V

Towards the end of November 1800, James wrote to Calcutta to report that ‘The annual ’urs [festival] to Mawlah Ali is close at hand, and I propose going there and staying in my tents in a few days, for the benefit of fresh air and recreation.’¹

It was not just James who planned to leave the city for the ’urs. Great swathes of the population of Hyderabad took the opportunity to break from their routine for ten days and to set off twenty miles to the north on a short pilgrimage whose attractions mixed the satisfaction of piety with the pleasures of novelty and a change of air. It was at once a pilgrimage and a pageant, a sacred festival and what James described in one letter as a ‘tenting holiday’.²

The festival commemorated a vision of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, granted two hundred years earlier to a senior eunuch in the Qutb Shahi court named Yaqut (‘Ruby’). One night Ruby the Eunuch was asleep when a man in green came to him in a dream, and told him he was being called by Maula Ali,^de the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, and the most revered figure in Shi’a devotion. Ruby followed the mysterious figure in green and was led to a place where Maula Ali was seated on the summit of a hill, with his right hand resting upon a rock. Ruby fell down before the figure, but before he could say anything, he awoke. The following morning, Ruby set off from Golconda in his palanquin and went up the hill, where he found the mark of Maula Ali’s hand branded on the stone where it had rested during the night. Ruby ordered the handmark to be hewn out of the stone and placed in a great arch he built on the site.

The rock soon became a popular centre of devotion for Sufis, mystics and ascetics, and after one of the Golconda princesses renounced the world and became a hermit on the hill, the Shi’a Qutb Shahi sultans began leading an annual pilgrimage to the site on the anniversary of Ruby’s vision. After the conquest of Hyderabad by the Sunni Mughals in 1687 the festival went into temporary decline, and it was only after the Nizam’s family began to patronise the ’urs from the 1780s onwards that the pilgrimage again grew to become one of the two great national festivals of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad. The women of the Nizam’s zenana seem to have particularly welcomed the opportunity to escape from the city for a few days, and one of the Nizam’s two most influential wives, Tînat un-Nissa Begum, gave her blessing to the ’urs by building a garden complex not far from the shrine which she named Tînat Nagar; here she and the Nizam stayed for the festival as well as for occasional winter hunting expeditions. ³ Word spread among the townspeople that Maula Ali himself could be seen wandering around the shrine on his birthday, and such was the popularity of the’urs that rather than being celebrated on a single day as in Qutb Shahi times, the festival gradually became extended: ‘The coming and going of visitors increased constantly, the ’Urs grew accordingly, and all the distinguished citizens of the town came out for rest and recreation and stayed to enjoy the long nights of revelry.’⁴

A line of lamps was lit on either side of the road all the way from the Char Minar to Koh e-Sharif, the shrine of Maula Ali. Haloed in dust, much of the population of the city, and indeed of the surrounding towns and villages, of whatever faith, would set off on foot, on bullock cart, in palanquins and on elephant-back to a lush green stretch of country enclosed in a bend in the Musi, and bounded by a group of three smooth volcanic hills, one large, two slightly smaller. By 1800 the festival lasted from Ali’s birthday, on the thirteenth of Rajab,^df to the anniversary of the vision on the seventeenth, and many of the people, from stallholders to great omrahs, stayed in the area for as long as ten days.⁵ Amid the smell of sweat and spices, elephant dung and the wafts of hot cooking from the roadside stalls, the highest officials of the Deccan rubbed shoulders with trinket-sellers and stable boys, soldiers and sepoys, diamond merchants, senior courtiers and, in particular, the courtesans.

For in that strange link between piety and prostitution that existed all over India at this period—both among the devadasis^dg of the great Hindu temples and the Muslim courtesans who used to pick up their clients in the great Sufi shrines^dh—this was a festival especially associated with thetawaif, the cultivated and urbane dancing girls who were such a central feature of late Mughal society. Across India at this most libertine moment in the country’s recent history, such festivals, with their music and high spirits and unrestricted mixing of men and women, had become notoriously convenient occasions to meet lovers. One young Hyderabadi of the period described the scene at an ’urs as follows:

Chandeliers of all kinds are hung [inside the shrine], and the artisans come and give the lamps the shape of trees which when lighted put to shame even the cypresses. When the place is fully lighted, it dazzles like sunlight and over-shadows the moon … Hand in hand lovers roam the streets [around the shrine], while the debauched and drunken, unmindful of the kotwal [police] revel in all kinds of perversities. There are beautiful faces as far as the eye can see. Whores and winsome lads entice more and more people to this atmosphere of lasciviousness. Nobles can be seen in every nook and corner [of the shrine] while the singers, qawals and beggars outnumber even the flies and the mosquitoes. In short both the nobles and plebeians quench the thirst of their lust there.⁶

The link between the tawaifs and the Maula Ali festival was especially strong due to the influence of the greatest of all the tawaifs of the Deccan, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Her mother, Raj Kanwar Bai, who was also a celebrated courtesan, was six months into her pregnancy when, in the spring of 1764, she went on a pious outing to the shrine with James’s friend, the Nizam’s court historian and painter, Tajalli Ali Shah. Just as they were approaching the Koh e-Sharif, Raj Kanwar Bai began bleeding and appeared to be suffering a miscarriage. Tajalli Shah took her straight up to the shrine, where they bought some sacred threads to tie around Raj Kanwar’s waist and ate the prasad^di given to them by the pirzadas (officials). Raj Kanwar Bai miraculously recovered and Mah Laqa was born a beautiful and healthy child three months later.⁷

In gratitude, the family became prominent donors to the shrine, and due to their influence and prestige the Nizam and his family began attending the ’urs of Maula Ali. Mah Laqa’s uncle, the assassinated Prime Minister Rukn ud-Daula,^dj was buried just below the shrine, and in 1800, the year James first attended the ’urs, Mah Laqa herself had just begun building a magnificent garden tomb at its base, where she laid her mother and where, in due course, she too would be buried, under a Persian inscription that described her as a ‘cypress of the garden of grace and rose tree of the grove of coquetry’.⁸

Other tawaifs, and the musicians who worked with them, donated guest houses for the pilgrims, mosques, ceremonial arches and naqqar khanas (drum houses), as well as pools and fountains and pleasure gardens in the countryside nearby. According to Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘There are on the upper slopes of the Koh e-Sharif, many buildings commissioned by the courtesans. This is where they congregate during the ’urs. There they serve delicious foods, have fireworks and illuminations, adding to all these pleasures the delights of musical raags.’ During the ’urs, in these illuminated gardens the tawaifs would give dance displays far into the night, as well as—presumably—providing all the other services that made them so sought-after among the Hyderabadi nobility.⁹

As well as being a popular excuse for a holiday, the festival played an important political role, by allowing the Nizams to reach out across the sectarian divide in the Hyderabadi aristocracy, a divide that split the nobles of the kingdom straight down the middle. The old Qutb Shahi élite, as well as the other old Deccani families from towns such as Aurangabad and Bidar, had been almost entirely Shi’a. Their numbers had been augmented by the large numbers of new Shi’a Persian immigrants welcomed to Hyderabad by a succession of Shi’a Ministers including Aristu Jah and Mir Alam.¹⁰ The Nizams were however themselves solidly Sunni, as were the nobles of the élite Paigah clan and most of the Mughal soldiers and courtiers who had emigrated from Delhi to join them in the Deccan.^dk The two groups regarded each other with suspicion, and as James’s Assistant Henry Russell later wrote, ‘a considerable degree of jealousy subsists between the two sects, and they seldom intermarry’.¹¹ Yet despite its Shi’a inspiration, the festival of Maula Ali was celebrated by both Sunni and Shi’a with equal enthusiasm; moreover the popular devotion to holy relics which formed the centrepiece of the festival was also accessible to Hyderabad’s Hindus, both high and low; indeed, as today, Hindus often outnumbered Muslims at a shrine which in any other country might have become a centre for exclusively Shi’a sectarian devotion.

Indeed the people of Hyderabad—of whatever sect or religion—were proud of their festival, and the Deccani historian Munshi Khader Khan Bidri boasted patriotically in his Tarikh i-Asaf Jahi that ‘during the ’urs the place was so crowded that wise and elderly people were of the opinion that no place in Delhi, or indeed anywhere else in India had such a vast crowd on any occasion’.¹² They certainly did not like it when Middle Eastern Shi’as hinted that Najaf and Karbala and any of the other shrines in Iraq associated with the historic Ali were in any way more authentic or powerful than the Hyderabadis’ own home-grown Shi’ite holy site. In this context Mir Alam used to tell a story about a Shi’ite Mongol Hazara from Afghanistan, who had

recently arrived from Iran, and came to my house just as I was preparing to go to the Koh-e Sharif to give an ex-voto picnic. I invited the Mongol to join me on this pious visit. He answered: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve already visited Najaf [the premier Shi’ite pilgrimage site in Iraq] many times, so I hardly feel any need to visit your little shrine here!’

At last I persuaded him to mount the bullock-cart in the middle of my household and took him with me to the Koh-e Sharif. When we halted, as he was coming down off the bullock cart, and unused to such transport, he slipped his leg in between the supports of the cart and a sudden movement of the bullocks made the wheels turn and snapped his shin-bone. He screamed and wailed and then fainted, so I was forced to throw him back in the middle of the cart and proceed to the top of the mountain, while sending servants to fetch a surgeon. The Mongol, coming to, shouted: ‘I never have and never will give up my leg to a surgeon, never, ever! Just as He (Praise Be Upon Him) broke my leg upon this hilltop, so He will mend it!’

So the Mongol spent the whole night, without medicaments or surgery, weeping and tossing on his bedding, crying out: ‘Ya Maula! Ya Maula’ ‘O my Lord ’Ali, O my Lord ’Ali!’ At last, in the last watch of the night before morning, sleep overtook him. He dreamed he saw His Holiness of Manifest Wonders [i.e. Maula Ali] graciously appearing and approaching him. As He laid His hand on the Mongol’s broken leg, He cried: ‘Arise and walk!’

The Mongol awoke and no longer felt any pain; he stretched out his leg, and drew it up and stretched it again, sat up, stood, walked, came back to sit again, and saw no trace of any fracture. So he prostrated himself in grateful prayer, and called out by name each of his dependants to show them his miraculously healed leg. He entered the shrine and recited the Fatiha^dl and circled the holy rock-print seven times.

As long as he remained in Hyderabad, this Mongol never failed to visit the shrine each Thursday, convinced that this sacred place was quite especially acceptable to Maula ’Ali.¹³

The ’urs could not have been better-timed for James. He badly need a break, for it had been a terrible few months—the worst since he became Resident—and his nerves were frayed and his health in tatters; indeed he worried at times that he was approaching the point of total physical breakdown.

For weeks now he had been forced to work from his bed; at other times his letters were written from ‘a warm bath’ into which he had been ordered by George Ure, the Residency quack, who thought this the best cure for the crippling headaches to which James was increasingly prone.¹⁴ On occasion his symptoms seemed closer to dysentery, and at one particularly embarrassing moment he was forced to take his own thunderbox tent into the Nizam’s palace as he was suffering from a ‘very bad bowel and stomach disorder—or rather I think a complication of all the disorders the human frame is subject to. I got very well through my visit to the Minister, though I had such a looseness in me as obliged me to take a necessary tent with me to the durbar.’¹⁵

Both in his public and his private life, the pressure was now on. The jashn party James had thrown to celebrate the marriage of Sikander Jah to Aristu Jah’s granddaughter had gone well, clearing the air after the unpleasantness of the Mysore Partition Treaty, and for a while he was able to report that ‘I am grown a prodigious favourite and Pett’ of the Minister. ¹⁶ But Calcutta had been pressing him to force a further treaty of alliance on the Nizam, by which the size of the British military mission in Hyderabad (known as the Subsidiary Force) would be increased, so providing a strong protection for the Nizam against any potential invasion—but only in return for some very large land concessions by the Nizam to the Company.

This of course suited the Company, which still retained ultimate control of the troops lent to the Nizam—and which indeed could use them to gently pressurise Hyderabad if ever the Nizam should prove less pliable than usual—while gaining a profitable way of financing its own forces. The benefits of the deal were less obvious to the Hyderabadi durbar, especially now that the threat of an attack by the Marathas seemed to have receded: as James told William at a particularly trying moment in the negotiations, ‘Though Solomon [Aristu Jah] is inclined to concede a great deal to us, I begin to doubt whether he will concede all we require, unless really frightened from the Poonah quarter.’¹⁷ Yet Wellesley would brook no watering-down of the terms he had set, which were weighed heavily in the Company’s favour. He ordered James to get the Hyderabadis to sign, whatever it took.

Wellesley was in fact in a particularly foul and uncompromising mood that season. After conquering Seringapatam and ‘Taming the Tiger’ (as he euphemistically referred to the killing of Tipu) he had assumed that he would be lavishly rewarded by his masters in London, and wrote to his French wife Hyacinthe that ‘I don’t see how one can deserve honours more than by such feats, and if there is any justice in England they must send me the Garter by an express courier … I don’t care about any honour except the Garter.’¹⁸When he was offered instead a mere Irish marquessate, which did not even give him the right to sit in the House of Lords in London, Wellesley almost had a nervous breakdown. He took to his bed for ten days, unable to eat or sleep, raging at the perceived insult of what he called this ‘double gilt potato’ and working himself into such a state that he ‘broke out into enormous and painful boils’.

Nor was there anything in Calcutta that might cheer him up or lure him out of his bedroom. Calcutta society, Wellesley had decided, was boring and vulgar: ‘the men are stupid, are coxcombs, are uneducated; the women are bitches, are badly dressed, are dull’, and he raged to Hyacinthe about ‘the stupidity and ill-bred familiarity’ of the Company merchants he was meant to govern and control: ‘They are so vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar & stupid as to be disgusting and intolerable; especially the ladies, not one of whom, by the bye, is even decently good looking.’¹⁹

In misery, the highly-strung Wellesley wrote to Hyacinthe: ‘I have been reduced to a skeleton, yellow, trembling, too weak to walk around my room … In my mind I suffer martyrdom … I am ruined here, everyone feels my degradation.’²⁰ Hyacinthe, like his staff in Calcutta, was mystified by her husband’s almost psychotic vanity and conceit, and especially the degree to which he cared about the most arcane gradations in the British honours system. Baffled by his behaviour, she wrote gently to her husband pointing out the absurdity that ‘he … before whom all the rulers of Asia tremble [lies] stretched on his bed, devoured by fury, without sufficient philosophy and courage to look on honours and decorations with an indifferent eye … Dear, dear soul you are not a child—your accursed head destroys your body.’²¹

None of this of course made Wellesley any more pliable, and it was certainly no moment for one of his staff to take issue with his orders or to fail to achieve all that the Governor General expected of him. William Kirkpatrick wrote urgently to James to tell him to try his very utmost to bring his negotiations to a successful conclusion at least if he wanted to have any chance of retaining his position. Already, he said, Wellesley had been muttering about replacing James with his own brother Arthur.^dm

To add to his difficulties, James’s able and hard-working Assistant, John Malcolm, had left Hyderabad in the summer of 1799 on an embassy to the Shah of Persia. His place had been filled by one of Malcolm’s protégés, an elderly Scottish soldier named Captain Leith. James had been suspicious of Leith’s abilities from the beginning, and had noted laconically to William that ‘Malcolm, like a true good Scotchman, [always] has a happy knack at discerning the special merits in those born North of the Tweed.’²² Leith’s arrival in Hyderabad had been delayed—ominously—by his bad health and an attack of dysentery, and when three months had passed and he had still yet to leave Madras, James wrote in some irritation that ‘If Capt Leith does not soon get into motion for this quarter I shall begin to think that he has no bowels.’²³ When Leith did finally make it to Hyderabad, he proved more of a hindrance than a help: ‘The new assistant is a disaster,’ James wrote to William in January 1800. ‘He can barely read or speak Hindoostany—indeed he can barely converse in it so as to be intelligible—or Persian [for that matter], and has taken three days to translate a letter with Amaun Oollah [Aman Ullah, the younger brother of James’s very able munshi^dn] the whole time by his side.’²⁴

The following month, around the time of the wedding of Sikander Jah, James’s own health had begun to fail, yet at this vital moment Leith was unable to assist in any way. James wrote: ‘I have been tormented for this week past to an unusual degree with bile which has at length brought on a fever and ague which I am at this moment suffering under. Pray heavens that the physic which Ure has just given me may afford me some relief! For I plainly see that it will be a long time indeed ‘ere my present assistant [Leith] gives me any. He is slow beyond anything I had conception of … He is almost deaf and blind, and upon the plea of candlelight burning his eyes, has requested me to excuse his attendance at the durbar … ’²⁵

Over the course of the year, as the treaty negotiations wound their interminable way through successive drafts, proposals and counter-proposals, Leith disappeared from his office for weeks at a time on a variety of excuses: ‘I am almost at my wits end with this strange assistant of Malcolm’s recommendation,’ James wrote in February. ‘I have not set eyes upon him for this last fortnight, he being laid up with worms in his feet, and in a deep salivation in consequence of attempting to kill them with mercury. If ever his finger aches he fancies himself terribly out of order and declares his incapacity to attend the office; though from the specimens [of his work] he has hitherto given, I can’t say I suffer much inconvenience from his absence. I am obliged as hitherto to attend to, and to carry, all the detail [i.e. humdrum] business of the Residency, which the assistant surely ought to ease his principal of. Ure says Leith is constantly whimsical and hypochondriacally inclined.’²⁶ Captain Leith finally took fright at the danger Hyderabad posed to his delicate health and fled back to his regiment in Madras later in the year.²⁷

This left James to deal with the entire business of the treaty negotiation with only his highly intelligent and wily Delhi-born munshi, Aziz Ullah, to help him.²⁸ In order to lure the Hyderabadis into a closer embrace with the Company, James and Aziz Ullah were forced to use every stratagem they could think of, and Aziz Ullah spent many hours at Aristu Jah’s deorhi trying to find ways of making the Minister more pliable. Day after day he would go to sit with him smoking a hookah in the summerhouse of the Minister’s garden, or to fly pigeons, or to watch cockfights; on one occasion the grave munshi even reported in his official record of a meeting that Aristu Jah had invited him to continue their discourse in his personal hamam (Turkish bath), where they could talk without being overheard.²⁹

On Aziz Ullah’s advice, James tried buttering up Aristu Jah by sending to Madras for ‘a curious piece or two of mechanism in the clock work way’ which he believed ‘will go a great way to clinching the treaty now brought on the carpet.’³⁰ The Nizam was likewise deluged with presents, including a new set of winter woollies to keep him from the worst of the December cold.³¹ James also spent huge sums bribing both Aristu Jah and the women in the Nizam’s zenana, writing to William in code that he had promised Aristu Jah a pension of one thousand rupees a month if he could get the Nizam to agree to the treaty, and remarking that the ‘citadel of negotiation’ might yet be taken ‘by a well directed fire of gold shot’.³²

Later, when William asked for details, James wrote—again in code—revealing exactly how he went about the difficult art of bribing the Prime Minister:

The affair of the bribe … only occurred to me when every other means seemed to fail, but I should probably not have had recourse to it if you had not repeatedly called my attention to this mode of accomplishing difficult points, or at least not to the extent I did … Bribery effected the objects, viz removing Solomon’s and the Nizam’s objections to certain points [in the treaty]. The number of persons bribed is of no consequence at a court like this and will seldom if ever do any harm even if it reaches the ears of the Principal, except in cases very different from the present one. The principal channel of my bribes in Nizam’s mahl [zenana] was Fihem Bhye, a woman of the most inordinate avarice … ³³

The Subsidiary Treaty of 1800, dubbed ‘The Perpetual Alliance’, was finally signed on 12 October after nearly a year of negotiations. The Company agreed to increase the British forces in Hyderabad by an additional two thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry, in return for which the Nizam handed over to the British the Mysore provinces he had won after the fall of Seringapatam eighteen months earlier—provinces that were of course worth a huge multiple of the actual cost of maintaining a few thousand sepoys.

Diplomatically, it was another triumph, and Wellesley wrote to congratulate James in fulsome terms; indeed when the Governor General had his portrait painted by Robert Home the following year he asked to have himself depicted with his hand resting on the Subsidiary Treaty, as if he regarded it as his greatest achievement to date in India.³⁴ The Nizam also seemed pleased, and gave James the title ‘Beloved Son’ as well as an enormous gem attached to a gold ring. ‘Solomon [Aristu Jah] for some time past had dropped obscure hints to Munshi Uzeez Oollah of having something in store for me,’ wrote James on the day the treaty was signed,

which he thought would be highly acceptable, but could not be brought to tell him plainly what that something was … The day before yesterday however I was partly enabled to form a guess as to what was intended, by His Highness requesting me to send him a ring as the measurement of my finger; and this morning on my arrival at Durbar, Solomon signified to me His Highness’s intention of distinguishing me by the appellation of his Son!!! an honour never hitherto conferred on anyone whatsoever but himself [Aristu Jah]. It was in vain for me to protest so high an honour utterly exceeded my merits, pretensions, or most sanguine expectations … The ring is a very shewy one, and the diamond a pretty large one. Young Sydenham [one of the junior Residency staff ] thinks it may be worth from fifteen hundred to two thousand pagodas. Were I to guess, I should say a thousand pounds … ³⁵

Nevertheless, the whole affair left a nasty taste in Kirkpatrick’s mouth. He was particularly disgusted by the degree to which he had had to bully and bribe the durbar to get his way, and he had more than a sneaking suspicion that the treaty was not at all in the best interests of Hyderabad. To his friend General William Palmer in Pune he wrote in full agreement with the latter’s view that the Company was becoming dangerously grasping and over-confident.³⁶ When he finally wrote to his brother to tell him of the imminently successful result, the letter contained no hint of triumph. Instead he revealed his growing unease at the ruthlessness with which Wellesley had pursued his objects, telling William that Aristu Jah had told Munshi Aziz Ullah ‘that our avidity had no bounds, that we required everything while we would concede nothing and that we seemed determined in short, to have everything our own way’. He added as a P.S.: ‘My mind is just now in too perturbed a state to answer the private matter contained in your letter, even if I had time to do so.’ Instead he simply asked his brother ‘whether I ought not in justice to myself and to the public to request permission to resign the station’.³⁷

This ‘private matter’ over which he was considering resignation was, of course, Khair un-Nissa.

The affair was now a continual source of pain and worry to James. In May, the growing unrest in Hyderabad over rumours about his seduction of a Sayyida had surfaced dramatically when, on his usual early-morning ride along the banks of the River Musi, James was ambushed: ‘I had a narrow escape from being shot, having been twice fired at by two sepoys of the old French Party, within twenty yards,’ he reported to William the following day. ‘One of the balls passed very near to my head. I had some difficulty suppressing the indignation of the troopers who attend me; but the offenders were sent bound to me soon after by Solomon, with a request that I would hang them up. I contented myself however (after asking if they had been sent by anyone, which they positively denied) with cautioning them against ball firing in future, except against enemies of the state.’³⁸Hyderabad gossip, of course, immediately linked the shooting to the growing disquiet caused by James’s affair.

But it was not the gossip and signs of anger in the old city that really worried James. He knew now that Khair un-Nissa was pregnant. He also knew that her family were trying to force her into aborting their child.

Little is known about abortion in India and the Islamic world at this time, but the practice was clearly widespread. Islamic jurists had ruled early on that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy was not haraam (forbidden); indeed they laid down that it was permissible, in exceptional medical circumstances connected with the health of the mother, up to the fourth month, at which point the foetus was deemed to have become fully ‘ensouled’, and so a human being. Niccolao Manucci, who attended Aurangzeb’s Imperial Mughal harem in Delhi, asserts that abortions were common there, and medieval Islamic texts are full of unusual suggestions for herbs and medicines that either prevented conception or aborted any foetus that might accidentally be conceived.

Birth-control methods varied widely around the Islamic world, and there are a great number of texts suggesting a variety of techniques, ranging from coitus interruptus to more bizarre solutions such as suppositories containing rennet of rabbit, ‘broth of wall flower and honey’ and ‘leaves of weeping willow in a flock of wool’ (a popular option in early medieval Persia). But birth control was not just the woman’s business: male contraceptive techniques included ‘drinking juice of watermint at coitus’, rubbing the juice of an onion or a solution of rock salt onto the end of the penis, or, more alarmingly, smearing the entire penis with tar.^do Other mysterious solutions to the problems of Islamic family planning included ‘fumigation with elephant’s dung’ and, stranger still, ‘jumping backwards’.^dp

Much less is known about the always sensitive subject of abortion, but the great medical authority Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), writing in early-eleventh-century Bokhara, suggested the following methods in his Canon of Medicine, all of which sound fairly unpleasant, as well as being (one would have thought) notably risky for the mother’s health:

Abortion may be performed by movements or by medicine. Medicines work by killing the foetus and causing the menses to flow … Movements include phlebotomy [blood-letting], starvation, [bodily] exercise, frequent jumping, carrying of heavy loads and loud sneezing.

A good procedure is to insert in the os uteri, a rolled piece of paper, a feather, or a stick cut to the size of a feather made of salwort, rue, cyclamen, or male fern. This will definitely work, especially if it is smeared with abortifacient medicine such as tar, the water of colocynth pulp, or some other abortifacient.

Other widely-used abortifacients in the medieval Islamic world included drinking potions of ‘myrrh in lupine water, pepper, laurel seeds, cinnamon, madder, juice of absinthe, cardomum, water mint, roots of sweet basil, candy carrot and luffa seeds in vinegar’, which methods could be combined with rubbing the navel with the gallbladder of a cow, fumigation with roots of cyclamen and the use of suppositories containing roots of wild carrot and ‘the juice of squirting cucumber’.

It is not known what methods late-Mughal midwives favoured, still less what were those common in Hyderabad, but the midwives concerned, the family and Kirkpatrick all clearly regarded the act as well within their competence. Just as Indian women were regarded throughout the Middle East as being especially sophisticated in the arts of love, so they were believed to be especially skilled in the art of preventing pregnancy, and if all else failed, in assisting at births.³⁹

Abortion was nevertheless a dangerous operation, and apart from wishing to keep the child, Khair un-Nissa must have been alarmed at the sheer risk involved in undergoing a termination: after all, her half-sister had died only a few months before, in March 1800, after going through a presumably much less dangerous operation to help her conceive.⁴⁰

Not surprisingly, this unpleasant saga was not something James felt able to confide to his brother. Indeed he always tried to tell William as little as possible about his Hyderabadi lover, and even avoided revealing to him that she was pregnant—but a brief reference was made to the abortion attempt in the Clive Report, when Colonel Bowser testified that Kirkpatrick had personally told him that

in consequence of this intercourse the young lady became pregnant, and to conceal her disgrace they [her family] wished to marry her to the Mussulman formerly alluded to [the son of Ahmed Ali Khan], but the lady herself had positively refused, had threatened if compelled to put an end to her existence, and declared that she would marry no person but Hushmut Jung (Major Kirkpatrick). Finding that they could not prevail upon her, they wished to give her medicine to procure an abortion, but that he (the Resident) had sent for the principal midwives of the city and deterred them from an attempt of that nature. He concluded with declaring that whatever might be the ultimate result of these investigations he was determined never to desert the lady or her offspring.⁴¹

Yet while James may have been determined not to abandon Khair un-Nissa in the long term, in the short term he was unable to meet her or even regularly answer her letters, due to the vigilance of her grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan and, more importantly for his own security, his recent promise to James Dalrymple. Instead he was forced to sit impotently in the Residency gazing over the Musi to the old city where Khair un-Nissa lived, forbidden to contact her or reply to her letters. To William he wrote in cipher: ‘I have long since desisted from all intercourse with the females of B[âqar] A[li]’s family … [But] it is generally reported that the young girl is pining miserably, and that her parents have by way of soothing her distress of mind come to a determination not to marry her to any one.’⁴²

He then, for the first time, hinted to his brother that he was a lot more serious about the affair than he had previously made out. Up to now he had grudgingly admitted to William that he had slept with Khair un-Nissa but denied that he was planning to marry her, or indeed that he regarded his connection with her as anything more than a regrettable lapse of self-control. Now however he made it clear that in fact he was far, far more deeply involved than this. He wrapped up the revelation in the language of honour and duty so as to make it seem less objectionable to his brother, and still pretended that the connection was forced upon him; but the import was exactly the same: that he was prepared to resign from his job and abandon his entire East India Company career before he gave up the girl: ‘I should not be astonished,’ he wrote on 17 August,

if they [Khair un-Nissa’s family] were sooner or later to implore me to renew a connexion with her in my own terms. I will tell you however with the same un-reserve I have hitherto practised, how I should in all probability act in such a predicament. I would first endeavour by every means in my power to decline the offer, but if I found that this could not be done without danger of more than one kind, I would feel the pulse of the Nizam and Solomon, and if they proved not averse to the business, I would, as in duty bound, have the matter submitted to Lord W who from my public statement of the case is well acquainted with the young girl’s sentiments respecting me.

[But] if his Lordship should from reasons of political expediency or from any other consideration prove decidedly hostile to any arrangement whatever, my feelings will in all probability compel me to request permission to resign my situation in order that I may be more at liberty to consult them and my inclinations, than I can do as a public man. Various considerations no doubt will make this alternative a most painful one indeed, but it will be the only one left me, to extricate myself with honour from as cruel a dilemma as perhaps any man was ever placed in … ⁴³

If James had hoped to escape from the shadow of the affair during his trip to Maula Ali, he was mistaken.

He set off north on 1 December, and took with him Leith’s replacement as Residency Assistant, a talented, vain and cocky young Oriental scholar named Henry Russell. Russell was a fluent Hindustani speaker, though his Persian was not up to scratch, and he probably got the job as much from his connections as his skills. His father, Sir Henry Russell senior, was the Chief Justice of Bengal, an honest, clever but coarse man whose nouveau riche manners appalled the profoundly snobbish Lord Wellesley: ‘I know not where you picked up Sir Henry Russell,’ Wellesley wrote to the Company Board of Control’s President Henry Dundas in London when he first heard hints about Sir Henry’s appointment. ‘He is a vulgar, ill-bred, violent and arrogant brute; he gives universal disgust. I hope you will never allow him to be Chief Justice … at all events do not place that brute in a station which his manners and conduct will disgrace.’⁴⁴

But while abhorring the father, Wellesley admired Russell’s son, whom he regarded as ‘the most promising young man’ he knew.⁴⁵ James agreed, and wrote to William that Russell ‘cannot, I think, fail to be an acquisition to me in every point of view. As yet, he has not, I perceive, made much progress in the Persian but he is a very tolerable Hindwy [i.e. Hindustani /Urdu] scholar through the medium of which he will make himself useful to me in the translating turn, and thus by degrees gain himself a knowledge of the language.’⁴⁶ He also personally liked the boy, whom he found lively, intelligent and companionable, and a welcome relief after the dour and heavy presence of the self-pitying Leith.

By the time Russell, Kirkpatrick and the Residency party arrived at Koh e-Sharif the crowds were already immense. Lines of huge silken shamiana tents had been erected amid the palm trees at the base of the hill. The pilgrims milled around, shopping in the temporary bazaars and eating the food and drinking the sherbet provided to everyone free of charge in the huge kitchen erected by Mah Laqa Bai and maintained at her own expense.⁴⁷ Hindus came with coconuts to bring as offerings to the shrine; Muslims brought sheep to slaughter; beggars lined up for alms. According to Ghulam Husain Khan:

All of God’s people go, from the Nizam and his Ministers to the poor, the soldiers and the entertainers—even old women, of 90 or 100 years old, who hardly have the strength to walk, yet still drag themselves to the festivities. About 5 lakhs of people—Muslims and Hindus, followers of Vishnu and Shiva, Brahmins and sadhus and Marwaris, as well as foreigners from Iran, Central Asia and Turkestan, Ottoman Turkey and Syria, Arabs and non-Arabs, and even the English—all of them come to this ’urs which none will willingly miss. They erect countless tents, and those that have built lodgings decorate them with carpets and candles … Each of the major nobles endows mansions that are named after them.^dq

Some 3,000 elephants, as well as some 50,000 horses and load-bearing camels, with stalls selling fresh and dried fruit, clothes and fine woollen pashmina shawls: as far as the eye can see, immense crowds appear, of buyers and sellers, riders and dancers, glorious tents and mountainous elephants, and with tall buildings erected continuously on either side from the Musi river to the foot of Koh-e Sharif, hung with silk and adorned with chandeliers …

Beautiful dancers with variously painted faces and rich jewels and bright coloured dresses entertain joyful gatherings where they astonish listeners with their ravishing music; there are fireworks, various delicious dishes of food and drinks beyond counting. When His Highness the Nizam enters, the celebrations and illuminations begin … ⁴⁸

The centrepiece of the festivities—in a syncretic Hindu touch to a nominally Shi’a Muslim ceremony—was the moment at midnight on the sixteenth of Rajab when the tray of holy sandalwood was carried with great pomp on the back of a camel from the graveyard of Takia Rang Ali Shah; after this a second piece of sandal was sent to Koh e-Sharif from Punja Shah, and a third from Malajgiri. The pilgrims surged up to the top of the hill and, according to Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘the crowds are such, that it is difficult to reach the shrine, unless, pushed by the repeated shoving of the strong young men behind you, drenched in sweat, you finallycome into the shrine chamber’. Here they bowed or prostrated themselves before the holy handprint found by Ruby the Eunuch more than two hundred years earlier.

Yet James found that even here, in the middle of the vast anonymous crowds that thronged to the festival, he still could not escape the scandal that was rapidly enveloping him. Wherever he went—up to the shrine, on a hunting trip, or to one of the dance displays—he found himself being shadowed by Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari and his cousin Mir Dauran, the plump, spoilt and deeply unattractive teenage son of Mir Alam.^dr Both were intent on trying to persuade James to intercede for their disgraced and exiled kinsman, who was now approaching Hyderabad on his way from Rudroor to his chosen place of internal exile, his estates in Berar, a hundred miles north-east of the city; both men refused to believe James’s protestations that he was unable to exert any influence on Mir Alam’s behalf. James was particularly irritated when the two suggested a deal: that if they got Khair un-Nissa for him, could he agree to get permission for Mir Alam to return home? As James reported to William,

Abdul Lateef is frequently with me, and to all appearances very candid and vastly communicative. His complaisance indeed knows no bounds, for like Meer Dowraun he has not hesitated to offer his services to me very unreservedly in a certain quarter where he assured me there would be no difficulty in effecting in my own terms all my wishes—whatever they might be. You may easily suppose how I received and answered such meanness and impertinence … I suspect he [Mir Dauran] has been tampering with old Bauker [Khair’s grandfather, Bâqar Ali Khan], and that he has been pumping him, as the old man has unreservedly declared to me.^49ds

As James knew very well, now that Khair un-Nissa was seven months pregnant and clearly in no state to marry Ahmed Ali Khan’s son, Bâqar Ali and the Shushtari clan were less the problem than Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple. For Dalrymple could still make Kirkpatrick’s life very difficult, especially if he reported to Calcutta that James had broken his solemn undertaking and was again seeing Khair un-Nissa, despite the clear dangers this presented to the British position in Hyderabad.

So when on 9 December, just three days after the end of the Maula Ali festival, news arrived at the Residency that Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple had caught a sudden fever and died in his tent, James must have felt a very mixed series of emotions. Dalrymple was a close acquaintance, and James wrote warmly of his ‘mild, conciliating manners’, of his humility and ‘the heavy loss we have just experienced in the death of my invaluable friend’.⁵⁰ Indeed, he personally conducted the funeral service at the Parade Ground Cemetery just beside the new British cantonments, and showed every sign of grief as he read the funeral oration. But part of him must have quietly rejoiced. For according to Bâqar Ali Khan’s later testimony, less than two days after the death of Dalrymple, James again began secretly visiting Khair un-Nissa with ‘more eagerness than ever’.⁵¹

Just over two weeks later a mysterious harkarra (messenger) appeared at Aristu Jah’s palatial courtyard house. He entered the Minister’s durbar and in front of the assembled crowds loudly demanded in the name of Hushmut Jung Kirkpatrick that Khair un-Nissa should be immediately handed over to the British Resident. Before he could be questioned, the man slipped out into the crowded street.⁵²

That same evening Sharaf un-Nissa, accompanied by her mother Durdanah Begum, burst crying and weeping into the quarters of her father, Bâqar Ali Khan. The old man was sitting alone and he anxiously asked what was wrong. Sharaf un-Nissa claimed that she had in the past fortnight received a whole series of threatening messages from the Minister’s house. The first two messages, she said, had come from Aristu Jah’s daughter-in-law, Farzand Begum. Then, ‘the day following the Festival of the Birth of Christ’, another had arrived from Mama Salaha, an aseel^dt in Farzand Begum’s service. Mama Salaha had told her that ‘as the Resident had for the Six months past become a real Mussulman [Muslim] she ought therefore to give her Daughter; but that if she did not Comply, ruin would fall on her Father and his Family’.

Sharaf un-Nissa said she had ignored these threats, but then, only three hours earlier, ‘Mama Nuddeem, another of the Minister’s Aseels, brought a message from Furzund Begum, to the following purport, “That if I did not immediately give up my Daughter to the Resident, his eagerness & desire to have her was so violent, that he would Cut off his hair & come & sit down at Bauker Ally Khan’s Door.” ’⁵³ Bâqar Ali Khan was understandably aghast at these threats, as was Durdanah Begum, who, ‘tearing open her garment and throwing a winding sheet over her shoulders, said “Now I am a fakeer and renounce the world.” ’ She then gave him another winding sheet, saying, ‘Take this and having gone before the [British] battalions, throw it over your shoulders and before the whole of the English gentlemen declare that it is your wish to become a fakeer and to relinquish the world’—turning mendicant being in her view the only sure way to save the family both from such threats and such irreparable dishonour.⁵⁴

Early the following morning, 28 December, Bâqar Ali Khan did indeed visit the British camp, but not to turn fakir. Instead he sought out Colonel Bowser, who was thought likely to succeed Dalrymple as the commander of the Subsidiary Force, and urgently begged him for his help and protection against both Kirkpatrick and the Minister. Bowser was at breakfast when the Khan entered, and as he did not speak either Persian or Hindustani, and realised the importance of the matter, he agreed with Bâqar Ali that it would be best to go and find the force’s fluent-Persian-speaking doctor. Dr Kennedy was at home, and once the three were gathered behind closed doors, Bâqar Ali explained the ‘delicate’ matter he had come to discuss with them. He described how

for a long time past attempts had been made by the Resident, and backed by the Minister, to get possession of his Grand Daughter; but that he had hitherto resisted all their importunities, and had in this been supported by the Late Lt Col Dalrymple, who had exacted a solemn declaration upon honour from the Resident, that he should desist in future from any attempt of the kind. Only two days after the death of Colonel Dalrymple however, these attempts were again renewed … and were very lately accompanied by threats from the Minister, of ruining him & his Whole Family if he did not comply with what was required of him—‘To every importunity and to every threat,’ the Khan observed, ‘he had returned for answer that he was resolved never to yield; that they might deprive him of his jaghire [estates], his pension, and even his life; but that he would never consent to the Dishonor of his Family.

‘They were pushing him now,’ the Khan continued, ‘so very hard, that he saw no other way of saving his Honor than by demanding the protection of Col. Bowser; and that to make the matter appear in the most serious light, he would instantly retire, and get a [formal] letter [of complaint] written to Colonel Bowser on the subject.’

The Khan then went out & returned shortly with a letter, which he immediately carried in his own hand to Colonel Bowser:

After the usual compliments—‘Since the death of Colonel Dalrymple, a business of oppression has come upon me, on account of which my character & reputation will be ruined if I remain any longer at Hyderabad—I request therefore that you will allot to me some habitation in the English Lines, in which I may remain with all my Dependants, or, if this cannot be done, that you will give me a Guard of Seypoys to escort me & my dependants into the Company Territories.’⁵⁵

With this formal public complaint of Bâqar Ali’s, the dice were thrown. From this point, the affair clearly had to be properly investigated, and what had been up to this point a very private matter suddenly became very public indeed.

That evening Bowser sent a note to James, telling him about the very serious charges Bâqar Ali had made against him. He suggested that all the parties in the dispute should meet face to face at the Residency two days later on the morning of the thirtieth so that they could attempt to find out the truth of the accusations and to settle the matter in as civilised a manner as possible.

James agreed to the meeting, and in the meantime, the following morning, the twenty-ninth, sent Munshi Aziz Ullah straight over to Aristu Jah’s deorhi to tell him what had happened, and to show him Bowser’s note. He particularly wanted Aziz Ullah to find out whether it was true that the Minister’s daughter-in-law, Farzand Begum, had been sending threatening messages to Bâqar’s womenfolk as the old man had claimed.

By chance, Munshi Aziz Ullah arrived just five minutes after Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari had turned up to petition the Minister on behalf of his exiled cousin, Mir Alam. The two men were friends—Shushtari talks warmly of Aziz Ullah in his memoirs, saying what an excellent Urdu poet and sympathetic companion the munshi was⁵⁶—and a full account of what transpired survives from Shushtari’s pen:

This day, the 13th of Shabaun [29 December], I happened to wait upon the Minister and had only set down a moment when Moonshee Uzeez Oolla arrived and gave a note straight into his hands. The Minister while reading it underwent many changes of countenance and two or three times exclaimed, ‘I declare to God that it is false!’ After having read it he turned to me and said ‘God is my witness that this is an egregious calumny.’⁵⁷

Aristu Jah then gave the paper detailing Bâqar’s charges to Shushtari to read, muttering that Bâqar Ali Khan deserved to have his nose cut off for spreading such damaging and obviously untrue libels. As Shushtari read it, Aristu Jah sent to his harem summoning his daughter-in-law, Farzand Begum and the two aseels whom Bâqar said had threatened Sharaf un-Nissa. One by one they were brought and questioned in front of Shushtari and the munshi. According to the former, ‘they severally declared, with a hundred oaths, that they were entirely ignorant of the circumstance, and that it was a calumny on them’.⁵⁸

This only deepened the confusion—had they or had they not threatened Sharaf un-Nissa?—but James took it as a vindication of his innocence. He knew he had threatened no one, and he believed that Bâqar Ali was not as ignorant as he made out of his wife and daughter’s concerted attempts to draw Khair un-Nissa and himself together. He therefore assumed that Bâqar Ali was up to something, and suspected that it might not be unconnected to Mir Alam’s exile and the manoeuvres of the Shushtari clan to get their kinsman returned to power.

For Mir Alam was now encamped just thirty miles to the north of Hyderabad and was making one last desperate attempt to be returned to favour before he set off into exile and obscurity in Berar. He even wrote to James attempting to make up, saying that ‘the silly reports relating to the family of Aukul Oo Dowlah [Bâqar Ali Khan] are now entirely effaced from my mind by the discovery of their falsity … Friends cannot harbour malice against one another any more than a drop of rain can remain on the surface of the water.’⁵⁹ Mir Alam also sent to the Nizam claiming that he was suffering from extreme ill health and begging the Nizam to take pity on him; though Abdul Lateef Shushtari ‘had the candour to acknowledge [privately to James] that it is more a pretext than anything else, observing that a man cannot well be at death’s door who like M.A. travels with a seraglio of fifty five concubines with one or other of whom he is said to have daily or nightly connection’.⁶⁰ Though this made James warm to Abdul Lateef, whom he had begun to like and even trust, it made him all the more suspicious of the motives of Bâqar Ali.

So when, on the following morning, 30 December 1800, Colonel Bowser, Dr Kennedy and Bowser’s Persian interpreter Captain Orr rode into the Residency gardens as agreed, they found James angry, suspicious and in no mood for compromise. The soldiers had gone over Bâqar Ali’s claims as they cantered the seven miles from the cantonments, and had come to the conclusion that ‘some gross mistake or deception existed between the parties’; but James was convinced that there was more to Bâqar’s absurd story than met the eye. He told Bowser that he believed

the Khan was wilfully misrepresenting matters for some sinister purpose. This opinion he founded both upon a Conviction that the messages which the Khan complained as coming from the Minister’s family had never been sent (in as much as the Minister, when informed of the subject had expressed the utmost astonishment & anger at so bare faced assertions), and also because he was Convinced that [Bâqar Ali] Khan’s family was by no means in the state of mental distress represented.

This opinion he founded upon communications with which the females of that family troubled him too frequently. From this channel he was well assured that there was no such distress, and thence seemed persuaded, that the [story of the women’s] Lamentations, [and adoption of ] Cuffunies[winding sheets] etc were all a Deception. From these considerations the Resident seemed to have no doubt that he should be able to demonstrate to us, that all the grievances complained of were fictitious, and the complaints fabricated for some sinister view, to which he seemed to believe that the Khan was privy.⁶¹

Shortly afterwards, Bâqar Ali Khan arrived at the Residency gardens. He had barely dismounted and been ushered into the Residency before James had angrily confronted him, asking ‘how he came to involve his name in such a business, and demanded that he should produce proofs of what he had alleged. To this the Khan replied by asserting, that the [threatening] messages he complained of had indeed been sent from the Minister’s family, and added “If you were not the cause of them, how could they have been sent?” ’⁶² Munshi Aziz Ullah was then called for, who relayed verbatim what had transpired at Aristu Jah’s the day before, and how Farzand Begum and her aseels had all denied sending any threats or messages to the Khan’s house. This only added to the confusion. As Bowser later wrote in his report of the meeting:

The Khan persevered in asserting his belief of the messages and affirming that all the distress in his family had been occasioned by them … Hitherto nothing had appeared to throw any light on the subject, and each Party seemed positive that the other was wrong. We therefore reverted to what had been affirmed of the distressed state of the Khan’s family in consequence of the messages in question and wished to find means of satisfying ourselves whether the Family had assumed Mourning Dress as the Khan had affirmed, or whether they were (excepting a family quarrel) in their usual state of Composure, and only astonished at the Khan’s behaviour … ⁶³

They were still arguing the point when there was a knock, and ‘a Person presented himself at the door. Upon seeing him the Resident said, that a message from the Begum [Sharaf un-Nissa] must have been brought. He went out immediately, and on his return observed that he had just received a message of a complexion very different from the Khan’s story.’

At this the three British soldiers agreed that there could be only one solution to the mystery: they would have to send someone to Sharaf un-Nissa’s zenana to question her and find out her version of events. The question was who? Bâqar Ali suggested Mrs Ure, the doctor’s amply proportioned wife, ‘who, from speaking the Hindostany language, might be able to satisfy herself of what the females had to say’; but this proposal was vetoed by Lieutenant Colonel Bowser, who said the matter was too delicate to involve a European woman. Sending all three of the soldiers with Bâqar Ali was then suggested, but vetoed on the grounds that it would make too public a spectacle, and also that, as James pointed out, ‘by the Khan being present also, the women might be overawed from declaring themselves, or even find themselves under the necessity of saying whatever he might wish them. The Khan objected to Captain Orr or Dr. Kennedy going to his zenana unless he himself was with them: and Dr. Kennedy objected to going alone unless the Khan gave his assent to the enquiry being made in this way, which he would not do.’

At this point of impasse, it occurred to them all to question the messenger who had just delivered the message from Sharaf un-Nissa; but he had just left, so a boy was sent to fetch him back. While they waited they went through to eat at the Residency dining hall, where, according to Bowser, ‘The necessity of ascertaining the points in question became every moment more evident. It was accordingly proposed that Dr. Kennedy as a medical man & less liable to excite observation, should visit Sheriffe ul Nissa Begum [alone], and enquire about the [threatening] message and the [story of the fakir’s] cuffuny.’

This seemed an especially suitable solution, as apart from anything else Dr Kennedy had been to Sharaf un-Nissa’s mansion before: a year earlier Khair un-Nissa had been struck down with what appeared to be smallpox, and her horrified mother had prevailed on Bâqar Ali to consult an English physician. Kennedy had paid a visit to the family deorhi, after which Khair un-Nissa made a full recovery.⁶⁴ Bâqar Ali finally agreed to send Dr Kennedy to his women, and a note was duly dispatched to Aristu Jah requesting permission for the doctor to enter the city. While they were waiting,

the Resident being out on the verandah, Dr. Kennedy [discreetly] asked the Khan what steps he had taken to satisfy himself that the women of his family were not [in fact] deceiving him. He said that he had … stated the matter to his wife and daughter, and entreated them to declare themselves, telling them at the same time, that if they were inclined to forward what he was resolved never to consent to [i.e. marrying his granddaughter to Kirkpatrick] they had only to say so, and that he would leave the matter entirely to themselves; but that he was resolved also to leave with them the disgrace, and retire to his own country [Persia], or turn fakeer. The Females declared upon this that they had no such inclinations, & that they were resolved to share his fortunes & turn fakeers also. He then pointed out to us, that this proposal was in him an instance of great forbearance, as much harsher measures were commonly adopted by men of his cast upon similar occasions.

[At this point] we were informed that the Begum’s messenger had returned, & was in the bungalo behind. Thither we went, and Dr. Kennedy recognised the man as an old servant of the Khan’s. The purport of the message [he had brought] was, ‘that the Begum wished to inform the Resident, that the Khan had been making a great deal of disturbance in the family, and was no doubt gone to the Residency to expose himself still further by telling a very idle story; but that she hoped the Resident would keep him quiet (sumjow)’.⁶⁵

Bâqar Ali was both angry and astonished at this, but agreed that the only solution now was for Dr Kennedy to proceed with his mission and to question Sharaf un-Nissa directly, which he did as soon as the permission to enter the old city had arrived from Aristu Jah.

He set off, as agreed, within a covered palanquin, in order to preserve—as far as possible—his anonymity. But while no one could see in, it also meant that Kennedy could not see out, and isolated as he was inside the lattices of the litter, he was unaware that he was in fact being followed, not by one but by two shadowy but entirely separate figures, who themselves were apparently unaware that they were not alone in tailing their quarry.⁶⁶

In December, travelling on horse- or elephant-back, it was usually possible to ford the Musi in the shallows immediately below the Residency; but a team of palanquin-carriers would probably have opted to keep their feet dry and cross the river a mile further upstream by the old, low Qutb Shahi Bridge. This would have taken them along a bank filled with a line of Mughal water-gardens and then past the bustling city ghats, ‘always a stirring sight, with its countless groups of people bathing, washing clothes, or carrying away water from holes scooped in the sand; elephants being washed or scrubbed with sand by their keepers, and evidently enjoying the operation’.⁶⁷ From there Kennedy and his palanquin-bearers would have entered the city by the great Banjara Gate.

Although the staff of the Residency regularly visited the old city, they rarely ventured off the main roads; in general, the British simply paid brief visits to the durbar, shopped in the main jewel bazaars or took visitors to see the Char Minar and the Mecca Masjid. As a result, Western observers who penetrated deeper into the city were often struck by the contrast between the magnificent prospect of the city from afar, and the squalor of its back alleys. As one English resident of Hyderabad described it, your first glimpse of the city from the high ground of the Banjara Hills just to the north of the Residency was always unforgettable. It was, after all,

the first city of the Dukhun … Before me, on the gentle rise of the valley [stood a jumble of ] white terraced houses gleaming brightly in the sunlight amidst from what seemed to me at a distance, almost a forest of trees. The Char Minar and the Mecca Masjid rose proudly from the masses of buildings by which they were surrounded; and here and there a white dome, with its bright gilt spire, marked the tomb of some favourite or holy saint, while smaller mosques, I might say in hundreds, were known by their slender white minarets.

… The city seemed to be of immense extent; but I thought from the number of trees, that it was comprised principally of gardens and enclosures, and was much surprised afterwards, when I entered it, to find its streets so filled with houses, and the whole so thickly populated … It was altogether a most lovely scene: the freshness of the morning, the pureness of the air, and the glittering effect of the city and its buildings caused an impression which can never be effaced from my memory.

When the traveller passed through the gates, and left the main ceremonial avenues, there was always, however, something of a feeling of anticlimat:

It had been a late Monsoon and the streets were narrow and dirty, and the interior of the city certainly did not answer the expectations we had formed from its outside and distant appearance; still there were evident tokens of its wealth in the numbers of elephants, on the backs of which, in canopied umbaras, sat noblemen or gentlemen, attended by their armed retainers. Crowds of well dressed persons paraded the streets and … we made our way as well as we could through the throng, and our attendants were often obliged to clear us a passage …^68du

It is not known for certain where Bâqar Ali Khan’s deorhi lay, but in all probability it was beside his cousin Mir Alam and the other Persian émigrés in Irani Gulli. This lay half a mile from the Char Minar, in the warren of alleys behind the Burkha Bazaar, where the women of Hyderabad came to buy their clothes and bangles.

Aristocratic deorhis of the period were often very substantial complexes of buildings. You would enter through the great double gates of a whitewashed naqqar khana, from the first floor of which musicians would beat their drums and sound fanfares to announce the arrival of any important visitor. Inside were a succession of courts filled with slowly dripping fountains and enclosing small Mughal char bagh gardens. These would give onto a series of low, open baradari pavilions with their ornate arcades of cusped Mughal arches, as well as a few more substantial two-storey Mughal townhouses with latticed windows and intricately carved wooden balconies.

The zenana courtyard was usually a separate enclosure, the exclusive preserve of the women, at the rear of a deorhi complex. In the case of the clearly very substantial deorhi of Bâqar Ali Khan, the zenana courtyard contained two entirely separate mansions, one for Sharaf un-Nissa and her daughters, and the other for her mother Durdanah Begum.⁶⁹ A separate gatehouse would give access, and in Hyderabad at this period it was usually watched over by a small guard of armed women aseels, described by one rather superior Englishman of the time as ‘low caste women who are armed, accoutred and disciplined like our sepoys. They make a ridiculous appearance.’⁷⁰

It was into such a courtyard, and past such guards, that Dr Kennedy would have stepped, before clambering out of his palanquin to seek an audience with Sharaf un-Nissa. The etiquette for such visits was well-established. Watched over by a trusted servant, the visitor would converse through a lattice or a roll of reed chicks. Even on a medical visit—as this purported to be—face-to-face contact was not permitted, though in exceptional emergencies the doctor was permitted to put his hand through the lattice to feel the pulse of the patient.^dv

This occasion was no different. When Sharaf un-Nissa eventually appeared, attended by a maidservant, she ‘sat during the conversation inside of a Door, before which hung a bamboo blind’.⁷¹ According to Dr Kennedy’s account of the meeting, he ‘began by telling her, that I was a friend of her Father’s, and had come to her to ascertain the truth of certain points which seemed doubtful, but which it was necessary to verify—She desired me to proceed & to say what these points were, and that she would speak the truth.’

Seated on the veranda of Sharaf un-Nissa’s pavilion, Dr Kennedy then relayed the confused nexus of charges and suspicions that they had spent the morning discussing at the Residency: how her father had claimed that Farzand Begum and her household were pressurising her to marry Khair un-Nissa to Kirkpatrick, and that her father suspected that the Resident was ultimately behind these messages and threats. Kennedy finished telling his story and asked the shadowy figure behind the blind what she thought of all this. There was a moment’s silence. Then the figure began to speak. What she said changed everything. For Sharaf un-Nissa decided to come completely clean, and admitted unreservedly that in fact

no such message had ever been sent to her, that no communication had been held on the subject with the Minister’s family since the Month of Suffer [two months earlier], about which time, or previous to which, she had been sent for by Farzund Begum, and had discussed upon the point, but that she [Sharaf] had refused either to give her own consent, or to permit the matter to be submitted to decision of her daughter, as Farzund Begum wished.

Dr Kennedy then pointed out that Bâqar Ali Khan believed there had been a whole series of more recent threats, ‘and that it appeared strange how so much uneasiness could have been occasioned, if no such message had been delivered’. But Sharaf un-Nissa said, quite clearly and explicitly,

that she had herself delivered the message to Akul ud-Dowlah, and that she had done so without any such message being brought to her; that she herself was the contriver of the message, and had fabricated it with a certain view. I asked what her intention in it could be, as her father seemed much afflicted at the Circumstance, and affirmed, that both his Wife and Daughter were equally distressed—She then proceeded to say, that in consequence of what had passed between Hashmut Jung and her Daughter, the Daughter’s character had been ruined in the eyes of the world, but that since what had passed could not be recalled, and a fault (gonah^dw) had been committed, that she could not think of adding to the crime by marrying her daughter to anyone else, and therefore wished that she should be given to Hushmut Jung, and that it was this view that the message was framed.

Kennedy then asked if it was true that the women had been wearing ‘Fakeer’s dress’, and if so, why? Sharaf un-Nissa replied that ‘the message had occasioned a great deal of discussion & high words; that her father was much incensed at her avowing to him the sentiments she had just expressed to me; and that he had struck her & drawn his sword upon her, with an intention of killing her; that he had [only] been prevented [from doing so] by her mother stepping in & mitigating his anger, as well as threatening to accuse him herself of murder before the Nizam’.

At this crucial moment, said Sharaf un-Nissa, her mother had ordered her maidservant to bring in mourning rags, known as the kafan (or, as Kennedy spelled it, cuffuny), as a distraction. When they arrived the old woman immediately put them on as a symbol of her disgust with the situation, and signalling her intention to leave her worldly life and turn ascetic. Terrified that her father might still try to kill her, Sharaf un-Nissa also put on the rags, ‘overcome by fear & apprehension, [in order] to pacify my father, but from no other motive’. She also told Dr Kennedy that she was not wearing the fakir’s rags now. According to Kennedy,

Sheriffe ul Nissa then disclaimed strongly and pointedly her ever having made any Complaint of Oppression by Hushmut Jung [Kirkpatrick],or of any Compulsion of any measure whatever being used by him; that there never had been any, nor had she ever said so. She said that for the space of a Year she had been against her daughter being sent to Hushmut Jung; but that within the last five or six days she had changed her opinion, and now wished that Hushmut Jung had her—‘I wish he had her,’ she repeated, ‘in the same manner that he might have had her, before the Distinctions introduced by Moosa [Moses], Issa [Jesus] and Mahomed were known in the world.’

I observed that since matters had gone so far & were so public, it seemed strange that Akul ud-Dowlah [Bâqar] should be ignorant of them; and, if he knew them, it seemed still more difficult to understand, why he should be so much distressed upon the subject now. She replied, that it was all the fault of herself & her mother, and must rest on their heads. I observed that keeping him in ignorance occasioned much trouble, and that it would be better to inform him at once how matters really were—She said, she believed it would be better, but that he had been so much incensed regarding the honor of the family, that they were afraid to let him know what had actually happened, but wished much that the matter might be broken to him by some of his English friends—She added, that we might assure him also, that his good name ought not to suffer, as whatever fault there was, was the fault of herself and her mother, & that he was altogether ignorant and blameless. She also observed, that she ought to have more to say in the disposal of her daughter than Akul ud-Dowlah [Bâqar], who was only the girl’s grandfather.⁷²

With that Dr Kennedy thanked the figure behind the blind, made his salaams and stepped backwards, only to find ‘that a man, whom I knew to be a Boy Servant of Akul ud-Dowlahs, had come in and was listening to what had been said’. Worried about the possible safety of the three Begums if Sharaf un-Nissa’s words were relayed straight back to Bâqar Ali, Kennedy got straight into his palanquin and set off back into the crowded streets, when,

reflecting upon the extraordinary & unexpected nature of the conversation which had just passed I began to think that I might be disbelieved in relating it, and that it might be better if I could remove all ambiguity about the Person who had spoken to me behind the Blind—I therefore returned, and being admitted to the same place, informed the Lady, that as Akul ud-Dowlah [Bâqar] was so much in the dark, that it was more than possible that he might not believe what he must now have upon my authority—that though I was perfectly satisfied that I had been conversing with Akul ud-Dowlah’s daughter there was still room for him to say that I had been deceived, and been addressed by someone who only impersonated her—that therefore I wished that she would give me a Ring or any other trinket known to Akul ud-Dowlah to be her’s, as a token that what I had to say came actually from herself—This however, she declined, and I then proposed, that she should permit me to leave something of mine with her, to be shewn to her father, in order to convince him that his own daughter had actually received it from me—

To this she consented, and I took from my watch chain a seal with my name in Persian characters, and gave it to her, to be produced to her father.⁷³

This time, as Dr Kennedy stepped back, he found that as well as the eavesdropping boy-servant of Bâqar Ali, his conversation had also been listened to by ‘a servant of the Resident’ who had clearly tailed him to Bâqar Ali’s deorhi and somehow slipped in at the same time as his palanquin. The two eavesdroppers had, wrote Kennedy, ‘heard all that had passed’.

For Bâqar Ali Khan, this was in every way the worst possible outcome, a total collapse, a complete humiliation. He had been outwitted and completely outmanoeuvred by his womenfolk. They had taken matters into their own hands, and not only had they successfully opposed a marriage alliance he had forced upon them and to which his granddaughter had expressed an ‘unequivocal aversion’, he had been fooled by them into thinking that they were planning to turn fakir, and so had successfully protected themselves from his wrath. By themselves sending threatening messages to Bâqar Ali which purported to come from James, and by inventing a series of intimidating visits from the aseels of the Prime Minister’s zenana, the women had hoped to induce Bâqar Ali to back down quietly and to hand Khair un-Nissa over to James without a struggle. That plan had gone wrong, and Bâqar Ali had instead taken the complaint to his British friends in the Subsidiary Force; but though their various tricks had now been exposed, the women still ended by getting their way.

Two days later, on the morning of 1 January 1801, Sharaf un-Nissa and her mother, Durdanah Begum, were summoned to Aristu Jah’s deorhi. There they were asked to confirm what they had told Dr Kennedy. They did so, and were warned that they had behaved disgracefully, even if Bâqar had drawn a sword on them and they had been forced to invent these stories to save their lives. But the Minister’s real wrath was reserved for Bâqar Ali. He told James’s munshi, Aziz Ullah, that Bâqar had been given the wrong title—instead of Akil ud-Daula, ‘The Wisest of the State’, he should be renamed Ahmuk ud-Daula, ‘The State Fool’—and that the old man should be banished or imprisoned. Aziz Ullah replied that Bâqar’s public humiliation was probably more than punishment enough.⁷⁴

That same day, at three in the afternoon, a grave and embarrassed Bâqar Ali appeared at the Residency and asked to see James. He apologised for falsely accusing him of issuing secret threats, and said it was clear that he could no longer stand in James’s way. As long as Khair un-Nissa’s paternal uncle, Mir Asadullah, also gave his assent, as the law required, he withdrew all his objections to James marrying his granddaughter if he still wished to do so; but he was not prepared to attend the nikah (marriage ceremony) in person. Instead, ‘with a view of not being a witness to the ceremony he would quit the city and take up his abode 10 or 12 coss^dx from it; but that he would leave his seal in the house and that they might execute what they pleased in his name and apply his seal to it’. With that he set off north in a dhoolie or covered litter, towards where his cousin Mir Alam was still temporarily encamped. James later wrote that he believed the old man was ‘more to be pitied than blamed’ for the confusion, adding that he was ‘defective in sight and hard of hearing [so] the females might [easily] have succeeded in deceiving him’.⁷⁵

Two men had stood between Khair un-Nissa and James: one of these two, Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple, was now dead, while the other, Bâqar Ali, had formally withdrawn his objections. But there was still one further obstacle to James’s marriage. For all that he wore Hyderabadi clothes and had embraced Hyderabadi customs, and indeed for all that he was widely believed in Hyderabad to be a Muslim, he was nonetheless still technically a Christian, and so strictly forbidden by Sharia law from marrying a Muslim woman. There was only one way around this: he had to be circumcised, and then formally to convert to Islam.

According to a later report prepared by a Residency munshi after consulting with Khair un-Nissa’s family, ‘As a marriage was impossible without professing Islam he [James] promised to embrace that faith at the time of marriage … Hashmat Jang [therefore] secretly embraced Islam before a Shi’a Mujtahid [cleric] and presented a certificate from him to Khair-un-Nisa Begum, who sent it to her mother.’⁷⁶

As the conversion is never referred to in Kirkpatrick’s own writings, it is difficult to guess at his feelings about taking this major and irrevocable step. Was it a nominal conversion, taken only in order to give him access to his pregnant lover? Or did his ‘partiality’ to Muslim culture extend to the religion itself? At this distance, with the nature of the sources that exist, it is impossible to say. What is certain, however, is that if it was a real conversion, then it seems to have been Khair un-Nissa who brought him to Islam, rather than the other way around.

James having produced his certificate of conversion, it was agreed that the marriage could go ahead, and ‘accordingly, the marriage tie was bound by the said Shi’a Mujtahid and all the ceremonies incident there to were performed in accordance with the customs in vogue with the Mohamadans’.⁷⁷ As Sharaf un-Nissa makes clear in a letter she wrote much later, the ceremony did however take place in the greatest secrecy,^dy and there was no public shadi, or marriage party^dz—not least, presumably, because Khair un-Nissa was heavily pregnant by this stage. According to Sharaf:

Colonel James Kirkpatrick sought my daughter from Nizam Ali Khan as also from Aristojah. Nizam Ali Khan and Aristojah communicated the request to my father, who at last, after much demur, gave his consent, that the ceremony of the Nikah should take place, and expressed his willingness that the rites should be performed according to the customs of our tribe.

To this also Nizam Ali Khan assented, and honoured Col James Kirkpatrick at the same time with the designation of his son. His Highness also desired that he should stand as father for the approaching marriage to Col James Kirkpatrick in the bonds of love and that Aristojah should take the place of my daughter’s [dead] father … In consequence of some disruptions [i.e. Bâqar Ali’s complaint and the scandal this had caused] the marriage ceremonies were not performed in the usual manner, though the marriage contract was gone through according to Mahommedan rites. In proof of this a learned man named Meer Ahmed Ali Khan⁷⁸ attended on the part of Aristojah and two of his confidential servants were also present in the capacity of witnesses. Syed ood Dowlah⁷⁹ was my representative on this occasion when they all assembled in my house, and performed the ceremony of the marriage contract only.⁸⁰

This, in Islamic law, involved fixing the bride’s dowry and the amount that would be given back to her in the event of a divorce. In Khair un-Nissa’s case it was clearly a large sum, as James refers in his will to his wife’s private fortune and says that he need not provide for her as she was ‘amply provided for by Jaghiers [estates] and other possessions both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees’, a very large sum indeed, perhaps £300,000 in today’s currency.⁸¹ Khair un-Nissa’s jagirs were presumably the gift of Aristu Jah, implying that he stood in for her dead father in more ways than one. The marriage, in other words, made James not only a very happy man, but a very rich one too.^ea

If Sharaf un-Nissa’s account of the marriage is read in this way, it might be taken to indicate the degree to which—in the eyes of the Nizam and Aristu Jah at least—this was a political marriage, and a variation on the traditional courtly way of concluding alliances: first you signed a treaty, then organised a marriage between the two parties to seal the alliance. Khair un-Nissa was not of course an Asafiya princess, but for the purpose of this wedding she had become the Minister’s adopted daughter, while James was now the Nizam’s adopted son. In this way Aristu Jah believed he had finally succeeded in binding the British Resident through marriage into obedience and gratitude to the Nizam. No wonder the Nizam and Aristu Jah had been so angry at Bâqar Ali’s attempts to wreck so useful an alliance. It gave the two men a considerable degree of leverage on the Resident sent to keep an eye on them.

Whatever sensations of relief and elation James might have felt at the happy conclusion of eighteen months of often desperate hopelessness, he left no surviving record of his emotions at the moment of the marriage. For despite the fact that everyone in Hyderabad who needed to give their assent to the marriage had now done so, James continued to pretend to his brother William—and to everyone else in Calcutta—that the affair was over.⁸² On 16 January 1801 he wrote William a letter that veered further from the truth than any he had ever written, telling him that he had forbidden all messages from Khair’s family, despite their continual entreaties that he should marry her.⁸³ James now clearly believed that with his conversion to Islam he had moved far beyond a position that he could ever explain to William; and so rather than telling the truth he began creating a whole Pandora’s box of lies and half-truths which once opened and exposed would come back to haunt him at intervals over the next few years. James also thought—presumably for safety’s sake—that for the time being it was better for Khair un-Nissa to continue in her house in the old city, at least until memory of the scandal had passed. So it was that less than two months later Khair un-Nissa gave birth to their first child, a little boy, in the family deorhi in the shadow of the Char Minar, the principal symbol of old Hyderabad.

James was in the house for the birth, and the note he wrote that night on a tiny scrap of paper still survives in the private archive of their descendants. It reads as follows:

On Wednesday the
4 th of March,1801
answering to ye 10th
Shuwaul AH
1215, at about
four o clock in the
morning a Son was
born to me in the
Cityof Hyderabad.
His mother from a
Dream she had, wishes
Him to be named Meer
Goolam Ali,^eb to which
I mean to add that of Saheb
Aallum [Lord of the World].