they had a lot to learn from the Persians in terms of personal hygiene, as well as in matters of high culture. Shushtari was particularlyhorrified by what the British did to their hair, ‘shaving their beards, twisting their hair into pony-tails, and worst of all, using a white powder to make their hair look white.’ Not content with these enormities, ‘neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state’.^15cd

Shushtari was of the opinion that European women were particularly bizarre, immoral and headstrong creatures: ‘most European women have no body-hair,’ he notes,

and even if it does occur, it is wine-coloured, soft and extremely fine … By reason of women going unveiled and the mixed education of boys and girls in one school-house, it is quite the thing to fall in love. I have heard that well-born girls sometimes fall in love with low-born youths and are covered in scandal which neither threats nor punishment can control, so their fathers are obliged to drive them out of the house; the girl follows her whims, and mingles with whom she fancies. The streets and markets of London are full of innumerable such well-bred girls sitting on the pavements. Brothels are advertised, with pictures of prostitutes hung at the door, and the price of one night is written up with all the furnishings required for revelry … ¹⁶

This, believes Shushtari, is largely the fault of the Americans; indeed Abdul Lateef must go down in history as the first Muslim writer to take up cudgels against the United States, which, 180 years ahead of his time, he already regards as the Great Satan:

No man [in the West] can prevent his wife from mixing with strange men … but it was only after the conquest of America that the disgraceful habit of allowing women to sit unveiled in public became common in France and then spread to the rest of Europe. Similarly, tobacco, the pox and burning venereal diseases were all unknown in the world five years ago, except in America, and the problem spread to the rest of the world from there.

India is, however, fully a match even for the horrors of America. There are many things that disgust Shushtari about the subcontinent, but his real venom is reserved for the Muslims of India who have, as he sees it ‘gone native’, and by intermarrying with Hindus—or Muslim converts from Hinduism—assimilated not just their customs but their very un-Islamic morality: ‘They accept water from the hands of Hindus, use the oil they buy from them, eat their cooked foods—whereas they flee from all contact with the English, who at least in appearance are People of the Book and who respect religion and the law.’¹⁷

The only thing that appalls Abdul Lateef Shushtari more than the men in India is the behaviour of the women, Hindu and Muslim alike, who in his eyes have no idea about proper modesty, and take every imaginable liberty. He discusses at some length the case of Muni Begum, who was the effective ruler of the state of Murshidabad in Bengal: ‘she is neither the mother of the present ruler, nor even from a good family, but was a singer kept by Ja’far [Ali Khan, the ruler of Bengal] who became completely infatuated with her and the Supreme Giver opened the doors of good fortune for her’.

Shushtari’s surprise at the power of women in late Mughal India is very significant. Islam has never been monolithic and has always adapted itself to its social and geographical circumstances. The Hindu attitude to women, to their place in society, to their clothing and to their sexuality has always been radically different from that of Middle Eastern Islam. But over centuries of Hindu—Muslim co-existence in India, much mutual exchange of ideas and customs took place between the two cohabiting cultures, so that while Hinduism took on some Islamic social features—such as the veil worn by upper-caste Rajput women in public—Indian Islam also adapted itself to its Hindu environment, a process accelerated by the frequency with which Indian Muslim rulers tended to marry Hindu brides.

As this happened the cultural gap between the court culture of Mughal India and Safavid Iran widened ever larger. Women in Iran were more confined and less able to act in the public sphere than in India where, thanks to the influence of Hinduism, notions of purdah, and ideas about the seclusion and protection of women, were always less deeply entrenched and less central to notions of male honour.¹⁸ As a result, Muslim women in India have always played a more prominent role in politics than their sisters in the Middle East. Indian society, both Hindu and Muslim, was certainly very patriarchal and hierarchical; yet there are nevertheless several cases of very powerful Indian Muslim queens: Razia Sultana in thirteenth-century Delhi; or Chand Bibi and Dilshad Agha, the two warrior queens of sixteenth-century Bijapur, the first of whom was famous for her horsewomanship, while the latter was renowned for her prowess as an artillerywoman and an archer, personally shooting in the eye from atop her citadel Safdar Khan who had the temerity to attack her kingdom.^19ce

Moreover Mughal princesses tended to be richer, and to possess far greater powers of patronage, than the secluded Iranian noblewomen Shushtari would have been familiar with in Iran: half the most important monuments in Shah Jehan’s Mughal Delhi were built by women, especially Shah Jehan’s favourite daughter Jahanara, who independently constructed several mansions (including one in the Red Fort which alone cost 700,000 rupees,^cf a garden, a bath-house and a palatial caravanserai; she also laid out the whole of the principal avenue of the city, Chandni Chowk.²⁰

Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or ‘learned matrons’; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy.²¹ As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses: Gulbadan, the sister of the second Mughal Emperor Humayun, wrote her brother’s biography, the Humayun Nama, while her great-great-great-niece Jahanara wrote a biography of the celebrated Indian Sufi, Mu’in ud-Din Chisti, as well as several volumes of poetry and her own epitaph.²² More scholarly still was Aurangzeb’s daughter, Zeb un-Nissa. According to the Maasir i-Alamgiri, the history of Aurangzeb’s reign, Zeb un-Nissa had learned the Koran by heart and ‘completely mastered the Arabic and Persian languages, as well as the art of writing all the various styles of calligraphy. Indeed her heart was set on the collection, copying and reading of books. The result was that she collected a library the likes of which no man has seen; and a large number of theologians, scholars, pious men, poets, scribes and calligraphists by this means came to enjoy the bounty of this scholarly lady.’²³

This sort of thing was dangerous enough, thought Shushtari; but more shocking still was the way these over-educated and independent-minded Indian women behaved. He was particularly horrified at the number he came into contact with on his travels who had had affairs—or even intermarried—with the English:

The women of the immoral Hindus and the Muslims they have corrupted, of their own accord and desire enter into the bonds of wedlock with the English. These English do not interfere with their religion nor compel them to leave purda veiling; when any son born of the union reaches the age of four, he is taken from his mother and sent to England to be educated. Some daughters are left with their mothers to be trained by them in their own way before being married off to a Muslim who is then given some appointment; the fathers also leave the girls something of their inheritance. When children reach the age of discretion, they are free to choose their religion themselves.²⁴

This approach was not in fact some radical colonial departure, but was part of an old Indian tradition: providing wives or concubines for rulers had long been a means of preferment in courtly India. As the British rose to power across the subcontinent it became increasingly politically opportune to marry princely Indian women to them, so binding the British, and especially the British Residents, into the Indian political system and gaining a degree of access and leverage over them: William Linnaeus Gardner for example is quite open about the fact that his application to marry his Begum was ultimately agreed to by her family as ‘on mature deliberation, the ambassador [i.e. Gardner] was considered too influential a person to have a request denied, and the hand of the young princess was promised’.²⁵

Behind these frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women—and Shushtari’s horrified attitude to such connections—lay not just different approaches to gender, but radically differing approaches to both romantic love and sexuality between India and Iran. Sexuality in India was always regarded as a subject of legitimate and fascinated enquiry, and looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics: srngararasa—the erotic rasa or flavour—being one of the nine rasas comprising the Hindu aesthetic system. Such was the lack of embarrassment in both Hindu and Muslim courts that numerous miniatures were commissioned and painted showing exactly how the fullest possible pleasures of this rasa might be attained. It was a world away from the rigid ban on the depiction of images of any sort that defined the strictest interpretations of Middle Eastern Islam.

Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries many of the classics of Hindu writing on love and eroticism were translated into Persian for the use of the princes and princesses of Indian Muslim courts. Significantly, it was in the more cosmopolitan and less comprehensively Islamicised courts of the Deccan such as Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda that much of this work of translation and dissemination took place: erotic treatises such as the famous Kama Sutra and the Srngaramanjari (literally ‘The Bouquets of Sexual Pleasure’) were translated into Persian or Deccani Urdu, while Indian Muslim authors added new studies to the erotic shelves of the palace libraries such as the Lazat al-Nissa (or ‘Delights of Women’) and the Tadhkirat al-Shahawat (‘Book of Aphrodisiacs’), both of which were much read and copied throughout the eighteenth-century Deccan.

Other texts advised on how to plant a pleasure garden with sensually stimulating plants as an aid to seduction, or even, in the case of the ‘Itr-i Nawras Shahi, how to ‘charge’ a palace bedroom with scents appropriate to prolonging and heightening sexual pleasure: as well as placing bouquets of tuberoses and other strongly scented flowers at varying heights in the room, the writer suggests burning varieties of citron- and jasmine-derived incense, and lifting the bedspread so that the sheets can absorb the fragrance, which will be ‘enticing, invigorating, and pleasure giving’.²⁶

Nor was it just a matter of erotic theory: judging by the evidence of travel accounts, sexuality played a significantly more open role in daily life and gossip in India than it did in Iran. Travellers to the subcontinent regularly brought back tales of romantic liaisons in the palaces of the Mughals, especially with the khanazads or salatin, the palace-born princes who moved freely about the harem as children and whose entry as adults was restricted but not entirely forbidden. The salatin, who tended to marry into the royal household and lived in the precincts of the Mahal, were said to have taken full advantage of their status: certainly, according to the seventeenth-century Venetian quack Niccolao Manucci, ‘under cover of this title, these princesses and many great ladies gratify their desires’.²⁷

If this is true of Mughal India in general, it is especially true of late Mughal India between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. After the end of the enforced puritanism of Aurangzeb and Nizam ul-Mulk’s period, attitudes changed completely: Nizam Ali Khan even founded a department of his civil service to oversee and promote the business of dancing, music and sensuality, the Daftar Arbab-i-Nishaat (the Office of the Lords of Pleasure).²⁸ At the same time there was an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary experimentation: in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, poets at this time wrote some of the most unblushingly amorous Indian poetry to be composed since the end of the classical period seventeen hundred years earlier.

This was the age of the great courtesans:^cg in Delhi, Ad Begum would turn up stark naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one would notice: ‘she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as is found in the finest cloth of Rum’. Her rival, Nur Bai, was so popular that every night the elephants of the great Mughal omrahs completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her house; yet even the most senior nobles had to ‘send a large sum of money to have her admit them … whoever gets enamoured of her gets sucked into the whirlpool of her demands and brings ruin in on his house … but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in possession of riches to bestow on her’.²⁹

Nur Bai’s counterpart in Hyderabad was Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the mistress of Mir Alam, and the most celebrated beauty of the age.³⁰ She was as renowned for her intelligence as her matchless dancing; and on meeting her, according to Shushtari, the young Mir Alam immediately ‘fell in love with this moon-faced beauty^ch and threw off the gravitas of the scholar. In the days of the full springtime flush of his youth, his mind was unsettled by her seductive beauty and ravishing charm, so that he could only think of love and poetry, and soon fell ill. It took him more than three months to recover and get back to studying and teaching the Islamic curriculum.’³¹

Mah Laqa Bai was not just glamorous and seductive: she was widely regarded as Hyderabad’s greatest contemporary poet, whose works were collected as far away as Delhi and Lucknow. She built a famous library filled with books on the arts and sciences, and commissioned the Mahanama, a major new history of the Deccan; later she became an important patron of poets in her own right.³² Such was the Nizam’s reliance on her wisdom that alone of the women of Hyderabad she was given in her own right the rank of a senior omrah, so that she could attend the durbar and advise the Nizam on state policy.³³ She also accompanied him to war, dressed in male clothing, and gained a reputation for her riding skills, her accomplishments with the bow, and even with the javelin. No wonder Kirkpatrick’s Assistant John Malcolm called her ‘an extraordinary woman’, or the Hyderabadi sage Qadrat Ullah Qasim wrote that she was ‘a unique combination of body and soul’.³⁴

The poetry of Mah Laqa was typical of much of the verse of the period in being concerned largely with the joys of love. At this time a whole new specialist vocabulary of Urdu and Deccani words and metaphors developed to express the poet’s desires: the beloved’s arms were likened to lotus stalks, her nose to a champa bud, her thighs to banana stems, her plaited hair to the Ganges, and her rumauli—a word that was coined to describe the faint line of down which ran from below a woman’s navel—to the River Godavari. In this spirit, the Avadhi poet Shauq (1783-1871) wrote a whole series of masnavis on amorous subjects entitled Fareb-i-Ishq (‘The Wiles of Love’) and the Bahar-i-Ishq (‘The Spring of Love’), while his contemporary Nasik summed up his life’s work with the epitaph:

I am a lover of breasts
Like pomegranates;
Plant then no other trees
On my grave but these.

This sort of thing was not to everyone’s taste: the great Delhi poet Mir expressed his view that most Lucknavi poets could not write verse, and would be better-advised to ‘stick to kissing and slavering’. But this mood of fleshy decadence crossed from themushairas (poetic symposia) of the poets to the workshops of other artists: to the tailors, for example, where derzis laboured to produce ever more transparent and revealing cholis with weaves of wondrous lightness named baft hawa (‘woven wind’), abe-rawan(‘running water’) and shabnam (‘evening dew’).

Similar concerns inspired the scriptoria of the miniaturists. In Hyderabad, the artists of Nizam Ali Khan’s period were producing miniatures that tapped into the old erotic pulse of so much pre-Islamic Indian art and which were concerned above all with the depiction of aesthetic bliss in the Arcadia of the scented Deccani pleasure garden. Here courtesans as voluptuous as the nude yakshis^ci and apsaras^cj of south Indian stone sculpture attend bejewelled princes who seem to have walked off the walls of the ancient Hindu cave sculptures of nearby Badami. These women smoke hookahs and swim in long garden pools, they drink wine and play with pigeons or while away the moonlit monsoon nights on swings, listening to music and carousing in marble pavilions. The hunting and battle scenes of high Mughal art have disappeared. As one rather surprised Indian art historian has commented, ‘it is difficult to account for their sudden absence from the painters’ list of themes, but it shows that women and not hunting or war were important for their patrons’.³⁵

There was nothing to compare with this pleasure-loving spirit in Shushtari’s Persia. For in strong contrast to the sensual decadence of late Mughal India, the Iranian and Middle Eastern attitude to romantic love lay much closer to Eastern Christian notions (the environment in which so many early Islamic attitudes developed), which emphasised the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and even, in extreme cases, the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity. In Iranian literature love is usually portrayed as a hazardous, painful and dangerous condition: typically, in the great Persian epic Layla and Majnun, Majnun is driven mad by his love for Layla, and ends up dying wasted, starving and insane.^ck

This is the attitude to romantic love that Abdul Lateef Shushtari subscribes to, and the Tuhfat contains a discussion of the subject in which he emphasises the derivation of the Persian word for romantic love—’Ishq—as coming from ‘the bindweed that strangles … doctors call it a melancholy distemper of black bile, curable only by sexual union with the desired object’.^cl

As Shushtari wrote on this subject, the notorious affair between his cousin’s granddaughter Khair un-Nissa and James Kirkpatrick must have been at the back of his mind. At the time he was writing the affair had led to the destruction of all his hopes—and those of much of his family—of wealth, success and power in India: romantic love and sexual fulfilment had indeed turned into a kind of poisonous bindweed dragging down all who had become entangled in it.

The liaison was thus a most sensitive and scandalous subject, and Shushtari refuses to discuss it directly, remarking only that ‘a detailed account of this notorious affair is not appropriate to these pages, indeed even a summary mention of it would provoke horror and disgust in the reader’; but what is intriguing about his account is the fact that he clearly does not in any way blame Kirkpatrick for what happened. Instead he describes him in the warmest terms: ‘The Company representative, Major James Kirkpatrick, is a man of good character and firm friend of mine. He has made a garden on the outskirts of Hyderabad where he lives: it is a beautiful garden and I occasionally went there in his company and found him a man of great intuition and understanding, second only to my older brother.’ As far as Shushtari is concerned, James did not initiate the affair, and so was not responsible for what happened.

Over and over again in his book, Shushtari emphasises the uniqueness of his clan of Sayyeds, the importance to them of endogamy, and the central duty of Sayyed men to look after their women and to guard their virtue. Yet here was a case of a good Shushtari Sayyed—his own first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan—coming to India, intermarrying with an Indian Muslim family, and so in Shushtari’s eyes picking up immoral Indian ways. The result: Bâqar’s granddaughter throwing herself not just at a non-Sayyed, but at a non-Muslim, a firangi.

The initiative, he implies, came from Khair un-Nissa’s side, and it was there that lay the shame.

In January 1799, about a month after the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa, serious disagreement broke out in the household of Bâqar Ali Khan about the match intended for the younger of his two granddaughters, Khair un-Nissa.

An engagement had been arranged by Bâqar Ali for the girl, who was then probably not much older than fourteen. The man in question is never named, but he was from the clan of one of the most powerful Hyderabadi nobles, Bahram ul-Mulk, and the son of a close friend and ally of Mir Alam, a prominent nobleman named Ahmed Ali Khan.³⁶

It is not clear what the women of the family objected to in the match: maybe Ahmed Ali Khan’s son was violent, drunken or untrustworthy; maybe they just disliked him or thought him insufficiently grand for the girl; maybe it was simply that Bâqar Ali Khan had arranged the marriage without consulting the women when, as maternal grandfather, his legal right to matchmake was open to question: after the death of Khair un-Nissa’s father, Mehdi Yar Khan, legal responsibility for the girl’s marriage would normally have fallen first to Sharaf un-Nissa, her mother, then to Mehdi Yar Khan’s surviving brother, Mir Asadullah Khan and his close male relations.^cm Bâqar Ali Khan would not normally have been expected to involve himself in such matters.

Possibly the disaffection of the women of the household was due to a mixture of all these reasons. But whatever the cause, it is quite clear that they strongly disagreed with the match; and it is also clear that in eighteenth-century Hyderabad there was an understanding that the women of an aristocratic family—and especially the bride herself—did have a real right to veto any marriage arranged for them: a decade earlier, for example, the women of Nizam Ali Khan’s zenana had joined together to reject a proposal from Tipu Sultan that his brother-in-law might marry one of the Nizam’s daughters. The women argued that Tipu and his clan were parvenu Indian-born commoners with no noble blood in their veins, that even Tipu himself was the son of an illiterate soldier of fortune, and that it would dishonour the blood of the Asafiya dynasty to mix it with such peasant Indian stock—after all, Tipu’s father had been a humble soldier in the Nizam’s army. Despite the political benefits that an alliance with Mysore might bring to Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan eventually agreed to the women’s demands, and Tipu’s ambassador was sent back to Seringapatam empty-handed.³⁷

By the end of January 1799, the women of Bâqar Ali Khan’s household appear to have despaired of persuading the old man to cancel the engagement of his own volition. Some sort of public engagement ceremony^cn had been performed ‘which rendered it impossible to break off the match without disgrace to the parties’, and Bâqar dug his heels in, saying that he refused to shame the family by withdrawing from the contract.³⁸ But the women did not admit defeat, and in mid-February they seized an opportunityto take matters into their own hands when Bâqar and Mir Alam had to leave Hyderabad for several months to go off on campaign.

The cause of their departure was the Nizam’s decision to join the British in their new war against Tipu Sultan. This was the next stage in Lord Wellesley’s aggressive campaign to extinguish the last remnants of French influence in India and to establish the British not only in their place, but as the undisputed pre-eminent power in the subcontinent. From captured correspondence, Wellesley now had solid proof of what he had always suspected: that Tipu was seeking French troops and supplies from the Governor of Mauritius, and was actively plotting with Bonaparte to bring down British rule in India. Wellesley was determined he would never allow either Bonaparte or Tipu a second chance. The captured letters were the excuse he needed to open hostilities and to play the checkmate in the forty-year-long struggle between the sultans of Mysore and the East India Company.

Now that the Corps Français de Raymond had been disarmed in Hyderabad, and the news had come through of the defeat of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, Wellesley began making detailed logistical preparations for a major assault on Tipu’s well-fortified river-island capital of Seringapatam. He wrote personally to Tipu in a vein of deepest sarcasm, breaking the news to him of Nelson’s devastating victory at the Battle of the Nile: ‘Confident from the union and attachment subsisting between us that this intelligence will afford you the deepest satisfaction, I could not deny myself the pleasure of communicating it.’³⁹ Meanwhile he worked late into the night preparing the logistics for Tipu’s destruction.

On 3 February 1799, everything was in place and General Harris, the Commander in Chief, was ordered to mobilise and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’.⁴⁰ A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his British allies, as had been agreed in the Preliminary Treaty he had signed five months earlier.

Bâqar Ali Khan, as bakshi to the British troops in Hyderabad, had to go with the army and act as liaison between the British and the Hyderabadis. Mir Alam came too, as overall commander of the large contingent of Hyderabad troops, though as his younger brother, Sayyid Zein ul-Abidin Shushtari, was Tipu’s Private Secretary and a senior Mysore courtier,^co he must have felt a certain ambivalence about the campaign.⁴¹

More ambivalent still must have been the attitude of the (at least) four thousand Hyderabadi infantry soldiers who had formerly been sepoys of Raymond’s corps until they were reassigned to British-officered regiments after the French capitulation. Ironically, they were now under the direct command of James Kirkpatrick’s Assistant Captain John Malcolm, who had played such a major role in their surrender only four months earlier.⁴²

Realising that his situation was now very serious, Tipu wrote a desperate plea to the Nizam warning him that the English ‘intended extirpating all Mussulmans and establishing Hat Wearers^cp in their place’, and arguing that the Nizam and he, fellow Muslims, should join together to resist the Company; but it was too late.⁴³

On 19 February, the six East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys under John Malcolm, and over ten thousand Hyderabadi cavalry under the command of Mir Alam, joined up with General Harris’s huge Company army, which had marched up from Vellore. On 5 March, with some thirty thousand sheep, huge stocks of grain and a hundred thousand carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.⁴⁴ In their wake were at least a hundred thousand camp followers. Wellesley, who had moved south to Madras to see the army off, believed it to be ‘the finest which ever took the field in India’; but it was a huge and unwieldy force, and it trundled towards Seringapatam at the agonisingly slow place of five miles a day, stripping the country bare ‘of every article of subsistence the country can afford’, like some vast cloud of locusts.⁴⁵

Whatever the new war might mean for Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa was quite clear about the opportunities it presented her in her efforts to outflank her father on the issue of the unsatisfactory marriage which had been arranged for her younger daughter. At Nazir un-Nissa’s wedding, James Kirkpatrick had seen Khair un-Nissa, and they had apparently made a deep impression on each other. Now the women of the zenana seem to have decided that Kirkpatrick was the answer to their problem, and to have persuaded themselves that he was a far more appropriate suitor for the girl than the unpopular son of Ahmed Ali Khan.

With this in mind, according to James, ‘every inducement had been held out to him by the females of the family: the young lady had been shown to him when she was asleep, his portrait had been given to her by her mother, or grandmother, and she had been encouraged in the partiality which she expressed for the original from a view of the portrait, that he had been perpetually importuned with messages from the ladies to visit at the house of the Khan, and on an occasion of his indisposition he had received daily messages from the young lady herself to inquire after his health—[indeed] that occasions were even afforded her of seeing him from behind a curtain, and that latterly she was permitted in that situation to converse with him. In conclusion they were purposely brought together at night in order that the ultimate connection might take place.’ For this to happen, according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Bowser, ‘the ladies of Bauker’s family paid a visit of two days to those of the Resident’.⁴⁶

About Khair un-Nissa’s motives there is little dispute: James Kirkpatrick certainly believed that the girl had fallen in love with him, and he may have been right: certainly nothing in her behaviour contradicts this view. To his brother William, James later wrote that ‘[among] all the ranks and descriptions of people here, the story of B[âqar Ali Khan]’s grand daughter’s long cherished partiality for me [is] perfectly known’. James’s belief was echoed by Bowser in the Clive Report: he stated under oath that ‘it is said that the lady fell in love with the Resident’.⁴⁷ James also claimed that Khair un-Nissa had threatened to take poison unless he helped her escape from a ‘hateful marriage’.⁴⁸

Exactly why Sharaf un-Nissa and her mother, Durdanah Begum, were so keen on the match is, however, a much more difficult question to answer. It could of course have been a mother’s sympathy with her lovelorn daughter, and a wish to save her from unhappiness and possible suicide. But Khair un-Nissa was a descendant of the Prophet, a Sayyida, and so part of a strictly endogamous clan who never married their women to non-Sayyids, and whose prestige and notions of honour depended largely on this stricture being rigorously observed. Moreover, there was no tradition of love marriages in eighteenth-century Indian society— indeed at that period it was a fairly novel concept even among aristocratic families in the West—and yet it is clear that Sharaf un-Nissa not only gave her assent to Khair un-Nissa’s attempt to seduce Kirkpatrick, she and Durdanah Begum went out of their way to help her achieve it; indeed if James is to be believed, the two women more or less pushed the girl into his bed. Why would they do this?

The most likely explanation is that they realised that such a connection would be hugely advantageous to their family. James was not only a powerful British diplomat; since February 1798 he had also been an important Hyderabadi nobleman, with a series of titles given to him by the Nizam—Mutamin ul-Mulk, Hushmat Jung (‘Glorious in Battle’), Nawab Fakhr ud-Dowlah Bahadur—and an elevated place in the Nizam’s durbar.

Other Indian women who had married British Residents at this time had found that marriage brought them prestige, wealth and rank. James’s opposite number at the Maratha court, General William Palmer, for example, was married to a Delhi begum named Fyze Baksh who would later become Khair un-Nissa’s best friend. Fyze’s father was an Iranian immigrant and a captain of cavalry who had moved from Delhi, where Fyze was born, to Lucknow. On her marriage to William Palmer, she was formally adopted by the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam and loaded with titles: the spectacular gilt sanad awarding her the title Sahib Begum survives in the India Office Library, and there can be little doubt that it represented a considerable jump in rank for a woman who was from a respectably aristocratic but hardly imperial background.⁴⁹

An even more dramatic transformation in status was experienced by General Sir David Ochterlony’s senior bibi, Mubarak Begum. Though Ochterlony is reputed to have had thirteen wives, one of these, a former Brahmin slave girl from Pune who converted to Islam and is referred to in his will as ‘Beebee Mahruttun Moobaruck ul Nissa Begume, alias Begum Ochterlony, the mother of my younger children’,⁵⁰ took clear precedence over the others.⁵¹

‘Generalee Begum’, as she was also known, occasionally appears in contemporary letters, where she is frequently accused of giving herself airs. She offended the British by calling herself ‘Lady Ochterlony’—in one letter it is recorded that ‘Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca’—and also offended the Mughals by awarding herself the title Qudsia Begum, previously that of the Emperor’s mother.^52cq Much younger than Ochterlony, she certainly appears to have had the upper hand in her relationship with the old General, and one observer remarked that Ochterlony’s mistress ‘is the mistress now of everyone within the walls’.⁵³

Mubarak Begum ultimately overplayed her hand: after Ochterlony’s death she inherited Mubarak Bagh, the Anglo-Mughal garden tomb he had built in the north of the city, and she used part of her considerable inheritance to build a mosque and a haveli for herself at Hauz Qazi in the old city of Delhi.⁵⁴ But her profound personal unpopularity, combined with her dancing-girl background, meant that no Mughal gentleman would ever be seen using her structure. It is still, to this day, referred to in the old city as the ‘Rundi-ki-Masjid’, or Prostitute’s Mosque.^cr

Mubarak Begum’s extreme social and political ambitions led to her nemesis. But her story is nevertheless a graphic illustration of quite how powerful a woman could become by being the wife or even the senior concubine of a British Resident. Sharaf un-Nissa was a widow whose father was pressuring her to marry her daughter to a man neither mother nor daughter thought suitable. Kirkpatrick clearly represented a very eligible escape route.

Yet there is one further possible explanation for Sharaf un-Nissa’s willingness to indulge her daughter’s wishes. Sharaf un-Nissa’s great friend was Farzand Begum, the daughter-in-law of Aristu Jah, and the moving force in the Prime Minister’s zenana.^cs Over and over again in the records, we hear of Sharaf un-Nissa visiting Farzand Begum, and Sharaf un-Nissa later insisted that Farzand Begum had encouraged her to marry Khair un-Nissa to the British Resident.⁵⁵ Farzand Begum seems to have been involved in encouraging the liaison from the outset, for it was later reported that Aristu Jah had supervised it from its commencement, and in Mughal society the only way he could have done this would have been through the women in his zenana.⁵⁶ It is also unclear whether Aristu Jah or Farzand Begum offered Sharaf un-Nissa any inducements to make her daughter available to Kirkpatrick; but it is known for sure that following the marriage Sharaf un-Nissa was indeed granted lucrative jagirs (estates) of fifty thousand rupees per annum by the Nizam.⁵⁷

If this was part of a deal, a quid pro quo for giving Khair un-Nissa to the British Resident, it would follow that the affair between Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa was to some extent planned—or at least manipulated—by Aristu Jah, a tactician of genius who realised how far he could use the relationship for his political advantage. As later events would show, Aristu Jah also clearly hoped that if he played his cards carefully, the relationship might be the weapon he had been looking for to revenge himself on his great rival, Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin once removed, Mir Alam. If this is the correct interpretation—and it was certainly what Mir Alam later believed to be the case⁵⁸-then it would follow that Khair un-Nissa was made available to Kirkpatrick as what (in the parlance of modern spy novels) is known as a ‘honey trap’.

If this is the case, how should we judge Sharaf un-Nissa’s actions? Was she effectively prostituting her daughter for her own ends and ambitions? However we may regard it today, this is certainly not how the women of the family would have looked at it themselves. Sexuality was a key asset and weapon for women in Mughal India, and subtly finding a way of making the women of a family available to powerful rulers and officials was a recognised means of achieving advancement and preferment at court and in society.⁵⁹ All Sharaf un-Nissa was doing was adapting this ancient tradition to the new semi-colonial environment—and here lay her problem.

Even with the most Mughalised British official, there were big differences between setting up a marriage alliance with a British Resident, and doing the same with a senior Mughal courtier, as the women would in due course discover. What might be regarded as normal courtly behaviour in a Mughal environment could be misconstrued by Europeans as procurement or pimping; moreover British Residents moved quickly from court to court before, in most cases, returning home to Britain. Alliances that in a Mughal environment would be permanent often became dangerously short-term in a colonial one. At first Sharaf un-Nissa’s strategy to gain influence through marrying her daughter to the British Resident seemed to work. Only time would reveal the scale of the difficulties involved in trying to cross such sensitive cultural frontiers.

In the end, motives are always difficult to establish. But what is certain is that with Bâqar Ali Khan away on campaign with the army, Sharaf un-Nissa was free to follow her own plan to bring her daughter and the British Resident together. She did not hesitate to take full and immediate advantage of that opportunity. According to Mir Alam’s later testimony, it was shortly after he and Bâqar Ali ‘took the field against Tippoo Sultaun [that] Kirkpatrick debauched this girl’.⁶⁰

It was several months before James admitted to his elder brother that he was sleeping with Khair un-Nissa. Indeed he only did so explicitly long after the scandal had broken and William had written to him repeatedly demanding to know exactly what truth lay behind the ever more outrageous rumours emanating from Hyderabad.

The two brothers had lived closely together in Hyderabad, and each knew that the other was involved in a long-term relationship with at least one Indian woman. Some time after his wife Maria’s return to England, William had re-established his relationship with Dhoolaury Bibi, by whom he had earlier fathered two children, Robert and Cecilia, both of whom were now teenagers and living with the Handsome Colonel in Kent. Dhoolaury Bibi had joined William in Hyderabad when he became Resident, and after William had left to recover his health at the Cape, James had written to his brother assuring him that his mistress was well and happy, and that he was looking after her. After William returned to India, Dhoolaury Bibi followed him to Calcutta, and was still living there, with her son Robert, twelve years later when she received a substantial legacy in William’s will.⁶¹ It seems to have been a serious and loving relationship; it was certainly longstanding: as their first child, Robert, was born in 1777, the two appear to have lived together for at least twenty-three years, except for the brief interlude between 1785, when William married Maria Pawson, and 1788, when Maria left India to return to England.

James, meanwhile, was also living with at least one Indian girl, by whom he had had a son. Neither her name nor that of the child has survived, and all that is known of the girl is that she was significantly darker-skinned than Khair un-Nissa, and so was perhaps of Tamil or Telugu origin.⁶²James seems to have treated the relationship in a rather offhand manner: there are explicit references in the Clive Report—and in some of the Indian sources—to James’s women in the plural,⁶³ and stories of his amorous adventures at this period reached even Arthur Wellesley in Seringapatam three hundred miles away: ‘About three years ago he is supposed to have debauched a young Mogul woman by pretending to be a Persian from Iran,’ the future Duke of Wellington reported to his brother Lord Wellesley, ‘[and it is said] that he has her now in his house.’⁶⁴ He also reported that Mir Alam had told him that this sort of adventure was far from unusual for Kirkpatrick, and that if he were to come to Hyderabad ‘he would hear enough to make him ashamed that such a man was an Englishman’—much the same sort of thing as had long been said of James’s oversexed father, the Handsome Colonel.⁶⁵

After Khair un-Nissa appeared on the scene the ‘dark girl’—and any other women then living in the Resident’s zenana—simply disappear from James’s letters, and the ‘dark girl’ is referred to only once, as ‘my old inmate’. ⁶⁶ It is possible that she had died; certainly she received no legacy or any mention at all in James’s will. James’s apparent indifference to the girl seems to have extended to her child. Even the Handsome Colonel, never one to take the business of parenting too seriously, was a little shocked by James’s apparent lack of interest in his ‘Hindustani boy’, and wrote to admonish him, saying that ‘in his opinion there is no difference in the duty a parent owes to his legitimate and illegitimate children’.⁶⁷ When the child tragically caught a fever and died in the Handsome Colonel’s arms in the summer of 1804, James wrote correctly but a little distantly to his father about ‘that much lamented youth’, saying how ‘the estimation as well as regard in which my departed son was held by all who knew him, and by him in particular [i.e. the Handsome Colonel] who from his superior discernment, as well as opportunities, is so eminently qualified to form a just opinion, is the highest compliment that his memory could receive’.⁶⁸

This was very different from the sort of deeply felt and emotional language James would use about Khair un-Nissa and his children by her, and perhaps illustrates how far the British brought with them to India a morality that was determined as much by class as by race: there was one way you were expected to behave with a mistress from the lower classes, and quite another set of rules for educated girls from the top drawer of society, irrespective of their skin colour or nationality.⁶⁹

Certainly, it was precisely Khair un-Nissa’s aristocratic birth and connections that led to James’s reticence on the subject to William. Seducing Mir Alam’s cousin had clear political implications, and initially James responded evasively to William’s questions about the relationship by merely denying that he had any intentions of marrying Khair: it was, he maintained, ‘an absurd report’ that William had heard.⁷⁰ But William could see that he was not getting straight answers to the questions he was asking, and in letter after letter he kept up the pressure on James: was it true—had he seduced the girl or not? James was eventually forced to respond by giving William a full account of exactly how and where he had first slept with ‘B[âqar]’s granddaughter’, as he refers to her. In this letter he tried to clear himself of the charge of having taken the initiative in ‘debauching’ the girl: on the contrary, he maintains, it was Khair un-Nissa who had come to visit him—bringing her mother and granny along to his zenana, ostensibly as part of a visit to his women: ‘My dearest Will,’ he wrote,

When I declared myself to you in my former letter unreservedly with respect to what passed between B’s granddaughter and myself I did so because towards you I have never known what concealment was, though it may admit of a question how far I had right to open myself even to you in the present instance. It being now however at all events too late to recall what has passed, and placing as I do the most implicit reliance on your discretion as well as affection, I shall proceed to answer without even a shadow of reserve the enquiries you are so anxious to have satisfied.

By way of Prelude it may not be amiss to observe that I did once safely pass the fiery ordeal of a long nocturnal interview with the charming subject of the present letter. It was this interview which I alluded to as the one when I had full and close survey of her lovely Person—it lasted during the greatest part of the night and was evidently contrived by the Grandmother and mother whose very existence hang on hers to indulge her uncontrollable wishes. At this meeting, which was under my roof, I contrived to command myself so far as to abstain from the tempting feast I was manifestly invited to, and God knows but ill qualified for the task, attempted to argue the Romantic Young Creature out of a passion which I could not, I confess, help feeling myself something more than pity for—She declared to me again and again that her affections had been irrevocably fixed on me for a series of time, that her fate was linked to mine and that she should be content to pass her days with me as the humblest of handmaids. These effusions you may possibly be inclined to treat as the ravings of a distempered mind but when I have time to impart to you the whole affecting tale you will then at least allow her actions to have accorded fully with her declarations.

Until the above time (which might be a fortnight or three weeks before the interview spoken of in my former letter⁷¹) the young lady’s person was inviolate but was it human nature to remain proof against another such fiery trial? No, will perhaps be your reply, but wherefore you will probably ask, expose yourself to it? In answer I have nought to plead but human feelings, or if you please human frailty, which would not withstand the heart rending account of this interesting young female’s state of desperation and the pressing message from her grandmother to fly to her relief.

Here again however I did not act but on the fullest previous conviction founded on numerous collateral circumstances as much as actual information, that the grandfather and the mother (though they kept aloof on the occasion) were privy to the assignation—I went then and when I assure you, which I do most solemnly, that the Grandmother herself plainly intimated the design of this meeting and the granddaughter in faint and broken accents hinted that the sacrifice she was about to make me was the only chance (as she fondly persuaded herself) of avoiding a hateful marriage I think you cannot but allow that I must have been something more or less than man to have held out any longer. Deliberate female seduction I hold in as much contempt and detestation as any man, but whatever charge of imprudence (and who is at all times wise?) may be considered as attaching to my conduct on this trying occasion, or unwarrantable as it may be if tried by the rigid rules of morality, I can on no account endure the slightest whisper of it having being dishonourable or ungenerous …

I could say a great deal more on the foregoing subjects—[but] I must entreat you, my dear Will, to spare me if possible the pain of any further discussion of them,

Ever your faithful brother,
JAK⁷²

While the affair with Khair un-Nissa dominated James’s private life, his official time was fully occupied with coordinating the Hyderabad end of Lord Wellesley’s war with Tipu Sultan.

James’s task was to help keep the massive Company army supplied with sheep and grain, horses and carriage bullocks, a particularly important job now that Tipu had resorted to scorched-earth tactics in the hope of starving the advancing British army into retreat. James also tried to encourage Aristu Jah to send more cash for his sepoys’ salaries, as well as further reinforcements to the front. In the former logistical task he had some success; but cash and reinforcements were not to be had, and the more he pressed the wily Minister on the matter, the more the ‘perverse’ Aristu Jah fobbed him off, often quickly changing the conversation to his greatest passion, cockfighting.⁷³ By April James seems to have come to the conclusion that the most likely way to get anything out of the Minister was to hold out the offer of some prime English fighting cocks as long as Aristu Jah would commit some of his élite Paigah cavalry units to the war effort in return: ‘The Minister is passionately fond of game cocks and very desirous of getting some English ones of the true game breed,’ he wrote urgently to William a month after the Hyderabad forces set off on the road to Mysore. ‘Are any of this kind to be had at Madras?’⁷⁴

News from the front indicated that the campaign was about to reach its climax. By early April, General Harris had already taken several key forts, and Tipu had been forced to retreat within the great walls of Seringapatam. With only thirty-seven thousand troops, he was heavily outnumbered by the allies, but he remained a formidable enemy. In the three Anglo-Mysore Wars that had preceded the current conflict, the Mysore forces had frequently defeated the East India Company, and two of the most prominent Company commanders in the campaign, Sir David Baird and his cousin James Dalrymple, had both been prisoners of Tipu, having been captured and imprisoned after the disastrous British defeat at Pollilur in 1780—‘the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen the British arms in India’, as a contemporary called it at the time.^75ct

Tactically the Mysore forces were fully the match of those of the East India Company, and Tipu’s sepoys were every bit as well trained by their French officers as those of the Company were by theirs; and the steely discipline of the Mysore infantry amazed and worried many British observers.⁷⁶ Moreover the sepoys’ rifles and cannon were based on the latest French designs, and their artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies. Indeed in many respects the Mysore troops were more innovative and technologically advanced than the Company armies: firing rockets from their camel cavalry to disperse hostile cavalry, for example, long before William Congreve’s rocket system was adopted by the British army.⁷⁷ More worrying still for Wellesley, the defences of Seringapatam were designed by French engineers on the latest scientific principles, following Sébastian de Vauban’s research into artillery-resistant fortification designs, as adapted by the Marquis de Montalembert in his book La Fortification Perpendiculaire.^cu These provided the most up-to-date defences that the eighteenth century could offer, and took into account the newly increased firepower of cannon, bombs and mines, as well as the latest developments in tactics for storming and laying siege to forts.⁷⁸

By mid-April the siege of Seringapatam had begun, and Tipu was showing every sign of resisting with his characteristic ingenuity and tenacity. As one British observer wrote, he ‘gave us gun for gun … [and night-time skirmishes were] made with desperate exertion … Soon the scenes became tremendously grand; shells and rockets of uncommon weight were incessantly poured upon us from the SW side, and fourteen pounders and grape from the North face of the Fort continued their havoc in the trenches; while the blaze of our batteries which frequently caught fire … was the signal for the Tiger sepoys [Tipu’s élite forces, dressed in tiger-striped uniforms] to advance, and pour in galling vollies of musketry.’⁷⁹ It was a brave and skilful defence. But by 3 May, after the guns of the Nizam’s contingent had been brought up to within 350 yards of the weakest west corner of the walls, a substantial breach was made, and Harris set the following day for the assault.⁸⁰

At 1 p.m., in the heat of the day, most of Tipu’s sepoys went off to rest for the afternoon. In the Company trenches, David Baird, who had spent forty-four months in Tipu’s dungeons, roused himself and gave his troops ‘a cheering dram and a biscuit’. He then drew his sword, jumped out of the trench and led a storming party—which included two hundred of Mir Alam’s best Hyderabadi sepoys—over the River Cauvery and straight into the breach. His two columns scrambled over the glacis and into the city, swinging right and left along the ramparts amid fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Within a few hours the city was in British hands. Baird was later taken to Tipu’s body by one of his courtiers. It lay amid a heap of dead and wounded, with three bayonet wounds and a shot through the head. Tipu’s eyes were open and the body was so warm that for a few moments, in the torchlight, Baird wondered whether the Sultan was still alive; but feeling his pulse, he declared him dead.^cv

Already the Mysore casualties hugely outnumbered those of the allies: some nine thousand of Tipu’s troops were dead, as opposed to around 350 of the Company and Hyderabadi sepoys. But that night the city of Seringapatam, home to a hundred thousand people, was given over to an unrestrained orgy of rape, looting and killing. Arthur Wellesley told his mother:

Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered, and I understand that in camp jewels of the greatest value, bars of gold etc etc have been offered for sale in the bazaars of the army by our soldiers, sepoys and followers. I came in to take command of the army on the morning of the 5th and with the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging etc etc in the course of that day I restored order … ⁸¹

The prize committee, whose job it was to distribute the booty, began to collect what was left of Tipu’s possessions and the contents of his treasury: around £1.1 million of gold plate, jewellery, palanquins, the Sultan’s solid-gold tiger throne, arms and armour, silks and shawls—‘everything that power could command or money could purchase’.⁸²

It was nearly a fortnight later, on 17 May, that one of James’s harkaras^cw finally galloped into Hyderabad with the news of the great victory. James’s confidential munshi, or Private Secretary, Aziz Ullah, was already on his way

to the Durbar to pay his respects to the Minister and His Highness on the occasion of the Feast of Sacrifices [Bakra ’Id]. He immediately took with him the substance of the News, and upon him communicating it to the Nizam and Solomon [as James dubbed Aristu Jah], the former immediately put a string of his own pearls on the Munshi’s neck, and the latter got up and threw his arms around him. Uzeez Oolah had some difficulty in prevailing on them to postpone a feu de joye until I should announce to them the happy event officially, which thank God! I am now enabled to do … [The Nizam] is in prodigious high spirits [and I was welcomed into the old city] … by a continued firing of cannon for an hour together from the walls of the city and of Golcondah.⁸³

It was a great moment, and a vindication of the Anglo-Hyderabadi alliance James had worked so hard to build. But in the sheer scale of the victory and the stupendous quantity of riches seized by the victorious army lay the seeds of much future dissent, not only between the British and the Nizam, and between Aristu Jah and his victorious general Mir Alam, but also between Wellesley and his masters back in London, and, indirectly, between James Kirkpatrick and all these others.

Wilkie Collins’ wonderful Victorian detective story The Moonstone opens at the fall of Seringapatam when the narrator’s cousin, John Herncastle, seizes ‘the Yellow Diamond … a famous gem in the native annals of India [once] set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian God who typifies the Moon’. To do this Herncastle, ‘a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other’, murders the Moonstone’s three guardians, the last of whom tells him as he dies that the diamond’s curse will follow Herncastle to his grave: ‘The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!’ In the course of the novel, the diamond brings death and bad luck to almost everyone who comes into contact with it, before being seized back by its mysterious Hindu guardians.⁸⁴

The story is of Collins’ own invention, and does not pretend to be based on fact. Yet strangely enough, the looting of Seringapatam did act like a curse on many of the leading participants in the plunder, and, remarkably, a hoard of diamonds seized from Tipu’s treasury did indeed fatally dog the career of Mir Alam from that moment onwards.^cx

It was a full five months before the victorious Hyderabadi army marched back to Golconda, where it received a heroes’ welcome. On 11 October, according to Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who was in the crowd to greet his cousin, ‘Mir Alam returned to Hyderabad, and the Nizam sent his personal elephant for him to make a triumphal entry. He even ordered the nobility to come 2 or 3 farsakhs out of the city to greet him.’^cy

Other Hyderabadi accounts confirm this picture: ‘When Mir Alam returned from Seringapatam,’ wrote Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘his fame reached the skies.’⁸⁵ But beneath the surface, tensions were already beginning to become apparent about Mir Alam’s behaviour after the victory over Tipu. As Shushtari put it, ‘This moment of triumph was also the beginning of his downfall, as courtiers itched with envy and started plotting his downfall.’⁸⁶

The Mir Alam who returned from Seringapatam was a markedly different figure to the man who had set off nine months earlier. Physically, he was weaker, indeed he had been so ill in Madras that his formal audience with Lord Wellesley had had to be delayed, and some even thought he was dying.⁸⁷ This severe sickness was the first sign that he had caught the leprosy that would slowly eat away at him over the next decade. But for all his ill-health, the Mir had a new self-confidence—even a distinct arrogance—about him. The spectacular victory over Tipu, the close friendships he had forged with the senior British commanders, and his meeting with Lord Wellesley had all combined to give him a new sense that his rapid rise to power was firmly backed by the Company, and rumours quickly began to spread that he was now intent on overthrowing his old master Aristu Jah, who had irritated the Company officials in Calcutta by his lack of urgency in sending reinforcements and funds to the front in Mysore. Certainly, James noticed a big change in Mir Alam’s manner, and soon wrote to William that ‘the whole train of MA’s conduct from the time of his return to Hyderabad has been a heap of inconsistencies & improprieties, and I really believe that his Lordships distinguished reception of him has turned his head’.⁸⁸

Nor was James the only one to be offended by the Mir’s behaviour. Even before his triumphant return, on 14 September, James had reported that the Nizam was ‘extremely out of humour if not deeply irritated with Meer Allum who has I believe more enemies than friends in the Mahl [zenana]’.⁸⁹ This was an ominous development, for as James well understood, the Nizam’s women—especially the two senior wives, Bakshi Begum and Tînat un-Nissa Begum—had a great deal of influence over the professional life expectancy of the Nizam’s advisers and ministers. If they had taken against Mir Alam, then the Mir had cause to worry. But it seems that in the flush of his success he simply did not notice the effect his behaviour was having.

The Nizam and Aristu Jah did in fact both have several good reasons to be exasperated with Mir Alam. Firstly, they were deeply upset with the way that after the victory in May, Tipu’s dominions had been carved up by the victorious British. The British feared that the Marathas would be seriously alarmed if the Nizam and the British simply divided Tipu’s vast territory between them, thus hugely increasing their power and resources, to the obvious detriment of the Marathas, who had refused to participate in the campaign and were therefore unentitled to any share of the spoils. So a committee which included William Kirkpatrick had come up with an ingenious—if distinctly dishonourable—way of dividing up the state of Mysore without either enraging the Marathas or giving what the British considered to be too much land and power to the Nizam.

Instead of a simple two-way division of Mysore, the British Partition Committee had eventually decided to give relatively modest chunks of land to themselves and the Nizam, while awarding the lion’s share to the ancient Hindu Wadyar dynasty of Mysore, whose lands Tipu’s father had conquered and whose Rajah he had displaced. The British made sure, however, that the newly reinstated Mysore Rajah would be utterly beholden to his British donors, thus gaining firm indirect control of the land they were purportedly giving back to its rightful former owners. Lord Wellesley thought this a brilliant solution; but the Nizam was appalled, and quite understandably thought that as he had provided half the army which had defeated Tipu, he should by right be rewarded with half the winnings. He was especially angry when he discovered that Mir Alam had weakly agreed to the division, and put his own seal to the Partition Treaty rather than sending it on to the Nizam for his formal ratification. ⁹⁰ The Nizam’s anger with Mir Alam was increased still further when it emerged that the Mir had at the same time accepted a ‘very munificent pension’ from Wellesley—a monthly allowance which the Nizam and Aristu Jah suspected was more a reward for his feeble acquiescence in this dubious Partition Treaty than for any help he had afforded during the campaign.⁹¹

More serious for Mir Alam was the Nizam’s disapproval of what had happened to Tipu’s captured treasure. In India there was no equivalent to the European tradition of formally dividing the spoils not only between the commanders but among the ordinary troops too. When James heard that Harris had authorised the prize committee to reward the sepoys in this manner, he realised straight away that there would be trouble from the durbar: ‘When the Nizam and Minister come to know that the whole of the treasure of the Sultaun … has been shared amongst the army, they will I am certain be ready to break their hearts with grief and disappointment.’ He added: ‘I shall endeavour to prepare the Minister gradually for the information, which would be too violent a shock to communicate at once to him.’⁹²

Worse still for the Mir were the unconfirmed rumours circulating around Hyderabad that during the plundering of Seringapatam he had somehow got his hands on Tipu’s finest jewels, including an extraordinary necklace of egg-sized pearls.⁹³ It was true that he had presented a fine selection of looted gems worth a staggering eleven lakh rupees to the Nizam on his return; but persistent rumours continued to circulate that these were mere baubles compared to the treasures he had secretly seized for himself.⁹⁴ There were also stories doing the rounds which suggested that the Mir had embezzled much of the state treasure he carried with him to the war. Aristu Jah was personally affronted by all of this, and was also seriously worried by the close relationship Mir Alam had forged during the campaign with influential British commanders such as Arthur Wellesley, connections the Mir made no effort to hide from his rival.

Nor was Mir Alam the only member of the Shushtari clan to fall under the displeasure of the Nizam. An intriguing incident had taken place a fortnight before the Mir’s return. After the fall of Seringapatam, Bâqar Ali Khan had accompanied Mir Alam and John Malcolm to Madras, whence they had been summoned to be presented to Lord Wellesley. But for some reason Bâqar Ali had suddenly made his excuses, deserted the army and headed back two weeks early to Hyderabad. When news of his desertion reached the durbar, Bâqar Ali was severely criticised by Aristu Jah for having left his post without permission, and at first ‘was refused admission to the City’; more ominous still, his petitions asking for forgiveness were returned unopened by the Minister.⁹⁵ The dispute fizzled on for some time. According to James, ‘hurt at this treatment, the old gentleman in the first emotions of anger, wrote an arzee [petition] to the Minister requesting leave to go to Mecca [i.e. to temporarily give up the world and become a pilgrim]. To this arzee he received no answer which provoked him to such a degree that he positively prohibited his wife and family from continuing their attendance in the Minister’s Mahl, and it was not until repeated messages and intreaties from the Boo Begum [one of Aristu Jah’s wives], between whom and Baukers family a great intimacy exists, that the Minister allowed him to return thither.’⁹⁶ This was all extremely odd—and also extremely unwise and uncharacteristic—behaviour by Bâqar Ali Khan. James’s letters are the only source for this incident, and naturally they contain no mention of what would be the most obvious explanation of Bâqar Ali’s behaviour: that he had somehow heard rumours that something was afoot in his zenana, and the women of the family badly needed his supervision.

For all these growing tensions, the popular mood was still one of celebration, and a great round of public entertainments was organised to celebrate the fall of Tipu. The first party—on 18 October, a week after the return of the army—was a huge nautch at Mir Alam’s house during which the Mir’s mistress, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, danced for the audience and presented a book of her poems to John Malcolm.⁹⁷ Malcolm, who had become close to the Shushtari clan on the Seringapatam campaign, was also invited to a party at Bâqar Ali’s deorhi, where he was invited to meet the women of the family—an unprecedented honour, tantamount in the etiquette of the day to declaring him an honorary brother of Bâqar Ali. It was a measure of the family’s liberal principles, very far, as one observer put it, ‘from the usual narrow prejudices of their sect’.⁹⁸

Nautch parties and mehfils in Hyderabad at this period, as in Delhi and Lucknow, tended to be held outside at night in the illuminated garden courtyards of the great palaces. Some of the most alluring descriptions of such parties are given by Farzand Begum’s grandfather, Dargah Quli Khan, who writes how,

in the evenings, the courtyards are swept and sprinkled with water and colourful carpets are spread on a raised platform. Then the established poets start the recitation of ghazals … [sometimes] shamiana tents are erected … Dancers entertain the people and good looking women gather in such large numbers that the mere sight of them appeases the appetite, although for the lecherous this does not suffice. The illumination of the lamps and candles is akin to the light in the Valley of Tur.^cz The omrahs occupy a separate side which is adorned with most beautiful carpets. They are courteously offered fruits and other delicacies along with perfume. Those desirous of wine are also provided with it … The sounds emanating from the bow on the strings of the sarangi are like arrows piercing the heart … The music makes people listless with ecstasy and the sounds of appreciation rend the air … ⁹⁹

James enjoyed such entertainments, and usually stayed to the very end. Certainly, his letters to Calcutta during November are full of apologies for being so behind in his work, and after one particularly late night at Aristu Jah’s he excuses himself on the grounds that ‘in compliment to the Minister I did not take leave until a very late hour … [Indeed] I have engaged myself to a regular nightly attendance during the remainder of the festivities—the fatigue from which will I hope plead as an apology for the lateness of my address to your Lordship.’¹⁰⁰

Just as this circuit of celebratory parties was coming to an end, the announcement of the forthcoming marriage between the Nizam’s son and heir apparent, Sikander Jah, and the granddaughter of Aristu Jah, Jahan Pawar Begum,^da prompted a whole new round of entertainments. It also provided James with what he regarded as an important diplomatic opportunity. He was very worried by the marked cooling of relations between the durbar and his Residency which had taken place following the announcement of the much-hated Mysore Partition Treaty, and said he saw ‘serious inconveniences from the ill humour’ of the Nizam, ‘which will increase if not soothed in some way or other’.¹⁰¹

Up to this point James had been an unqualified admirer of Lord Wellesley, writing to his brother of his veneration for the Governor General in terms that sometimes come close to hero-worship: ‘How I long to throw myself at his Lordship’s feet and express to him if possible the deep sense of [my gratitude for] all his goodness towards me,’ he had written to William at one point in February 1799. ‘I earnestly trust this to be not impracticable before his Lordship’s return to Bengal. I really think my veneration and attachment to that great and worthy nobleman is only short of what I feel to my beloved Parent, and of course my love and regard for you.’¹⁰²

Now however James’s views were beginning to change. For the first time, the Partition Treaty had led him to re-examine his attitude to Wellesley’s aggressive and bullying approach to Indian princes. The Nizam had unflinchingly stuck to his commitments in the 1798 Preliminary Treaty and had provided a huge army at very short notice to fight alongside the British at Seringapatam. The reward of the Hyderabadis was to be cheated of their full share in the division of the spoils. Irritated by this, and by the damage it had done to his carefully nurtured relations with the Hyderabad durbar, James now wrote to his friend General William Palmer, the Resident in Pune, openly criticising the Governor General’s policy: ‘I perfectly concur in the justness of your reflexions respecting our late dictatorialness of spirit. Our success indeed appears to me to have somewhat intoxicated us.’¹⁰³ It was a view that James would hold more and more strongly over the following months.

In order to try to undo some of the damage done by this Treaty, he now wrote to Calcutta for permission to lay on a major jashn (the word means simply ‘party’, but in this case refers to a post-marriage feast)—for Aristu Jah and the Nizam, during which generous presents could be presented to all the members of the Nizam’s and the Minister’s families, including the key members of both zenanas, and so pour oil on the troubled waters.¹⁰⁴

James realised that it was not going to be easy to sell such massive expenditure to a thoroughly sceptical Lord Wellesley, who would never be particularly enamoured of the idea of spending so much money on ‘natives’, least of all in making donations to the women of various harems, troupes of nautch girls and a series of Hyderabadi Sufi shrines. In his letter, therefore, James acknowledged that from the point of view of Calcutta ‘the time is no doubt gone by when the friendship or enmity of this state was an object of serious importance to us, and nothing but some strange vicissitude can hereafter render its smiles or its frowns of much consequence to us. Nevertheless you will no doubt agree with me that harmony and good understanding are at all times desirable things between states in alliance and that it is better if possible to maintain our ascendancy and influence in this by conciliatory acts than by any other means.’¹⁰⁵

In the event Lord Wellesley refused to countenance James’s initial estimate of over three lakh rupees for the jashn, but he did finally authorise him to throw a more modest party costing one lakh. A date in April 1800 was set, as custom dictated, five months after Sikander Jah’s marriage.

As the great state marriage grew imminent, gatherings of the durbar were increasingly marred by clashes between Aristu Jah and Mir Alam. ‘Meer Allum and Solomon have been sparring a great deal of late,’ James wrote on 1 November, ‘so much so, indeed, that the Meer has sent his son Meer Dauran twice to me, to request my advice or interposition on the occasion … candidly acknowledging at the same time, that the open declaration of my readiness to take his part to the extent required would in all probability enable him to carry the points [with Aristu Jah] he was contending for’.¹⁰⁶ When James politely declined to intervene, Mir Alam let it be known—to James’s surprise and mild alarm—that he regarded it as a personal insult.

The real crisis point was however reached two days later on 3 November, during the middle of the wedding celebrations. Aristu Jah had thrown the wedding party at Purani Haveli, one of his residences which he had just gifted to his granddaughter as part of her dowry. James had arrived with the senior Residency staff and some of the more senior army officers led by James Dalrymple, along with ‘the trays containing dresses and jewels for the brides principal male and female relatives’. They had sent ‘various trays of viands together with a large assortment of confectionary into the female apartments for distribution’, and had themselves been ‘regaled agreeably, as is the usage on such occasions, with sherbet’. Moreover each British officer was presented with a valuable sarpècheor turban jewel. Aristu Jah, huge bearlike man though he was, spent much of the party in tears, ‘so great is his grief in parting with his granddaughter in whom all his affections centre’.¹⁰⁷

Later that night, very publicly, in front of the gathered Hyderabadi nobles, a tearful Aristu Jah challenged Mir Alam as to the whereabouts of Tipu’s state jewels. Mir Alam denied all knowledge of them and after a moment’s silence and extreme embarrassment the festivities continued; but everyone realised that a point of no return had been reached in the relationship between the two most powerful officials in Hyderabad.

Even so, when Mir Alam left Hyderabad a few days later to take up his post as Governor of the newly conquered Mysore district of Rydroog, few could have guessed how swift, complete and ingenious Aristu Jah’s retribution would be.

Mir Alam was the Nizam’s official vakil to the Company, effectively his Minister for British Affairs. Ever since his three-year stay in Calcutta with Bâqar Ali Khan from 1787 the Mir had had excellent contacts with the senior Company staff in Calcutta, and Aristu Jah realised that if he wished to disgrace him, he would have first to alienate him from his British supporters. He now set about using James and Khair un-Nissa as the unwitting agents of this revenge. His plan was as brilliant as it was simple.

Mir Alam had already heard rumours about James’s infatuation with his cousin, and according to James had joshed him good-naturedly on the subject before he left Hyderabad again at the end of December.¹⁰⁸ The Mir clearly had no idea, however, how far the relationship had progressed. So, shortly after Mir Alam arrived at his new posting in January 1800, Aristu Jah hit on the simple but ingenious ruse of leaking the news to a Hyderabadi newswriter, but in a deliberately exaggerated form.

The two resulting newsletters—or akhbars—accused James not just of sleeping with Khair un-Nissa but of raping her, and of using his position to force her mother and grandfather to hand the girl over to him for his pleasure. Moreover, the akhbar included several titbits of gossip about James’s previous revelries in Hyderabad, including a long and complicated tale of how James had ‘debauched a brazier’s wife’, leaving the cuckolded husband to attempt to commit suicide at the most public place in Hyderabad, directly in front of the Char Minar. There was a kernel of truth behind the story: there was a brazier’s wife, and she had indeed attempted to take shelter from her abusive husband with her mother who worked in the Residency; but James had never seen her, and when the woman was called in front of the Hyderabad durbar, her far from attractive physical features were enough to convince the court of James’s complete innocence.¹⁰⁹

There was however a much more serious charge contained in the newsletters. Sharaf un-Nissa’s brother, and Khair un-Nissa’s uncle, Mahmud Ali Khan had died soon after Mir Alam’s departure for Rydroog, after a gun he was playing with—part of the loot from Seringapatam—had exploded in his face.¹¹⁰ Bâqar Ali Khan had testified that ‘the gun accidentally burst as he [Mahmud] discharged it … he retained his sense and talked until 9pm in the night and himself mentioned that this had happened in consequence of the trait which he had always had since his infancy of amusing himself with fireworks’.¹¹¹ But according to the scurrilous newsletter, the story was much darker: the uncle had strongly opposed Khair un-Nissa’s relationship with James, and had been quietly assassinated on the Resident’s orders so as to remove the one remaining obstacle to him attaining his wicked ends. As James reported to William, the akhbar maintained ‘that I sent or hired people to despatch him as an obstacle to my views on his Niece, or as other [gossips] related it, that I presented him with the fatal weapon, from the extreme badness of which I foresaw all that actually followed’.¹¹²

Beyond the central undeniable truth that James had been sleeping with Khair un-Nissa, none of these charges had any basis in fact; but they were sufficiently credible for Mir Alam—already angry with James for failing to take his side with Aristu Jah—to believe them. Once they had been published, according to the historian Ghulam Husain Khan’s contemporary account, the Gulzar i-Asafiya, ‘Aristu Jah wrote all the details of this affair [in an anonymous letter] and sent it to Mir Alam at Krapa … So it was that he [Mir Alam] wrote to Calcutta to the Lord Bahadur [Wellesley] demanding that the scandalous behaviour of Hushmat Jang [Kirkpatrick] should be punished as it deserved, to be a warning to others. Mir Alam acted according to the suggestion, and wrote a fulminating letter demanding Hushmat Jang’s execution.’¹¹³

Mir Alam had fallen straight into Aristu Jah’s trap. As Aristu Jah had guessed he would, Wellesley reacted to Mir Alam’s letter by writing immediately to the Nizam and Aristu Jah, demanding to know the truth about Mir Alam’s charges.

He sent the letter via James. On the morning of 7 March 1800, James received in the weekly dak (post) what was probably the single most terrifying missive he was ever to be sent by Wellesley. There were none of the pleasantries or compliments he was used to. Instead the letter was as abrupt as it was menacing. It simply instructed James that

as soon as you shall have read the [enclosed] papers [i.e. copies of the akhbars] you will lay them before His Highness and Azim ul-Omrah [Aristu Jah]. You will in my name request H.H. & the Minister to insert on the blank margins of the papers such observations as may occur to them on the allegation contained in the papers. I request HH and the Minister will authenticate their respective observations under their hands and seals. You will add such explanations as may appear necessary to vindicate your character against the heavy charges which these papers contain. In the meantime my judgement on the matter of those charges will remain suspended & the subjects will be preserved in the strictest secrecy.¹¹⁴

At this point, according to the usually very reliable Gulzar i-Asafiya, Aristu Jah called in James. ‘After some cockfighting’ he made it clear how serious the charges were, pointed out that James’s fate rested in his hands, and outlined what James’s fate would be if he chose to corroborate Mir Alam’s charges.¹¹⁵ Then he effectively offered to cut a deal. If James sacked Mir Alam as the Company’s vakil and was prepared to work with Aristu Jah for the best interests of Hyderabad, then in return the Minister would make sure that James’s name was completely cleared. He would personally persuade the Nizam to write to Wellesley, telling him that the charges were a malicious invention of Mir Alam. The dialogue put into James’s mouth in the Gulzar i-Asfiya is presumably invented, but the substance of the conversation has the clear ring of truth and tallies with all the other evidence:

Kirkpatrick went to have a private interview with Aristu Jah to beg for his life and his position, saying: ‘It was the girl who became obsessed with me. I did nothing; it was she who came and threw herself at me. I used no force. If you write this to Lord Bahadur, my life will be safe. In recognition for this great help, as long as I remain Resident here, I shall never forget the debt I owe, I shall strive for the best interests of your government and will obey all your orders.’ [My italics.]

Aristu Jah replied: ‘If I did try my utmost to have your life spared, I wonder whether you would be willing or able to do that service that I would require of you in return?’

Hushmut Jung [Kirkpatrick] asked: ‘And what is that?’

Aristu Jah made Hushmut Jung swear to total and utter secrecy, then said: ‘To have Mir Alam dismissed from the service of the English Resident and that I might succeed him in that office so that the Nizam’s Prime Minister and the English political agent will be as one—if you could persuade Calcutta to instruct the Nizam accordingly?’

Hushmut Jung accepted with all his soul, and swore to keep his part of the bargain.

Then Aristu Jah went into the presence of the Nizam and presented the case according to Hushmut Jung’s version, that he was completely innocent … [and Mir Alam was guilty of wilfully wrecking relations with the British by making unsubstantiated allegations against the blameless British Resident]. They sent the letter making this point to Calcutta, and the English notables, after due consideration, wrote that: ‘If Hushmat Jang is not guilty, and if the Nizam’s government is content to have him still as Resident, then let him keep his position. We are only concerned to secure the satisfaction of the Nizam’s government.’

In addition, about the dismissal of Mir Alam, they added: ‘The Nizam is master of his servants, and is free to choose and appoint as he wishes. We are happy to rely on his choice. However, if Aristu Jah is appointed, what could be better, on condition that Mir Alam’s life and honour and property are all safe!’

When this letter with its welcome answer reached Hyderabad, Hushmat Jang attended court, and Mir Alam was dismissed from his post as Vakil to the English, and also from the lucrative post of overseeing the newly conquered territories. He was imprisoned in isolation in Rudrur fort without the right to meet anyone else.’¹¹⁶

How seriously can this evidence be taken? Did Aristu Jah really succeed in using Khair un-Nissa not only as a way of disposing of his increasingly dangerous rival Mir Alam, but also as a way of ‘turning’ Kirkpatrick? And what exactly did Kirkpatrick’s promise to‘strive for the best interests of your government and obey all your orders’ actually entail? Was he really promising to betray his country and become some sort of double-agent—a late-eighteenth-century Philby, Burgess or Maclean? Or was he expressing a more general sympathy with—and affection for—Hyderabad, and saying that in gratitude for Aristu Jah’s intervention he would always be willing to help the Minister whenever he could?

With the evidence available, so long after the event, this question is now almost impossible to answer. Certainly James had always been sympathetic to Hyderabad, and became more so the longer he stayed in the town. He also grew increasingly outraged by what he believed to be the completely unacceptable threats and aggression used by Wellesley to put pressure not only on his Hyderabadi allies, but on several other independent Indian princes, to enter into ever more unequal treaties with the British. James was also appalled by Wellesley’s failure to honour his obligations in those treaties he had signed. It is difficult, however, to know now how much this was due to his own increasingly anti-Imperial political views and his longstanding fondness for Hyderabad, and how much to the fact that Aristu Jah now had a lever with which he could put pressure on James. For, by strenuously denying to the Governor General Mir Alam’s charges that he had raped Khair un-Nissa and murdered her uncle, James had been able to skate over the fact that there was a real basis to the scandal which underlay these stories, and that he had indeed been sleeping with Mir Alam’s teenage cousin. He had not told any blatant lies to the Governor General; but nor had he come completely clean. This was a grey area which left James extremely vulnerable, and open to further manipulation by the wily Minister.

The question as to the reliability of the evidence is easier to answer. On its own perhaps the Gulzar would not necessarily carry much weight, though it is in general an unusually accurate and well-informed record of the period. But the same story is repeated in two other independent Hyderabadi histories—the Tarikh i-Asaf Jahi and the slightly later Tarikh i-Nizam¹¹⁷—as well as in an investigation into the affair commissioned by the Residency after James’s death, which concluded that he had ‘ingratiated himself into the good graces of Aristu Jah, and by promising to stand by him in all his straits he succeeded in the fulfilment of his desires’. ¹¹⁸

Much more importantly, Mir Alam himself clearly believed that Aristu Jah had succeeded in blackmailing James, and that together the two had conspired to ruin him. Certainly he told this story to Arthur Wellesley six months later, in September 1800. The Mir had just been released from imprisonment but was still in deep disgrace, and had been banned from returning to the city of Hyderabad. Arthur Wellesley wrote immediately to his brother the Governor General to pass on what Mir Alam had told him, and his evidence is important as it is the earliest and most direct version of the story which later appears in a much fuller version in the Gulzar.

It is unclear if Arthur Wellesley ever met James; but it is quite apparent in his writings that he actively disliked William Kirkpatrick, whom he did know, and nothing he had heard about James did anything to alter his decided prejudice against both Kirkpatrick brothers. Moreover, he had come to rather admire the efficient, intelligent and unemotional Mir Alam, with whom he had worked closely during the campaign against Tipu. So when Mir Alam and his followers, newly released from captivity and heading into internal exile, fortuitously bumped into the future Duke of Wellington and his regiment in the middle of rural Karnataka in September 1800, Arthur was quite prepared to give the Mir’s version of events the benefit of the doubt.

On 21 September, the day after their chance meeting, Mir Alam laid on a nautch performance for Wellesley and his officers in a garden close to the fort of Koppal, just to the north-west of the ruins of the great Hindu capital of Vijayanagar (modern Hampi). ‘During the noise of the nautch,’ Arthur wrote in a memorandum which he sent Lord Wellesley in an official despatch written a few days later, ‘Meer Allum took the opportunity of entering into conversation with Col W[ellesley—i.e. himself] regarding his exile and disgrace. He began by saying that the fountain of justice no longer flowed towards him; that it was stopped by William Kirkpatrick in Bengal and his brother at Hyderabad, and that he depended solely on Col W for a representation of his case to the Governor-General.’¹¹⁹

Mir Alam then told the whole story to Arthur: how Aristu Jah had long wanted to have him disgraced, but finally succeeded in his object by using Kirkpatrick; how Kirkpatrick had wickedly seduced Khair un-Nissa; how Aristu Jah ‘had known of the affair from its commencement’, and tried to put the family of Ahmed Ali Khan off the idea of their son marrying Khair un-Nissa; how at first no one had dared to tell him—Mir Alam—about the developments; and how he, having at length been informed of the disgraceful behaviour of Kirkpatrick, wrote at once to the Governor General telling him what had happened; but that the Governor General—not knowing Aristu Jah’s close involvement with the affair—

thought the enquiry belonged to the Nizam’s government, and referred it to the Nizam … [whereupon Aristu Jah] reported upon it that there was no ground whatever of complaint; that the whole story was a fabrication … He [Mir Alam] then contended that the whole had been a plan of Azim ul-Omrahs [Aristu Jah’s] to ruin Mir Alam; that he knew that as long as Meer Allum was supported by Kirkpatrick it would be impossible to disgrace him, but that the moment he could deprive him of that support he was undone; that he had availed himself of the passions of Hushmut Jung [Kirkpatrick] to make it impossible that Meer Allum could ever connect himself with him in politics again.¹²⁰

All the other Hyderabadi accounts that refer to Kirkpatrick’s use of Hyderabadi clothes and customs speak of how much the people of the city were pleased and even flattered by his fondness for their culture, but on this occasion the Mir

launched into abuse of Kirkpatrick [saying] … that he had long respected the English for their steadiness and their adherence to their own manners and customs in private life, and their respect upon all occasions for the manners and customs of Hindustan, particularly those relating to women … but that Kirkpatrick, by dressing himself in the garb of a native and by the adoption of their manners, had made himself ridiculous, and was detested for his interference with their women. He said that if Col W did not believe him, he begged that he would send an hircarrah [messenger] to Hyderabad and desire him only to bring news of Hushmut Jung … ¹²¹

In the context of his dismissal and disgrace, Mir Alam’s claims that James’s crossing of cultures was regarded as ‘ridiculous’ can be taken with a fair pinch of salt, especially as we know from a note by Kirkpatrick—on the back of the only surviving miniature which shows him in Hyderabadi dress—that the clothes he is depicted wearing were actually given to him by Mir Alam so that he could wear them at the marriage of Mir Alam’s son Mir Dauran in November 1799.^db But the remark nevertheless provides a fascinating counterpoint to the view of, for example, the historian Ghulam Imam Khan who in his Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi stresses on several occasions that James’s adoption of Hyderabadi manners had made him especially popular in the city. It would be fascinating to know whether Mir Alam’s remarks reflected a widespread view in Hyderabad, or merely the Mir’s own anger and bitterness at losing his job.¹²² The remark does certainly highlight the contradictions and limitations to James’s transculturation: he might wear Indian dress, have an Indian lover and embrace Indian customs; but he remained—at least in the eyes of his political enemies—afirangi interloper and the official representative of an alien power.

Mir Alam concluded his tirade by asking Arthur Wellesley to ‘represent his case to the Governor General in order that Kirkpatrick might be removed’ and that he ‘be allowed to return to his house and family’. He also warned that Kirkpatrick was now ‘so completely under the influence of the Minister that it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam’s court than those of his own government’.¹²³ As Wellesley noted in his memo to his brother, ‘if it were true that the Minister had told a falsehood to screen Kirkpatrick from disgrace, he must be a very convenient Resident to the Nizam’s Government’.

The day after the nautch, Arthur Wellesley wrote to his friend Colonel Barry Close: ‘It will be impossible in my opinion to do anything for Mir Alam. The strong desire of Aristoojah to get rid of him is the cause of his removal … [and] Hushmut Jung’s passions have thrown him into the hands of Aristoojah and he could do nothing … ’ He added, in a tone of characteristic understatement, ‘It is a curious story altogether.’¹²⁴

In the months which followed, Mir Alam, now unprotected by the British, underwent a series of further misfortunes.

Aristu Jah’s spies had confirmed the rumours that the Mir had secretly acquired a set of spectacular gems at the sack of Seringapatam. Now that the Mir was under arrest, the Minister was determined to find where he had hidden them all. He questioned Mir Alam’s son, Mir Dauran, and his brother-in-law, Mustaqim ud-Daula. Both denied all knowledge of the stones. So Aristu Jah sent in a force of soldiers to Mir Alam’s mansion and ransacked it. They also tortured his khansaman or steward. When none of these measures had any effect, they burned the steward’s house down.¹²⁵

Khair un-Nissa’s grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan had, meanwhile, become deeply unpopular with all his kinsmen, who regarded him as indirectly responsible for Mir Alam’s disgrace. As the story of James’s affair spread, Bâqar Ali was jeered ‘in the streets [and accused of ] having prostituted his grand daughter to the Resident’. At one point ‘abusive papers’ were stuck up around the Char Minar insulting him.¹²⁶

Sometime in June, Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, now the most senior British soldier in Hyderabad, was out on a hunting expedition with Lieutenant Colonel Bowser a day’s journey from the city, when a message ‘was delivered by a servant of Bauker Aly, requesting us as his oldest and best friends to pay him a visit the next morning in order that he might consult with us on an affair of importance’. Dalrymple loved his shikar (hunting)—his will is full of detailed instructions for the disposal of his beloved ‘Arab horse, the little horse called Mamoola, and all my hounds’—but realised something important was up and immediately turned back to the city.¹²⁷

James Dalrymple had been a close friend of Bâqar Ali for at least five years, and the two had fought side by side at the capture of Raichur during the rebellion of the Nizam’s son-in-law Dara Jah in 1796.^128dc Now, so it seemed to Dalrymple, Bâqar Ali Khan’s friendliness and hospitality had been badly abused, causing his old friend to be almost outcast from his clan. Dalrymple went to see Bâqar Ali first thing the following morning, and found the old man to be in a state of considerable agitation.

Four months earlier, in March, Bâqar Ali had helped Kirkpatrick out of his troubles by writing a signed statement to Wellesley declaring that the claims in the scandalous akhbars were nonsense: that James had neither raped his granddaughter nor murdered his son, that the charges were ‘an absolute falsehood & a mere calumny’, and that towards James he felt nothing but ‘gratitude and obligation’.¹²⁹ Since then, however, the old man had clearly heard many more of the rumours linking Kirkpatrick with his granddaughter, and he needed Dalrymple to help him put a stop to it all.¹³⁰Moreover, Khair un-Nissa was still firmly refusing to marry the son of Ahmed Ali Khan, to whom she continued ‘to testify an unequivocal aversion’.¹³¹ Bâqar Ali—so it seems—had been the last to discover about his granddaughter’s ‘partiality’ for Kirkpatrick, and apparently still did not know quite how far the relationship had gone; but he was—albeit belatedly—well aware that there was a great deal of gossip linking the two, as the insults and bill-posters had made plain. Khair un-Nissa’s engagement to the son of Ahmed Ali Khan had still not been formally broken off, but Bâqar realised it was likely to be if there were any more scandals associated with her. Bâqar said he wanted Dalrymple to talk to Kirkpatrick, and tell him firmly to keep away from Khair un-Nissa. His granddaughter, he told Dalrymple,

had been demanded in marriage by a Mussulman of great respectability, and he was desirous of concluding that alliance. But the Resident had been using every means in his power to impede the marriage, and had sent repeated messages and communications with that view to the females of his family … [He] expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and he declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city) and stating the fact to the Mussulmen assembled: I will march, said he, at their head to take vengeance on the person of your Resident, and we will see what opposition his escort can make against the indignation and fury of the whole Mussulman body.¹³²

This was looking very bad indeed. Hyderabad was a vital ally and a crucial strategic asset for the British. There was still a French army at large in Egypt, and there was still, in the Marathas, an Indian army on the borders of Hyderabad that was quite capable of joining a disaffected Hyderabad and together turning the British out of India once and for all. Now, so it seemed, Kirkpatrick’s libido was endangering everything, and causing a major anti-British uprising in the Deccan. Faced with this potentially catastrophic turn of events, Dalrymple read the riot act to James: ‘Colonel [Dalrymple] represented to the Resident the fatal consequences not only to his own personal safety but to the public interests which must result in persevering in a conduct so improper.’¹³³ He demanded, in short, that James stop seeing Khair un-Nissa.^dd

James was forced to agree to keep his distance from the girl—at least for the time being, at least until the scandal blew over. After all, his own position was far from secure. He had very nearly lost his job over the affair already, and realised that he simply could not afford to ignore the explicit wishes of both Bâqar Ali and Dalrymple. His failure to come completely clean to Lord Wellesley about Khair un-Nissa had left him very vulnerable to gossip, especially from the British military in Hyderabad, over whom he had limited authority; and there was every reason to believe that having excused him once, Wellesley would not take it very kindly if further complaints about James’s womanising were made; still less would he sit back if James’s adventures were to lead to an anti-British rebellion. So James really had no choice: he gave Dalrymple ‘a solemn promise … that he would refrain from all intercourse with Bauker’s family’.

By the mid-summer of 1800, therefore, it appeared that the brief affair between James and Khair un-Nissa, which had already caused so much havoc, was over; or so at least it must have seemed to Kirkpatrick, Dalrymple and Bâqar Ali Khan.

None of them could have guessed that the real trouble was in fact just beginning. For what none of these three men knew, and what the women in Bâqar Ali’s zenana must have been all too aware of, was that Khair un-Nissa was now three months pregnant with James Kirkpatrick’s child.