VI

In the summer of 1800—at around the time Khair un-Nissa became pregnant—James’s friend and closest political ally, General William Palmer, the liberal and sympathetic British Resident at the Maratha court in Pune, found that he had become a victim of Lord Wellesley’s new, harsher political order.

In late June, Palmer had received a letter from the Governor General giving him notice that in due course he would be removed from his important and ‘arduous public station’ on the ostensible grounds of his ‘precarious state of health and advanced time of life’. The true reason for his removal, as Palmer immediately realised, was that he represented exactly the sort of tolerant, Indophile white Mughal that Wellesley most abhorred, and which he was determined to weed out of the Company’s service.¹

General Palmer was married to Fyze Baksh, a beautiful Mughal Begum from Delhi. He was a gentle, thoughtful and highly intelligent man, who was openly sympathetic to Indian fears and aspirations: Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who stayed with the Palmers at the Pune Residency, called him ‘almost angel-like in his good nature’.² General Palmer was, moreover, a man of firm principles, and had stated publicly to Calcutta that he refused to engage in ‘practices against the Peishwa [the Maratha leader] in any degree incompatible with [the] good faith … [or] candour and rectitude so essential to confidence and harmony in the public intercourse of nations’—in other words, he resolutely refused to obey Calcutta’s orders to bully, bribe and browbeat the Maratha durbar into a treaty which could reduce them to a state of subservience and which they had not the slightest wish to sign.³ This was not the sort of man who could expect to flourish in Wellesley’s India.

Palmer’s replacement, it was announced, was to be William Kirkpatrick, whom Wellesley knew would bring a much tougher and more inflexible approach to British relations with Pune. Nana Phadnavis, the great Maratha Minister and Aristu Jah’s former rival, had died just three months earlier, and without him to hold it together, the Maratha Confederacy began to unravel at speed, as rival chieftains and warlords jockeyed for power. Wellesley knew that unlike Palmer, William Kirkpatrick would be quite prepared to take full advantage of what the Governor General described as ‘the critical state of affairs in the Mahratta Empire [which] becomes hourly more interesting’, adding, ominously for the Marathas: ‘opportunities [for British intervention] appear likely to open up … ’⁴

The idea that William Kirkpatrick’s health was in any way better than Palmer’s was laughable: while Palmer was a fit, active man of sixty, Kirkpatrick, fourteen years his junior, was almost an invalid: his ‘cure’ at the Cape had been of short duration, and he spent much of his time in Calcutta prostrate with both severe rheumatism and a serious bladder complaint, the pain from which he attempted to alleviate with larger and larger doses of opium. Nevertheless, publicly at least, Palmer accepted his enforced ‘retirement’ with good grace, replying to Wellesley: ‘I am perfectly sensible, My Lord, that the cares and fatigues of an arduous public station may require powers of mind and strength of constitution that it cannot be expected I still possess.’⁵

Privately, however, Palmer was outraged at his ‘removal from office without the slightest public pretext’ after a lifetime of highly distinguished service to the Company.⁶ He would not normally be expected to retire from the Residency for many years, unless he actually wished to do so: twenty years later, for example, the Delhi Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, was still busily at work at the time of his death aged sixty-seven. Writing to his old friend and patron Warren Hastings, now retired into the depths of the Gloucestershire countryside, Palmer maintained that he had ‘preserved the best understanding with the [Maratha] durbar during my Residency, and have experienced more attention & cordiality from the Peishwa & his principal servants than any of my predecessors … Perhaps my disposition is not thought suitable to the management of our concerns, and if alliances are [now] to be obtained by menace & intimidation instead of argument & persuasion & conciliation, then it is certain that a fitter person than I may easily be found.’⁷

Palmer was one of the last survivors of an earlier generation of East India Company scholar-officials. His career had flourished under Hastings, who had shared his love of, and interest in, all things Indian. For four years between 1776 and 1785 Palmer had been Hastings’ Military Secretary in Calcutta, before being sent up-country as his personal agent (or representative) at the sybaritic court of Lucknow.

While performing his diplomatic duties, Palmer had spent his leisure hours busily searching around for interesting Sanskrit and Mughal manuscripts, often for Hastings, to whom he wrote a long series of enthusiastic, scholarly letters about his quest.^ec Palmer also formed his own extensive collection of ancient Indian coins, and took a scholarly interest in the traditions of the eighteenth-century military adventurers.⁸

With these interests and enthusiasms, the General soon grew to love the highly cultured city of Lucknow. In the late eighteenth century, with Mughal Delhi sinking into headlong decline, Lucknow was at the height of its golden age and had usurped the great Mughal capital to become indisputably the largest, most prosperous and most civilised pre-colonial city in northern India. The city’s courtly Urdu diction and elaborate codes of etiquette were renowned as the most subtle and refined in Hindustan;^ed its dancers admired as the most accomplished; its cuisine famous as the most flamboyantly baroque. According to one historian, this hedonistic city resembled an Indian version of ‘[pre-Revolutionary] Teheran, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, with just a touch of Glyndebourne for good measure’. ⁹ It was here, in this Bacchanalian atmosphere that Palmer met his lifelong love, and the woman who in due course would become Khair un-Nissa’s closest friend, Begum Fyze Baksh.

Palmer was, in fact, already married at the time he met Fyze. As a young man he had been sent as a soldier in the 70th Foot to the West Indies. There, in 1761, on the island of St Kitts, he had married Sarah Hazell, a Creole beauty, by whom he had three boys and two girls.¹⁰ But when Palmer was posted to India six years later, Sarah opted to stay in St Kitts with her daughters while her husband and three boys caught ship to India. The boys continued to write to their mother,¹¹ and after she left the Caribbean and moved to Greenwich, the permanently impecunious Palmer tried to persuade his friends in Britain to send her money;^‡ but there seems to have been no question of Sarah ever intending to join him in Lucknow, nor of William planning to return to England to see either her or the two girls who had remained with her.¹² The marriage, one can only assume, had collapsed—or at least jaded into mutual distaste—in the West Indies, and the two had agreed to separate, though there was no divorce and Palmer continued to refer to Sarah as his ‘wife’. Either way, by 1779 Palmer had met and married Fyze, according to Muslim law;¹³ and the following year the couple had their first child, named William Palmer after his father. In due course the boy’s destiny was to be closely—and tragically—interwoven with that of James Kirkpatrick, Khair un-Nissa and her mother.

Palmer’s young bride had been born in Mughal Delhi. She was the daughter of ‘a Persian captain of cavalry’ formerly in the service of the Emperor Shah Alam II, who had emigrated to Lucknow where he rose to prominence in the Nawab’s service, and where he later married Fyze’s Lucknavi mother.¹⁴ Fyze also had a sister, Nur Begum,¹⁵ who having been married as a child to the Nawab of Pundri, to the west of Delhi, found herself widowed at the age of fifteen, before the marriage could be consummated, and who thereafter seems to have spent much of her time with Fyze in her house in Lucknow. Over the next few years, with Nur on hand to play the role of maiden aunt, Fyze produced child after child on an almost annual basis, until the couple had produced a brood of six—four boys and two girls—in just eight years.

Both Fyze and her children figure prominently in Palmer’s letters. ‘Your little friend Fyze sends Bunder-gee and bote bote Salaam [many good wishes and may peace be with you],’ he wrote to David Anderson in 1781. ‘She brought me a little boy soon after you left Lucknow and another here last year, but born dead. I expect another in about four months.’¹⁶ In May 1783, William was outside Lucknow, unable to return home due to an epidemic that had attacked his children. ‘It is my intention to proceed to the residency as soon as I can move my little family,’ he reported. ‘The boy is just recovered from Small Pox and a Girl which Fyze brought me six months ago is still ill of it.’¹⁷ A year later ‘poor Fyze’ was pregnant yet again, and ‘has been for this month past so unwieldy that she [cannot make it to their first-floor bedroom and] has been obliged to sleep below stairs’.¹⁸

A picture of the family painted between April and July 1785 by the artist Johan Zoffany^ee survives today in the India Office library in London.¹⁹ It is one of the most charming images of a family group to survive from the entire Indo—British encounter. Fyze is placed at the centre of the picture, barefoot and dressed in Lucknavi court costume: a magnificent saffron peshwaz and dupatta over a brief angia bodice.²⁰ She is seated on the ground, surrounded by her children and their ayahs and wetnurses, a calm, serene and beautiful young woman in her late teens, modest and maternal, but hung with the finest Mughal jewellery: sparkling diamond earrings, several strings of pearl necklace and silver payal anklets. In her lap she lovingly cradles a sleeping newborn infant. This is her third son, later baptised Hastings Palmer, but now still wrapped in swaddling clothes, his head covered with an embroidered Muslim topi. Hastings’ two elder siblings, William and Mary, then aged five and three respectively, look on engagingly from the sides of the canvas in their long, flowing Lucknavi jamas.

To Fyze’s left, seated in a European chair and wearing the formal red coat of his British military uniform, is her husband, a dark, thin, still-handsome man in his early forties. He looks down at Fyze with a long gaze that is at once adoring and protective. To his left, kneeling at his feet but with her expression directed at her elder sister, sits Fyze’s sister Nur, then a beautiful girl of around sixteen, wearing a thin white veil. Another sister looks on from the right of the painting.²¹

Sometime towards the end of the 1780s Nur married William’s friend, the great Savoy-born Maratha General, Benoît de Boigne, and went to live with him in his house in Aligarh, near Agra. The letters between the two brothers-in-law, preserved in the de Boigne family archives in Chambéry, contain many fond references to the two sisters: ‘Fyze sends her affectionate salaams to her bahyne [sister], to which I add mine,’ Palmer writes at one point. ‘Give my love to the Begum & kiss the young Baron for me,’ he writes again in February 1792; then more unexpectedly two months later, ‘Make my affectionate salaams to my sister the Begum.^ef How will she bear a rival princess?’²²

This is a reference to one of de Boigne’s two other concubines, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut,^eg who were both given to de Boigne as spoils of war, although of at least one of them he swore ‘Je ne l’ai jamais touché.’^‡ When de Boigne returned to Europe in November 1796, bringing Nur with him, he left the allowance due to his two other women in the hands of Fyze, and the Chambéry archive contains a fascinating Persian arzee, or petition, in Fyze’s hand, begging her brother-in-law de Boigne to increase their pensions—a fascinating instance of female solidarity within the zenana: after all, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut might in other circumstances have been taken to be rivals of Fyze’s sister, and therefore hardly eligible for her support. The arzee is headed, very grandly:

Arzee from Lady Fyze un-Nissa Khanum
to the Saheb Kalan [Great Lord] M. Benoît de Boigne.
My Lord Hail!

From the day I parted from you, God and the people are my witness, that I am continually thinking of you, and I hope you will not forget me. The money which you entrusted me to present to Moutie [Mihr un-Nissa’s mother], she has refused it; saying, never mind, it is too little to be of consequence. We must think about this. My Lord, she is an influential person; if the sum had been worthy of her position, she would have accepted it; [but she didn’t, so] the purse and that sum are returned herewith. Pray do not be offended in the least by my returning the money. You are a great man, and she is likewise very respectable. Perhaps we should consult together on what to offer her. The purse is sent merely to remind you. Forget me not.²³

The Lucknow that Fyze and Palmer inhabited was every bit as hybrid as their own marriage; indeed Lucknow in many ways pioneered the sort of white Mughal Residency culture which James Kirkpatrick later cultivated at Hyderabad. If the Nawab sometimes amazed foreign visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral, or even as a clergyman of the Church of England, then the Europeans of Lucknow often returned the compliment.²⁴ Miniature after miniature from late-eighteenth-century Lucknow shows Europeans of the period dressed in long white Avadhi gowns, lying back on carpets, hubble-bubbles in their mouths, as they watch their nautch girls dance before them. Some Europeans even married into the Nawabi royal family: William Linnaeus Gardner’s Anglo-Indian son James, for example, married the Nawab’s sister-in-law, Mulka Begum.^25eh

Nor was this sexual curiosity one-way: at least two British memsahibs (or possibly Anglo-Indians) were recruited to join the Avadhi harem, and a mosque survives which was built by the Nawab for one of them, a Miss Walters.²⁶ Another Englishwoman who was married to a prominent Lucknavi Muslim nobleman at this time wrote a remarkable book entitled, somewhat cumbersomely, Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions Made During Twelve Years Residence in their Immediate Society, which she published under the name Mrs Meer Hassan Ali.²⁷ After returning to England, Mrs Meer Hassan Ali ended her life, bizarrely enough, ‘attached in some capacity to the household of [George III’s sister] Princess Augusta’.^28ei

Equally integrated into the life of Lucknow was one of Palmer’s best friends, the Swiss-French engineer, businessman, spy and scholar, Colonel Antoine Polier. On his jagir near Agra or in his haveli in Lucknow, Polier lived entirely like a Mughal nobleman, as his voluminous Persian correspondence, now in the Bibliothèque National in Paris, shows. One day he might instruct his agents to find him betel-leaf holders, hookahs and luxurious palanquins; the next he would send for the great Lucknavi painter Mir Chand and order an album-ful of miniatures of his wives and dancing girls; a third he might send out for his favourite green mango pickle or a particular type of scented tobacco. He had two Indian wives (one senior, one junior, who were deeply jealous of each other and fought incessantly), a large number of half-Indian children (one of whom, George, later went to live with Palmer’s sister-in-law Nur Begum in Sussex²⁹), and a vast collection of rare Mughal manuscripts (which mostly ended up in Paris).^30ej

In his letters to Hastings from this tolerant and hedonistic oasis, Palmer’s letters mixed happy expressions of pleasure in the life he lived in Lucknow with darker passages recording his growing horror at the ever-increasing arrogance and indeed naked racism of the Company’s government in Calcutta from the late 1790s onwards. When Wellesley arrived in 1798 things rapidly went from bad to worse, and Palmer’s correspondence shows that he intensely disliked the new Governor General from the start; he wrote perceptively to Hastings of Wellesley’s ‘inordinate love of pomp, and a Vanity which almost surpasses conception’. He added, equally perceptively, ‘It is sincerely to be lamented that such weakness should accompany and defeat the effects of talents of the first order.’ A couple of years later, Palmer had become firmly convinced that Wellesley’s policies were bringing disaster to India, and permanently estranging Indians from the British. ‘I do not take His Lordship’s patriotism to be of the first order,’ he wrote to Hastings after a trip to Calcutta.

The desire of fame is his ruling passion & it is insatiable, too often indeed ridiculous. His state maxims are those audacious one’s of Mr. Pitt’s that the end justifies the means & convenience sanctifies the ends … Little or no attention is [now] paid to those [of your friends] who are Vakils[ambassadors] of the Native Courts by Lord Wellesley. They are not permitted to pay their respects to him oftener than two or three times a year which I think is as impolitic as it is ingracious …

I observe with great concern the system of oppressing them adopted by the present government and imitated in the manners of almost every European. They are excluded from all posts of great respectability or emolument, and are treated in society with mortifying hauteur and reserve. In fact they now have hardly any social intercourse with us. The functions of magistrate and judge are performed by Europeans who know neither the laws nor the language of the country, and with an enormous expense to the Company. The Head Molavy in each court, on whose information and explanation the judges must decide, has a salary of Rs.50 a month. And this I believe one of the most trustworthy and lucrative employments which a Native is allowed to hold in the Company’s service. What must be the sensations of this people at our thus starving them in their native land?³¹

A couple of months on, Palmer was gloomier still: ‘Our weakness, arrogance & injustice cannot fail to draw upon us the vengeance of a united India,’ he wrote prophetically. ‘Already there have been insurrections …’³² Against this background of growing British conceit, and with Palmer feeling increasingly isolated as he saw successive new generations of British officials behaving with ever greater hauteur to his Indian friends, he quickly realised that James Kirkpatrick represented a kindred spirit. As soon as he arrived in Pune in 1798, Palmer jumped to befriend his counterpart over the border in Hyderabad.

In a series of increasingly warm letters, the General did his best to establish a close friendship with James, though they had yet to meet face to face. Among their many shared enthusiasms, it turned out in the course of their correspondence, was a passionate love of mangoes: ‘The mango season has been late but tolerably abundant & of no bad flavour,’ wrote James in one of the first letters, whereupon Palmer offered to send him a selection of mango grafts for his orchards; the two were soon comparing notes on their favourite varieties, agreeing—sensibly enough—that Alphonsos were hard to beat. When Mir Alam complained to Calcutta about James, Palmer was quick to offer support, and when the Mir finally fell from grace after Aristu Jah managed to get him sacked and arrested, Palmer wrote a characteristically discerning letter about him to James:

I confess I feel no compassion for Mir Alam. His malice and ingratitude to you deserve much severer retribution than has yet fallen upon him, and his mind is so sordid as to render him unworthy of confidence or esteem. All his zeal in our cause was excited by his persuasion of its carrying him, by the nearest road, to reputation & fortune, and if these objects could have been obtained by opposing our interests, or even by exterminating us, I have no doubt he would have laboured to that effect. His firmness and abilities certainly make him a valuable acquisition to any cause he thinks it in his interest to support; but unbounded sacrifices to his avarice must be made to retain him … He well knows that Aristu Jah has never forgiven his conduct towards him while he was prisoner here, and to expose himself to the consequences of it, and of your resentment, by acting upon the silly stories which were framed of you in the hope of injuring you, shows that his rancour had quite subdued his reason.³³

Other letters expressed both men’s growing disillusion with Wellesley, and in this Palmer led the way, encouraging his younger colleague to express openly what he really thought about the vain and aggressive Governor General. Letter by letter, Palmer openly voiced the heresies that James had up to now only expressed tentatively to his elder brother: of Wellesley’s personal arrogance, his imperious way of behaving both to his own colleagues and to Indian rulers and ambassadors, his ruinous overspending, and his habit of making appointments and decisions without even summoning the Council through whose majority vote all his predecessors had filtered their decisions.³⁴

Throughout June 1801, James was already becoming more and more disgusted with Wellesley’s bullying approach to Indian rulers, when an order came from Calcutta commanding him to renegotiate the solemn Subsidiary Treaty Wellesley and the Nizam had signed only the previous year. In that treaty, the chunk ofTipu’s territory won by the Nizam after the fall of Seringapatam had been surrendered to the Company in return for the British agreeing to send a large number of extra troops to increase the size of the Subsidiary Force in Hyderabad. The extra troops had yet to arrive, indeed they had not yet left Madras, but when Wellesley discovered that the revenue of the area handed over to the Company had fallen far short of what he expected, he wrote to James demanding that he get the Nizam to make up the shortfall, despite the fact this was specifically forbidden in the small print of the treaty.³⁵ Wellesley had no leg to stand on: he was manifestly bullying an important and friendly ally into handing over large sums of cash without any legal pretext, and in direct contravention of a treaty he had signed only eight months earlier.The fact that no new troops, and only a limited quantity of artillery, had yet arrived in Hyderabad made the blatant injustice of Wellesley’s position all the more glaring.

Palmer was quite clear what this would mean for British relations with Hyderabad: due to these ‘hard exactions … I fear our harmony with the court of Hyderabad will be completely interrupted’.³⁶ James was even more baffled by Wellesley’s ‘cruel’ instructions, and wrote privately to his elder brother in a state of deep depression: ‘My dear Will, the more I reflect on these secret commands, the more deeply they fill me with regret, astonishment and alarm … [they are a] glaring attempt at infringement on a recent advantageous treaty with an old and highly useful ally and [if they should] get abroad nothing on earth could save his Lordship from impeachment [back in Britain].’³⁷

It was a turning point for James. From this moment, he wrote to William, it was ‘no longer in my power to cherish that high awareness of his [Wellesley’s] political wisdom and integrity that I hitherto did’.³⁸ James had his opinion of Wellesley’s rapaciousness confirmed in November 1801, when the Governor General sent his youngest brother Henry to Lucknow to extract massive territorial concessions from the hapless Nawab. Having bullied and threatened Nawab Saadat Ali Khan into signing over more than half of his dominions to the Company, including most of the rich and fertile Doab region, worth a total annual revenue of more than thirteen million rupees, Henry Wellesley was then given charge of the newly seized territories.³⁹

James could not believe what was happening, all of it without any legal justification, and wrote to Palmer that he was again half-considering resignation rather than continue to serve such a master:

I am, my dear Sir, so heartily sick (between ourselves) of witnessing such disgraceful doings that I do not think it at all impossible but I may keep you company from hence [when Palmer’s successor arrived in Pune], as far as our two routes be together, yours to Calcutta, mine to Madras [where James could catch ship to England]. [It is scarcely possible to credit] the extraordinary threats said to have been held out to the Nabob [Nawab] by Mr [Henry] Wellesley, who I understand is to enjoy the fruits of his labours in some great office of controul over the countries thus wrested from their rightful owner.⁴⁰

In the meantime James had to decide how to react to Lord Wellesley’s instructions to renegotiate his Subsidiary Treaty. He wrote in despair to Palmer, saying that ‘the Dispatch of the Gov General almost sets me frantic. How, after all the assurances that I gave Solomon [Aristu Jah] in the course of the late Negotiations, can I show my face to him with such demands as I am now ordered to bring forward, and how will he, poor man, be able to shew his face to his master?’⁴¹ In the end, screwing up his courage, James wrote back to Wellesley and told him that he thought the orders he had received were frankly unreasonable, and clearly contrary to the stipulations of the treaty he, Wellesley, had signed less than a year earlier. It was a major mistake, at least as far as James’s future career was concerned: Wellesley was never one to take criticism lightly, and his attitude towards James, and the language in which his letters were phrased, grew progressively more hostile and adversarial from this point onwards.

James’s letters to Palmer strayed, however, far beyond their shared political beliefs, hopes and fears: the pair also discussed the less upsetting and more intimate subject of Palmer’s Anglo-Indian children, who had all been educated in England and were now returning to try to make lives for themselves in India. In 1799, James had found a job for William, Fyze’s eldest son, in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, and he now offered to look after their daughter Mary on her return from England as she made her way from Madras to Pune (an offer that in the end was not taken up, as Mary chose instead to join her half-brother John Palmer, a successful Calcutta banker known as ‘The Prince of Merchants’, and so did not in the end pass through James’s Residency^ek). The offer was greatly appreciated by Fyze and the General: at a time of growing prejudice against Anglo-Indians, the Palmers felt sure that they could trust James to be friendly to their beloved daughter.

Soon Palmer was writing to James that he planned to visit Hyderabad himself once he had finally been relieved of his duties. He would return to Calcutta via Hyderabad and Masulipatam, and would it be possible for him to stay at the Residency?⁴² James replied that he was delighted at the prospect: ‘I have a large bangaloe prepared, which will I think accomadate you and your entire family,’ he wrote. ‘There is a zennanah, though rather a small one, attached to it.’⁴³ This, it soon became apparent, was not going to be by any means sufficient. As James wrote in a letter shortly afterwards, the General’s ‘suite is rather numerous and includes at least a dozen females’.⁴⁴

The Palmers—especially Fyze, now honoured as an ‘adopted daughter’ of the Mughal Emperor, and known by the title Sahib Begum—clearly liked to travel in style.⁴⁵

In that long, hot summer of 1801, James had also found his own zenana rather too small for his needs. For sometime in late August, he had decided to throw caution to the winds, and formally to invite Khair un-Nissa and their little baby Sahib Allum (and also, so it seems, James’s mother-in-law, Sharaf un-Nissa) to come and live in his zenana in the Residency, apparently displacing, if they had not done so already, James’s existing concubines.

The reason he later gave for taking this risky decision was that he ‘did hearken to the voice of nature, pleading eloquently in the engaging form of an helpless and innocent infant’, and this may well have been partly true.⁴⁶ The child was considered by everyone who saw him ‘a most lovely infant’, and ‘by his female connexions as a downright prodigy of loveliness of every kind’.⁴⁷ James also remarked that ‘among other circumstances which render this child peculiarly dear and interesting to me is the striking resemblance which he bears to my dear father [the Handsome Colonel], which has been remarked by all his female attendants who have seen the picture [of the Colonel] hanging up in my room, and which Ure and his wife (who are the only Europeans who have seen him) declare to be uncommonly strong. He is indeed, in every respect, a most lovely infant, the most so, if their declarations can be relied upon, that Ure or his good wife, ever in their lives saw.’⁴⁸

Later, discussing with William the distant prospects for following Palmer’s lead and sending the boy to England to be educated, James admitted, ‘it will go to my soul to part with him, to say nothing of the opposition I may expect to meet with on this point in another quarter’.⁴⁹ But it clearly was not just because he had fallen in love with his baby son that the proud father finally invited his family onto the British Residency compound; he was badly missing Khair un-Nissa too. He knew he was risking everything by allowing his aristocratic Muslim wife into the Residency when he was yet to admit to Calcutta that there was any truth at all in the stories of their liaison, and when that liaison had already caused him so much grief with his masters. The fact that he willingly took that risk—as he had already taken so many others—is a measure of the strength of his commitment to his young wife.

Now he directed all his energies into building Khair a zenana-palace that would meet her expectations and requirements. That month he began work constructing the Mughal-style ‘Hindoostanee House’ or ‘Rang Mahal’ (‘Palace of Colours’), which was later described as ‘a very elegant and highly finished specimen of Hindustan architecture’.⁵⁰ James never describes the building himself in his letters, but according to an impressed visitor who was allowed to look around it in 1809, it was ‘built according to the native fashion & I have been assured that no Indian prince has so elegant a zenana. It would be reckoned a most beautiful set of apartments in Europe. It is situated in a garden. Within the court is a parterre. Round the interior of the court is a verandah of which the walls and ceilings are painted & gilded with great brilliancy & taste. The principal bedroom is larger than the Asiatics are accustomed to construct. The dressing room and baths are exactly the size they prefer.’⁵¹ At the centre of the principal courtyard was a large marble basin of water, fed by numerous fountains and lined by stately cypress trees. The arcades and terraces surrounding the court were gilded and richly ornamented with trellised jail screens and paintings of birds, flowers and beasts. Here Khair would entertain the ladies while Kirkpatrick received their husbands in the main Residency building.⁵²

Seventy years later, almost the entire structure was destroyed and levelled by a shocked Victorian Resident who believed that it smacked of ‘native immorality’.^el All that remains now is the beautifully built and decorated gatehouse, and some fragments of the interior including what appears to be Khair’s kabooter khana, or pigeon house. Dilapidated and overgrown as these fragments are, lying at the rear of a space still known as ‘the Begum’s Garden’, the quite exceptional finish and beauty of their construction hint at just how fine was the palace that James built for his beloved Khair un-Nissa, and for their son, Sahib Allum, the little Lord of the World.

Wellesley had given Palmer notice that he was to be replaced in June 1800, but a year later he was still in place, thanks to the increasing illness of his putative successor, William Kirkpatrick.

William did not set off from Calcutta until March 1801, and far from getting better on the voyage, as he had hoped, instead found his condition rapidly worsening. He arrived in Madras ‘in a grievous state of health’, with his agonising bladder condition greatly inflamed and much more painful. James immediately sent Dr Ure off to Madras to try to treat his elder brother—Ure had, after all, tended to William throughout his time as Resident in Hyderabad, especially after his health broke down during the siege of Khardla—and for once, Ure’s treatment seemed to work.

On 5 April 1801, James was able to write that he had just heard of the improvement in William’s condition: ‘I may consequently ’ere long have the happiness of embracing you at Hyderabad.’ But he went on to tell William that if things got worse again, Ure had been clear that ‘you should return home without further delay, [and] for heavens sake let no [financial] consideration prevent your doing so by the very next opportunity from Madras.’⁵³

Twelve days later, however, while staying in Madras with William Thackeray, the uncle of the novelist, William Kirkpatrick’s health had once again broken down. The Madras doctor had made him drink ‘caustic’ in an attempt to unblock his urethra, with drastic results: ‘I am glad you did not attempt to give me an idea of the sufferings you have laboured under, as they have already by a sort of sympathy affected me more than I can describe,’ wrote James. ‘Heaven grant that my dearest brother may never again be exposed to them … I perfectly concur with you in thinking that the caustic ought not to have been applied until the irritation of your body had somewhat more subsided, and I earnestly trust that this opinion will prevent you from submitting to any further operations until your strength shall enable you to bear them, and your habit be in a proper condition to meet them.’ James also promised to search Hyderabad for some presents for Thackeray’s boys and nephews as a way of rewarding him for his care: ‘I will enquire for toys for Thackeray’s children immediately,’ he wrote on the seventeenth. ‘What is there indeed that I would not most heartily make him an offer of, within the compass of my means and ability, if he returns my beloved William to the full enjoyment of health again, which I am now sanguine enough to expect he will.’^54em

William’s health continued to fluctuate, but he remained far too ill to proceed in the direction of Pune, and as the omens grew less and less encouraging, James began encouraging him to think seriously about retiring to England, though he was only forty-six: ‘you must now consult your own preservation, my dearest Will, and the well-being of your family in preference to every other consideration’, he wrote at the end of April. ‘These, in my opinion, loudly call for your early return to your native country.’⁵⁵ He also made it clear that he would consider it his duty to support his elder brother in his retirement: ‘My purse, as you well know, and as I have so often told you, is most entirely at your service, and must be considered in fact as your own.’⁵⁶

In early May, when William’s health suddenly dipped again, Ure despatched some new ‘electuary’, while James scoured the Deccan to find some ‘very fine fresh figs and prunes’ in order that Ure could ‘compose an electuary that you will approve of both for its taste and its effects. Ure is however decidedly of the opinion that you ought on no account allow of any further operation being performed upon you until you have completely recovered your strength.’⁵⁷

This never happened; instead William’s health complications became more and more serious, and the pain almost unbearable.^en By the beginning of June, he was forced to accept that his career in India was over, at least for the time being. He wrote to Calcutta for permission to leave India on account of his health, and at the end of the month received the brief chit from Wellesley allowing him to head ‘for the Cape, and eventually to Europe on Furlough should the state of your health render a voyage to Europe necessary’.^58eo

All that remained now was for William to find a ship to take him home. James wrote: ‘I must still insist on your embarking on none but an Indiaman with a good surgeon on board: these you know, are sine qua nons to my hearty acquiescence in the step, and if you cannot get such a passage at Madras you should go to Bengal in search of one.’⁵⁹

While William lingered prostrate in the Thackerays’ house in Madras, the two young Assistants who had accompanied him from Calcutta were told to proceed on their way to Pune, via Mysore and Hyderabad, where they would in due course be joined by a Resident, once one had been appointed to replace William.

Edward Strachey and Mountstuart Elphinstone were, James thought, ‘two very superior young men’;⁶⁰ and the double entendre of this phrase was entirely deliberate. Strachey was twenty-six, Elphinstone barely twenty-one. Both were highly intelligent and capable; but they made little effort to hide the fact that they knew it, or that they clearly believed they were destined for great things.

As there was no need for them to rush to their new appointment in Pune, they took their time about it, zigzagging across almost the whole of India and spending nearly a year en route. They travelled in great state with a sawaree of eight elephants, eleven camels, four horses and ten bullocks, not to mention the horses and ponies of their servants, of whom there were between 150 and 200, together with an escort of twenty sepoys and, later, what Elphinstone described as ‘a Mahratta condottiere of 30 to 40 men’. One elephant was reserved entirely for carrying their books, including a history of the Bengal Mutiny by Edward’s father, Henry Strachey, as well as volumes of the Persian poets, and editions of Homer, Horace, Hesiod, Herodotus, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato, Beowulf, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Dryden, Bacon, Boswell and Thomas Jefferson. As they ambled across India at the Company’s expense, they read aloud to each other, sketched, practised their Persian and Marathi grammar, went shooting and played the flute by the light of the moon. They also kept diaries.⁶¹

Diaries—and especially travel diaries—often reveal as much about the writer as the place or person written about. In his trip to Hyderabad, the French jeweller Tavernier noticed mainly the gold and diamonds in the bazaars, while the anonymous French soldier-gourmet who wrote an account of Hyderabad in 1750 was transfixed by the city’s celebrated cooking, especially the famous Hyderabad biryani. Edward Strachey, brought up at the height of the fashion for the Picturesque, saw instead a City of Ruins. Elphinstone, meanwhile, raised his nose at so extreme an angle he missed much that was of interest; but what he did record, he noted down with a waspish wit.

The two young Englishmen arrived at the outskirts of Hyderabad on the evening of 22 August 1801. As Strachey noted:

Near the city the grounds are more bare, rugged and rocky than before … Hyderabad is surrounded by a stone wall the extent of which is I am told nearly seven miles. This defence would be sufficient to keep off predatory incursions of horse, but would not stand an hour against our artillery. From a distance [you can see over the walls] … a great many white buildings much hid among trees with some lofty buildings and minarets rising above them … Wretched and ruinous as the scene is now where the walls are cracked and decayed, the cornices broke and different parts of the building overgrown with grass and weeds, I can easily conceive that in better times it must have been in a high degree splendid and magnificent … ⁶²

The two diaries, with their detailed record of five months in Hyderabad, form one of the most graphic and immediate sources for the city in the early nineteenth century. From the comments they make, both Strachey and Elphinstone clearly thought they were making a record of a timeless India that had not changed for centuries; but in actual fact the diaries are important and observant records of Hyderabad at a time of massive and rapid change: the ruins Strachey so lovingly describes were irrigated pleasure gardens when Tavernier passed through the city shortly before the Mughal invasion, while a few years later they would be swallowed up in the bustling commercial quarter that quickly grew up around Kirkpatrick’s Residency.

Likewise the picture of their visit to the Hyderabad durbar given by Elphinstone a month after his arrival is a record not of medieval continuity or the timeless customs of ‘Oriental Despotism’, as he and Strachey thought, but an interesting snapshot of ceremonial in a period of transformation, when the old ways copied from the Mughal emperors of the Delhi Red Fort were slowly becoming mixed with new forms imported from Europe: ‘Major K[irkpatrick] goes [to the durbar] in great state and has several elephants, a state palankeen, led horses, flags, long poles with tassels &ca and is attended by ten companies of infantry & a troop of cavalry,’ recorded Elphinstone.

… We passed through several courts in going to His Highness’s presence, the gates surrounded by armed men some of them with beards one or two with steel caps [i.e. helmets] and gauntlets, some of them very picturesque … At the last courtyard, the minister Azim ul Omrah [Aristu Jah] met us & embraced us. He led us though a court to a diwan khaneh where the Nizam was sitting. I went up to him and presented my nuzzar [ceremonial gift]. Major K’s munshi [Aziz Ullah] showed me how to hold it and a man prest me down to the proper stoop; His Highness took my nuzzar smiling. I retired and made a low salaam.

The Nizam was drest in brocade. He kept his right arm, which is palsied, within his gown; he wore a cap with a shawl twisted round it. The whole headress was shaped like a cone. He is a good looking old man [and … ] wore many splendid jewels. There were many other people some sitting & some standing. Among the latter were several female women sentries, dressed something like Madras seypoys. More were on guard before the doors & about 20 or 30 more women were drawn out before [the] guardroom in sight. Many women sat in the back part of the room where we were.

The Nizam showed us many clocks & curious pieces of mechanism some of them very obscene … I did not hear him say a word—he was most of the time amusing himself with laughing at the little machinery of the watches etc … Major K behaved like a native & with great propriety. The Nizam gave [us] sirpèches [turban jewels] for each donation [nuzzar]. Eventually we made a low bow then we withdrew into a room on one side of a passage.

[Here] we stopt to talk with the Minister [Aristu Jah] … He looks much younger than the Nizam & was plainly dressed. His only ornaments were a gold belt & dagger with a diamond buckle. He talked familiarly with a favourite old aseel, Mama Barun …⁶³

[Afterwards] the Resident told us of an event which had just happened, and which shows strongly the nature of the Nizam’s Govt. There had been many robberies committed in the city within a short time and the Nizam declared that if there were any more he would make an example of some of the offenders. One morning the Kotwal brought three men to the Nizam declaring that he had seized them drunk in the street late at night. The Nizam simply ordered them to be blown from a gun. The sentence had just been put in execution when one of the chief Omrahs of the court came in and said that the men were honest men servants of his, returning from a merry meeting where they had been drinking. The Minister [Aristu Jah] took advantage of the Kotwals having occasioned, by his careless report, the execution of the three innocent men, and fined him 30,000 rupees … ⁶⁴

It is a fascinating moment: the old Mughal ceremonial—the giving and receiving of nuzzars—and the tradition of instant ‘justice’ has survived, despite the intrusion of growing Company power and a profusion of new European knick-knacks such as the ‘very obscene’ clocks (a matter in which the Nizams seem to have pre-empted the tastes of the later Victorian maharajahs). The description is also interesting for what it shows of the sudden and unexpected power and prominence of women in the Hyderabad durbar at this period, and the degree to which Mama Barun, one of the two senior aseels—former wetnurses of the royal family who had also been commanders of the Zuffur Plutun women’s battalion at Khardla five years earlier—now acted as the principal master of ceremonies, while their women sepoys acted as the Nizam’s bodyguards.^ep

But perhaps the biggest and most significant change recorded by Strachey and Elphinstone in their accounts of Hyderabad, and something which no previous traveller had described, is the picture they give of the new British cantonments, ten miles to the north of the old city, just over the Banjara Hills.

These cantonments were vast tent cities which housed the now very substantial British military contingent that had arrived in the area following the two treaties James had signed with the Nizam. Strachey talks of the cantonments as ‘already extending near 2 miles (I guess) and there is a considerable town formed by the huts of the troops and camp followers. The situation is very high and airy commanding a fine view of the Hoosn Sagoor [the huge man-made lake north of the old city].’⁶⁵ Elphinstone adds that the tent city was ‘very neat’; he also implies that, in a way the Residency had never been—located as it was in an old Qutb Shahi baradari pavilion within a walled pleasure garden—the cantonments were intrusions of unadulterated Englishness in the utterly Indian landscape. Here the two youths went shopping in a ‘Europe Shop’—an emporium which sold only imported luxury goods from Europe—consulted a European doctor (about Elphinstone’s severe clap) and went to see an English farce at a makeshift open-air regimental theatre. They went shooting (though apparently only hit an owl), attended regimental balls, gambled and played whist, billiards and backgammon in the officers’ mess.⁶⁶ It was not much yet, but these cantonments were the embryo that would soon grow to become Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s twin city and a conurbation that is today as large as Hyderabad itself. Moreover, their growth was rapid: only eighteen months later, by the autumn of 1804, the cantonments were already ‘like a large regular town reckoned equal in extent to [the large north Indian station of ] Cawnpore’.⁶⁷

The cantonment was a rival centre of power not only to the Nizam and his durbar, but also to James and the Residency, whose writ ran uncertainly in the army lines. James certainly believed—with reason—that he was head of the British community in Hyderabad; but his authority was tacitly resisted by his former army colleagues. After all, James was still a humble major, while the commander of the Subsidiary Force was a lieutenant colonel. Moreover, among the troops in the force were a number of James’s former colleagues who resented his rapid promotion to a senior position in the Company’s diplomatic corps, when they remembered him only eight years earlier as a fairly undistinguished junior lieutenant. His swift rise from commander of an obscure tribal fort to one of the most lucrative positions in the Company’s service was attributed less to his own merits than to the influence of his powerful half-brother William. Moreover, James’s adoption of Muslim clothes, and the stories circulating about his partiality to Hyderabadi customs, did not go down well with his former army colleagues either, especially as some of them—like the late Colonel James Dalrymple—had been prisoners of Tipu, and had seen a number of their colleagues convert to Islam and adopt Decanni Muslim clothes, turbans and moustaches in return for easier conditions. A few of the prisoners had even agreed to help drill Tipu’s troops in modern European military techniques, in exchange for Mysorean wives and positions as officers and drill sergeants in Tipu’s army.⁶⁸ The soldiers in the cantonments therefore tended to look on all converts and Islamophiles as turncoats, and regarded the thoroughly assimilated James with the deepest suspicion.

This dislike and distrust of James was something that Strachey and Elphinstone had picked up when they stayed with Arthur Wellesley and his garrison at Seringapatam on their way to Hyderabad. According to their diaries, Wellesley had ‘rowed Hushmut Jung’ [i.e. joked about Kirkpatrick], and Elphinstone certainly arrived in Hyderabad thoroughly prejudiced against James. When a messenger from him came out to meet them on their way to Hyderabad, generously offering them accommodation at the Residency, his initial reaction to his diary was: ‘Bore! Who would like to live with Hushmut Jung?’⁶⁹ On arrival he was clearly surprised to be received ‘very civilly’, and to discover that ‘in most respects’ James was ‘like an Englishman’.⁷⁰ It was only after James had lavished his hospitality on the pair for several weeks that Elphinstone began to write warmly about his host, although what seemed to impress the twenty-one-year-old most was James’s shooting skills: ‘Major K is a capital shot,’ he wrote admiringly after an expedition looking for sand grouse in the Banjara Hills.⁷¹

In August 1801, when Strachey and Elphinstone arrived in Hyderabad, the nascent tensions between the Subsidiary Force and the Residency were evident, if still unspoken. But even before the pair had left the city three months later, it was out of these innocent-looking lines of regimental tents that the next great storm to shake Kirkpatrick was to emerge.

The rumblings of discontent with James were brought out into the open by events during the Muharram festivities in the old city in September; and in many ways it was James who brought the storm down upon himself.

‘As soon as the crescent new moon of the sacred month of Muharram is sighted over the city, the Standard of Hussain, the Blessed Horseshoe, and innumerable flower-garlands are sent by the Minister to the Palace to ensure the good fortune of the Nizam’s thousand-year rule,’ wrote Ghulam Husain Khan in his history of Hyderabad, the Gulzar i-Asafiya.

It is an ancient custom that when the garlands arrive, at the second watch of the night, with the Nizam’s guards all present, the Nizam—duly bathed and perfumed, dressed in green with a multitude of gems, and hair anointed—reverently takes the garland container on his head and carries it step by step, bare-foot, among crowds of people, along with goblets of sherbet and cauldrons of food offerings, into the place where the standards are erected in the great Husaini ’Alam shrine. There he ties the garlands [to the standards] while reciting the Fatiha [the opening chapter of the Koran].⁷²

So, every year, began the great ten-day-long festival of Muharram. If the festival of Maula Ali was one of the two great celebrations of the Hyderabadi year, then Muharram was the other. Despite both being ostensibly Shi’a celebrations, the two were very different events. For if Maula Ali was essentially a pleasurable holiday, an escape from the teeming lanes and alleys of the old city of Hyderabad, then Muharram was a celebration of the city itself, and especially of its internal divisions and diversity.

The festivities were organised—like the Palio of Siena, or the mystery plays of medieval York—by the rival quarters (or mohallas) of the city, who all competed with each other over the size and splendour of their devotional processions. The Sufis, the fakirs and the ascetics in particular tended to take a factional attitude to the celebrations, and ‘massed under the sun banners distinct to each mohalla’, ready to defend its honour and prestige against that of its neighbours: ‘Thus they all come from their own quarter and according to custom rank by rank, they join the processions. But if they try to get into any position other than that sanctified by custom, there will be quarrels and feuds, and the troublemakers will be arrested. In the past many were killed in this way until the Nizam issued strict orders against the wearing of weapons and the shedding of blood.’⁷³

Muharram was supposedly a time of mourning. It marked the anniversary of the defeat and death of Imam Hussain, the son of Maula Ali and the Prophet’s grandson, at the Battle of Karbala on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, AD 680. The standards—oralams as they were called—were stylised representations of the standards carried by Hussain at Karbala.^eq The beautiful elegies—or marsiyas—that were sung evoked the thirst of Hussain and his entourage of women and children, and their sufferings at the hands of the Ummayad Caliph al-Yazid, an event considered by Shi’as as the most tragic martyrdom in history.

Black was worn, and meat, smoking, sex and paan-chewing were all strictly forbidden, while the usual half-hearted ban on alcohol was more seriously observed than usual. Men went through the streets barefoot. Women unloosed their tresses, removed their bangles and put on mourning clothes. Charpoys were removed from the zenana wings so that even the grandest begum would have to spend Muharram sitting on the floor like the servants. Day after day, processions of pious Shi’ite men beat their chests and flagellated themselves in sorrow at the sufferings of the man they regarded as the legitimate heir of the Prophet: ‘The spectatorsare roused to an unbearable pitch of grief and the women shriek and wail as if it were indeed the end of the world, crying, Lord save us! Lord save us! Ma’adh Allah! Ma’adh Allah!’

Singers and reciters of the marsiyas would come in succession around those houses which had their own private ashur khanas (mourning halls), competing with each other to reduce their audiences to tears, or to raise them to such extremes of devotional hysteria that they would wail and beat their chests. In some houses the women would organise their own majlis (or assembly) in which women singers would sit on carpets in the illuminated zenana courtyards and sing devotional elegies; sometimes aristocratic women would even perform their own compositions.⁷⁴

Aristu Jah and Mir Alam, both of whom competed to be the most cultured of the Hyderabadi amirs, were especially keen to be seen promoting and patronising the most talented young Hyderabadi poets to excel in the art of marsiya-writing. Each year James and his Residency Assistants would visit the ashur khanas of both rivals to hear the works that they had commissioned. As one historian put it, Aristu Jah

was very keen on such gatherings, and he organised many, mostly at night. [Such was the reputation of the poets who attended Aristu Jah’s ashur khanas that] other reciters and chanters would come secretly and listen to the most popular chants and learn them to perform at their own gatherings, which inevitably led to many quarrels and literary feuds among the town’s poets. Indeed the Nizam and his Minister showed such a passion for these recitations that it became quite the fashion for the nobles to compete in bringing poets and reciters even from as far away as Delhi and Lucknow, and they were all kept busy. One year, Aristu Jah organised 17 such soirées and the Nizam 20. Even more modest amirs had two or three such events each.⁷⁵

The grandest and most magnificent of the ashur khanas was, however, that used by Nizam Ali Khan, the ancient Badshahi Ashur Khana, which the Nizam had recently renovated and enlarged after Aurangzeb had used it as a stable for his horses, as a way of deliberately humiliating the conquered Hyderabadi Shi’as. This beautiful Safavid-style mourning hall, which would not have looked out of place in the centre of Isfahan, was filled with some of the most exquisite tilework in India: great intricate swathes of startling parrot-blue, canary-yellow and egret-white, containing delirious swirls of roaring dragons and flame-like clouds.⁷⁶ Here, each Muharram, every one of the fourteen brass and silver alams (representing the Prophet, his daughter Fatima and the twelve imams, beginning with Ali) was ‘clothed’ by the Nizam’s family in gold brocade on which Koranic verses had been woven. Like Christianity, Shi’a Islam has at its core the story of the scandalously unjust suffering of innocents. Just as relics—especially relics of the True Cross—acted as devotional focuses for the meditations of medieval Christians, so the alams acted for Shi’a Muslims.

The walls of the Badshahi Ashur Khana and its forecourt were lined with arched recesses. The lowermost thousand rows were lit with small earthen lamps on the first night of Muharram, and the rows above each successive evening until, on the evening of the tenth of Muharram, each wall glowed with the light of ten thousand lamps—‘a flaming garden of Ali’, as one poet put it, ‘lit up by ten thousand burning, grieving hearts’. In addition a circular pit was dug in the centre of the forecourt and filled with incense sticks, so that a great fragrant cloud rose from the building as a long procession of black-clad mourners reciting the elegies and holding the alams high circled around the complex.⁷⁷

For all the sadness of Muharram, and of the events it commemorated, there was nevertheless a carnival element in the festival. There were fireworks every night. Houses were decorated and lit up with oil lamps, as at the Hindu festival of Diwali. As so often in India, and especially in the Deccan, Islam found itself unwittingly absorbed, transformed and assimilated by its overwhelmingly Hindu environment. Indian Muharram processions are unique in that large wooden models of the mausoleum of Hussain at Karbala, called ta’ziyas, are borne through the streets by devotees; sometimes in Hyderabad as many as two hundred ta’ziyas would be carried in succession. This practice was almost certainly modelled on the Hindu tradition of temple chariots, such as the famous Jagannath^er car at Puri in Orissa.⁷⁸ Even more Hindu was the practice of placing ‘on the ta’ziyassmall portions of corn, rice, bread, fruit, flowers, cups of water &c’, offerings to Hussain derived from the Hindu custom of leaving flour balls (or pinda) for the spirits of the dead.⁷⁹

Certainly the Hyderabad Muharram celebrations witnessed by Abdul Lateef Shushtari in September 1801 bore hardly any resemblance to the festivities he had grown up with in the solidly Sh’ia environment of Iran. Instead they had been transformed into a sort of syncretic Indo-Islamic saturnalia which had almost as much in common with Hindu river festivals such as the Kumb Mela as it did with the purely Islamic Muharram he knew from home: ‘I have seen with my own eyes how the Muslims in India copy Hindu styles of mourning, fasting and prostrating themselves in the Ashur Khanas,’ wrote a shocked Shushtari in his Tuhfat al-’Alam.

The two groups compete in self-mortification, wounding their chests, and flagellating themselves till the blood flows and they fall unconscious … More bizarrely still, the lower orders disguise themselves, going around in animal skins, some as camels, some as lions and so on, making grotesque gestures and setting up at crossroads and passages a standard [of their quarter], under which they light a great fire: there both men and women and these strange apparitions beat their breasts and dance—but never do they give any food to the hungry nor any drink to the thirsty!^80es

Ghulam Husain Khan also describes this strange, almost animist tradition of dressing up in animal skins during Muharram, adding that some of the ‘lions’

take sheep by the throat and bite through their jugular veins so that blood spurts out and adds to their image of a fierce blood-covered lion. In the city and Begum Bazaar [immediately behind Khair un-Nissa’s townhouse] … there are not less than 200 of them.

On the [tenth, the] day of the martyrdom, most of them gather under the Purana Pul, the Old Bridge. Some go mad and wear large hats with multicoloured paper streamers, and others put bells around their wastes like harkarra messengers. As they wander around the town banging their tambourines, quarrels and fights arise between them which threaten to become serious disturbances if it were not for the policing by the state.

At this time, two Ethiopians, young and well built, gild their bodies with gold leaf, and wearing only a turban, rush out into the streets with 25 other Ethiops and Arabs fully armed. All the other would-be lions become timorous foxes and pull in their codpieces not daring to confront these two. If any dare to they cut off his wooden tail …

In these celebrations both Muslims and Hindus take part together, and on the tenth, the actual day of the martyrdom, all the alam standards and ta’zya models and life size wooden images of buraq flying horses^et go down the Hussaini Alam street to the Musi, accompanied by elephant standards and fanfares and guards of Arabs and Western trained sepoys … Hindus and Muslims go by the thousands, all bare-headed and bare-foot, beating their chests and crying Hussain! Hussain! The Hindus in particular participate with full reverence tying onto the alam standards garlands of flowers with their own hands … From houses rich and poor, as many as can manage stream out of the old Bridge Gate. The mendicants in their two processions under their two rival leaders, the dervishes, the madmen dressed as runners, the lions and so on all go down to the river, chanting praises to Ali, and stay there overnight. The number of people is fifty thousand, not to mention the elephants, some of which carry perfume to spray over the crowd, and horses beyond counting, and all the tents which those who can bring and set up on the bank. There is no more wonderful sight in all Hyderabad!

The difficulty of maintaining order during this frenzy is a constant theme of Ghulam Husain Khan’s account, and he emphasises how in the past, many died during clashes, especially as rival processions of the fakirs of the different quarters of the city would clash, usually when they converged on the ghats of the Musi, where they would go to wash the alams in the river—a direct echo of the ceremony of washing and garlanding the standards of the different orders of sadhus that takes place every twelve years at the Kumb Mela, also with traditionally bloody results: ‘unfortunately,’ he adds, ‘when thousands and thousands of people are scrabbling in the sand on the ghats there are many injured in the shoving and fighting that ensues … ’

Keeping some semblance of order over this mystical Saturnalia was also the matter most firmly on James Kirkpatrick’s mind throughout the 1801 Muharram celebrations.

During a particularly bad bout of violence one night between the ecstatic mourners of two rival quarters, the Nizam had called him to the palace and asked if the Subsidiary Force might be brought in to restore order, and James had agreed. The order was sent up to the cantonments, but only a fraction of the required men had turned up. As James wrote to William ten days later, ‘the last Mohurram festival, having occasion for a strong battalion to go into the city at the Nizam’s application, and having consequently desired Col. Vigors [the new commander] to send me the very strongest [battalion available], one of [only] seven hundred and eighty firelocks was with some difficulty produced! And I have heard it said that if the Sub[sidiar]y Force were to be required to move tomorrow, not more than the above number could be reckoned upon.’⁸¹

A day later, having made a few more enquiries, James was shocked to have his first suspicions confirmed: a major fraud appeared to be taking place in the cantonments. Writing to William, who was still bedridden in Madras, he reported: ‘The more I reflect on the matter the more I am persuaded that there must be some serious abuses going on in the corps, which cannot too soon be put a stop to … ’

James had suspected that the officers were pocketing most of the allowances the Nizam had given them to provide for their weapons, equipment, tents and carriage. Not only were there not enough guns and artillery, there were hardly any tents.⁸²

Further investigations over the days that followed revealed the situation to be even worse than James had feared: his inquiries showed that, ‘if my information is correct’ there could not have been more than four thousand guns when there should have been, according to the treaty, 7200-in other words ‘little more than half of what [the Nizam] pays for’. This, James realised, put him in an impossible position, as he would

be under the unavoidable necessity of bringing [corruption] to public notice ‘ere long … a great deal of dishonest concealment must be going on, for all the corps are returned as complete or nearly so [in their official accounts]. At this rate what terrible abuses must be going in the Subsidiary Force! And how much are both our own government and this state imposed upon, and what a consequent load of responsibility will fall upon my shoulders if it should ever come out that I know, or even suspected, the serious deception going on, without taking any steps to remedy it?

Col Vigors’ faculties, I am sorry to say, both bodily and mental appear to be rapidly in decline, and he seems to possess in no small degree a defect common more or less to all who have attained to his rank in our service by the usual gradual rise, I mean the defect of winking at abuses, which they are probably conscious of having themselves in similar situations practised. The muster of the troops also must, I fear, be taken in a very slovenly way.

James’s sources, one of whom was almost certainly Fyze’s son, the young Captain William Palmer, who was now attached to the Nizam’s irregular cavalry and so had easy access to the British cantonments while remaining distinct from the regular soldiers, had informed him that the male children of the sepoys were being produced at parade to artificially inflate the numbers in the muster rolls.⁸³

Yet again, James found himself in a hopeless quandary, caught between his conscience and his sense of duty, between the British and Hyderabad, unsure whether to honour his residual loyalties to his old army colleagues and ‘wink’ at their clear corruption, or to honour his commitments to the Nizam under the treaty he had signed. In the end, aware of the unpopularity and odium it would bring down upon him, James eventually wrote to William that, after much hesitation, he was clear where his duty lay, and that he was intent on rooting out the abuses.

What he did not know when he wrote this was that his inquiries had already been noticed in the cantonments; and the suspicions of the senior officers were confirmed when William Kirkpatrick wrote to the commander asking for details of muster rolls and the amount of equipment available, saying that he had received a worrying letter from someone in Hyderabad: ‘They [now] know they are being watched,’ wrote James to William in early October.⁸⁴ He was also unaware that the senior officers in the force had already acted to defend themselves—by turning the spotlight back on him.

Sometime towards the end of September, an anonymous letter was sent from Hyderabad to the Governor General, detailing all the facts about Khair un-Nissa and her child and their move to the Residency that James had so far managed to keep concealed from Calcutta. The letter reached Wellesley in Patna at the very end of the month. Only a week later, having first checked the facts with James’s former Assistant John Malcolm, who had accompanied Wellesley on his journey, the Governor General picked up his pen and wrote an ominous letter to William Kirkpatrick as follows:

private and secret
patna october 7th 1801

My dear Sir,

It is with the utmost degree of pain and sorrow that I inform you that intelligence has reached me from various quarters which leaves no doubt on my mind that your brother the Resident at Hyderabad has abused my confidence in the most criminal manner and has deceived both me and yourself with respect to his conduct towards the granddaughter of Bauker Alli under circumstances of the most aggravated guilt.

The accusation originally came before me as a charge against the Resident of having employed the authority of his station to compel the family of this unfortunate woman to grant her to him in marriage. This charge led to a reference to the Nizam himself & I thought your brother fully acquitted himself by his Highness’s reply, and by the report of some respectable gentlemen then at Hyderabad. But it now appears evident that whether Kirkpatrick ever attempted to force such a marriage or not, he has debauched the granddaughter of Bauker Alli, he has a child born of this woman and he now lives with her.

The effect at Hyderabad is mischievous in the extreme as might be expected from such an outrage upon the general principles of normality & upon the most revered prejudices of the Musselmans. I will not press the aggravations of the most hideous crime to the extent which they would bear because I know the justice, honor & purity of your mind too well to suppose that you do not anticipate every topic which I could devise from the principles of public duty, or private gratitude. I will therefore only add the determination which I have formed upon this case.

Although thoroughly convinced of the bulk of the charges preferred against Major Kirkpatrick, it is not my intention to proceed to extremities until they shall have been verified by evidence regularly taken by competent authority. When I shall have reduced the facts alleged to regular form, I shall remove the Resident from his station and I shall afford him the fullest opportunity of entering upon any species of defence which can tend to exempt him from any more severe punishment. This course appears to me to be the most just, & expedient; the facts now alleged, when stated in a solemn manner by credible and respectable evidence will require the immediate removal of the person representing me at Hyderabad.

As if all this was not bad enough, the letter grew worse. Having stated his belief that James was guilty of gross deception, Wellesley then asked William to disown and publicly denounce his brother if he wanted to save his own reputation:

Now my dear sir, I wish to call your attention to the situation in which the offences of Major Kirkpatrick against me and against the State have placed (what I know you value more than life) against your character & honor. I know that your brother has deceived you even more flagrantly than he has deceived me and the Government, but the World is ignorant of this fact, the Court of Directors & the Government at home must be ignorant of it, & may continue in error unless you shall resort to some effectual mode of manifesting to the World what is evident to me that you have been as much injured by this nefarious transaction as I have been.

I therefore most earnestly represent to you the absolute necessity of your remaining in India while the whole enquiry into your brother’s conduct shall be concluded and until a regular opportunity shall be afforded to you of furnishing me with the means of recording such materials as shall preserve the actual lustre of your character from blemish.

You shall receive full information of every proceeding respecting Major Kirkpatrick; in the meanwhile I desire that you will not open the subject to him until you shall have received further intimation from me. His eminent public services & his connection with you have rendered me slow to credit the charges against him, until the truth became too manifest to justify hesitation; I must therefore proceed to the execution of the most painful part of my public Duty, in the instance in which that duty will be most painful; but I shall proceed with calmness & deliberation.

Believe me, Dear Sir, with the greatest regard & respect always your faithful & obliged friend and servant—

Wellesley⁸⁵

By the time William received the letter, the order had already arrived in Hyderabad for Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr to head straight for Madras to report to Lord Clive on a matter of the greatest secrecy and importance. Unknown to James, his investigations of the Subsidiary Force had brought down on his head the most serious threat yet to his life and career in India.

By the time he became aware that things were amiss towards the end of November, the investigation was already well under way.