VII

At the very end of December 1801-the most beautiful time of year in the Deccan, when the light is oblique, the evenings cool and the shadows long—William and Fyze Palmer finally packed up their household and set off for the last time from the Residency in Pune, heading off towards Hyderabad by the old Golconda road.

Their convoy moved slowly down through the then thickly wooded foothills of the Western Ghats, and out into the open farmland that lay in the plains beyond: rich, well-watered black earth where bullocks ploughed flat fields edged with palm groves and mango orchards. By 4 January 1802, the Palmers had made good progress and reached the dusty cotton-town of Tuljapur on the border with the Nizam’s dominions. James was there to meet them, but Khair un-Nissa stayed behind in the newly completed mahal at the Hyderabad Residency. There was a good reason for this: though James had yet to tell anyone about it, Khair was now five months pregnant with their second child.¹

Pune had been the Palmers’ home for four years, and the elegant British Residency at the confluence of the rivers Moota and Mula, opposite the ghats where sati (widow burning) was performed, was filled with the treasures they had accumulated in the course of their life together in Lucknow, Delhi, Agra and Pune itself. Yet even by the standards of the time the Palmers travelled heavily, and James was astonished by the sheer number of bullock carts, transport cattle, elephants, baggage camels, syces, sepoys, bearers and Fyze’s ‘dozen females’ (presumably her attendants) that turned up at the Maratha—Hyderabad border.²

The Palmers had originally planned to spend only a week or so resting in Hyderabad, before continuing their journey to Calcutta overland along the new military road which had recently been constructed up the length of the east coast. But so well did the two families get on, and so well matched were both the men and the women, that James tried to persuade his guests to stay on, arguing that if they waited for spring they could then catch a fast boat from Masulipatam and reach Calcutta just as quickly, and with much less effort, than by lumbering slowly over the Eastern Ghats. The General was won over, and in the end he and Fyze did not set off on the road again until April had come, and with it the height of the summer heat.³

Over their three months together Fyze and Khair un-Nissa struck up a close friendship, despite the fifteen-year difference in their ages. They spent their days in each other’s company, and in that of Sharaf un-Nissa, playing with Khair’s little boy Sahib Allum, now one year old and, according to James, beginning ‘to prattle very prettily’.⁴ Fyze introduced Khair un-Nissa to her twenty-two-year-old son William, for whom James had found a job in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, while Khair introduced Fyze to the women of both the Minister’s and the Nizam’s zenanas. With them came Fanny Khanum, Fyze’s adopted daughter, who was probably the General’s child by a concubine whom Fyze had taken into the family, as was the tradition at that period in both East and West.^eu

On these visits Fanny, who must then have been aged about ten, played happily with Prince Sulaiman Jah, the Nizam’s nine-year-old son.^ev After the Palmers had set off to Calcutta, James wrote to William, ‘Pray do not omit presenting my kindest remembrances to Fyze and her little daughter by adoption, with whom the little Prince Sulaiman Jah⁵ was so smitten, that he himself begged the females of my family to intercede on his behalf. They all join in sending kind wishes to Fyze … ’⁶ Later, James talked of Fanny as she ‘whom the young Prince Sulaiman Jah wished for his bride. By the bye, the impression she made was deeper than could be supposed, as he never fails to ask after her.’⁷ At the end of April, after Fanny had recovered from a serious illness, James promised the General that Khair would pass the news of her recovery on to Aristu Jah’s women, and assured him that Fanny’s ‘rapid improvements when mentioned by my family in their occasional visits to the Minister’s, will fire the breast of her young princely lover’.⁸

A miniature by the Hyderabad court artist Venkatchellam of the young Sulaiman Jah, with his younger brother Kaiwan Jah, still remains in the possession of James and Khair’s descendants. It shows the two boys, aged about seven and eight, sitting on superbly inlaid chairs on a marble terrace next to the Hussain Sagar lake, being fanned by barefoot attendants. Sulaiman Jah wears a suit of child’s toy armour; Kaiwan Jah, Nizam Ali Khan’s youngest son, who was given to Aristu Jah to adopt following the death of the latter’s only son in 1795, wears orange pyjamas, is hung with pearls and holds a sarpeche.^ew Presumably Sulaiman Jah was regularly brought to the Minister’s zenana to play with his younger brother Kaiwan, and it was no doubt there that Fanny and Fyze first met the young prince.^ex

The friendship between Khair and Fyze grew very deep indeed. They had much in common: both were of Persian extraction and spoke Persian as their first language; both were second-generation immigrants to India who had grown up with fathers in senior positions in the armies of Shi’a Indian courts, and with local Indian mothers. Moreover, both had faced the same challenges in that they had fallen in love with, and eventually married, Englishmen from a very different world to their own. Fyze perhaps acted as older, wiser adviser to Khair, but she was clearly as fond of Khair un-Nissa as Khair was of her. From the day the Palmers left Hyderabad, letters and parcels passed between the two women, both of whom were literate and keen letter-writers.⁹ Although their letters have since disappeared—or in the case of Khair un-Nissa’s apparently been deliberately destroyed¹⁰—something of their contents can be gauged from the accompanying letters written by their husbands, most of which are still intact.

Two days after Fyze and the General had left for the coast, James was writing that ‘My little Boy’s Mother and Grandmother return with interest and affectionate ardour the kisses imprinted on their infant in the name of Begum [Fyze], to whom I beg my best remembrances.’¹¹ The following morning Khair un-Nissa, attended by James and her mother Sharaf un-Nissa, and presumably also by Dr Ure, gave birth to a baby girl. James recorded the exact time and date on a small scrap of paper that he kept next to the piece on which he had recorded Sahib Allum’s birth only thirteen months previously:

On Friday the
9 th (ninth) of April
AD 1802 answering
to the 5th Zehidge A.H

1216, between 8 9 clock
in the morning a
Daughter was born to
Me in my House at
The Residency (Hyderabad)
She has been named
By her female parents
Noor oon Nissa
—Saheb Begum¹²

Noor un-Nissa means ‘the Light of Women’; the title Sahib Begum, ‘Lady of High Lineage’, was a reference to the child’s godmother, Fyze.^ey Soon James was ending a letter to the General with the postscript: ‘The females of my family all join in [sending their] kind wishes to Fyze, including her little namesake Sahib Begum who is improving daily.’¹³ A few days later James was telling William that ‘my family here both great and small are all well, and as many as can speak for themselves, beg to be remembered most kindly to Fyze, for whom the young Begum has made up a set ofchoorys [bangles] which I propose forwarding under cover to you, when I have got a smaller sett ready for my little ward [Fanny Khanum]’.

By the end of April, Khair had made still more choories for her friend, and James wrote to William that ‘as I find the choorys for Fyze and your little darling are not admissible in the dawke,^ez I shall commit them to the charge of [John] Malcolm and request you will assure the Begum with my best remembrances of my readiness to furnish her with further supplies as occasions may offer.^‡ There are four setts for her, and two for Fanny Khanum.’¹⁴

So strong was Khair un-Nissa’s relationship with Fyze that it outlasted her marriage to James, and many years later, as Khair lay dying, Fyze was beside her bed, holding her hand. Six weeks after Khair’s death, according to James’s Assistant Henry Russell, Fyze was still, ‘I fear, in great distress … She says she has lost the only real friend she ever had; and I suspect from what I have heard of her disposition and habits, that it is truly the case … ’¹⁵

James and the General also got on as well as, if not better than, both had hoped and expected. They visited court together, went hawking and hunting, and spent long nights talking over their mutual despair at the direction in which Wellesley was taking the Company in India. When the General finally left Hyderabad, James wrote him an emotional letter, telling him of the ‘gloom and vacuity’ into which he had fallen since his departure, and of the ‘gratitude and exultation’ the memory of their friendship brought to him.¹⁶

James also sent Palmer a revealing letter that openly acknowledged the degree to which both men had become Indianised. Soon after he left, James wrote to advise him that ‘With regard to your eventual intention respecting a trip to England … I am not sure that your well wishers—that is those who wish you many long years of life and happiness—would rejoice at such a measure, after a residence of more than half your life in the sultry climes of India.’¹⁷ At this stage, he gives no hint as to exactly what his worries for the General are; but in a later letter he enlarges on this: ‘I am glad to hear that your darling little Fanny Khanum is to be sent to England,’ he wrote towards the end of the year, ‘but I cannot say I am quite reconciled to the idea of your accompanying her, and I do not know if it depended on me, whether I should not vote for you in preference some snug sinecure in this country where you have passed so large a portion of your life. Recollect my dear friend, that you were long ago yourself doubtful how far you could stand the rigour of an English summer , how then can you think of braving an English winter?’¹⁸

James, it seems, was thoroughly convinced that the General no longer truly belonged to Britain: India was now his real home, and as far as James was concerned, it would only lead to trouble and serious health problems if he were to return to the West. This was a very different attitude to that of the late-nineteenth-century sahib dreaming of drizzle in Tunbridge Wells while complaining about the bloody awful climate in India. In James’s view, his friend had much more to fear from the chill winds of a British midwinter. India had transformed both him and his friend, the old General. It was one thing for the children to go back to Europe to get a good education; it was quite another for him or Palmer to retire there.¹⁹ Possibly James also wanted to protect the eccentric old General from the taunts he suspected a white Mughal such as he might attract in the crowded streets of Piccadilly.

The letters James wrote to Palmer show his love, respect and concern for his friend, and these were feelings that the General clearly reciprocated. The Palmers had come to stay at a particularly stressful and upsetting time for James, and their presence calmed and cheered him at one of his lowest points. James had first learned that he was in trouble with Calcutta again when William sent him a frantic note in cipher at the end of October 1801. William had given his word to Wellesley that he would not tell James of the secret investigation about to convene in Madras, but his note was intended to alert his brother to the fact that something was afoot without explicitly mentioning the Clive Enquiry. The letter contained none of William’s usual gossip, but went—starkly—straight to the point: ‘My dear James,’ it read,

When I lately put a question to you respecting the state of your intercourse with a certain female you satisfied yourself with answering that I might be perfectly easy on that subject. This, though not an explicit answer, I construed into such an appearance as I wished for.

I trust I did not deceive myself on this occasion: yet it would be a great comfort to me to know for certain that the woman in question does not now and has not at any time lived with you.

My solicitude on this subject is not idle. You have enemies. Who they are God knows—where they are is not difficult to guess [i.e. in the Subsidiary Force cantonments]. Whether in writing or in conversation, on whatever subject, I must relate personally to yourself to be at this time peculiarly guarded, reserved and temperate as well as collected. When I recommend reserve I mean especially those about yourself.^fa

Perhaps those who I have above called enemies might more correctly be called idle babblers. But whichever they be, caution & reserve become equally necessary.²⁰

A day later, James received another, more explicit, warning from an anonymous friend in Calcutta: yet again, now for the third time, his relationship with Khair un-Nissa was under detailed investigation. This time, though, James was to play no part in the inquiry; indeed instructions had been issued that he should not even be informed of the existence of the proceedings.

This of course greatly alarmed James; but it also made him furious, and he convinced himself that Wellesley was using the affair as a pretext for removing him from office, just as he had removed Palmer, ‘because I have in a late instance not been so pliantly accommodating to his unaccountable political views, as he perhaps thought that he had a right to expect’. By early December he was again considering throwing in the towel, and wrote to William in cipher: ‘Between ourselves I am so disgusted with Lord W[ellesley]’s conduct towards me from first to last that I should be half-tempted to resign my situation at once, were it not for the triumph it would afford a number of conniving and malicious persons, and for it being liable to be attributed to fear of standing an enquiry.’²¹ In the end, as he told William, he decided to ‘await the announced attack, with the firmness and resignation proceeding from an unconsciousness of having been guilty of anything beyond imprudence’.²²

James was especially irritated by the part played in this latest intrusion into his marriage by John Malcolm. The two had got on well when they were together in Hyderabad, and James had helped start Malcolm’s rapid rise five years earlier by asking for him to come to Hyderabad to take up the vacant job of Assistant. The young Scot was talented and ambitious, and had done very well since he left James’s side in 1799; indeed a year previously he had risen to be Wellesley’s Private Secretary. It soon became clear that Malcolm was now the front-runner to replace James at Hyderabad should the investigation go against him. As rumours began to spread, Malcolm wrote a series of letters to William Kirkpatrick explaining his embarrassment at this ‘delicate and distressing’ circumstance which was forcing him to choose between his own self-interest and his loyalty to an old friend. He maintained that he never wanted to be seen as taking advantage of James’s difficulties, and assured William that a promotion to the job of Hyderabad Resident, ‘however great and key in my hopes, will have no charms for me under such circumstances … where I may owe my advancement to the ruin of one friend to whom I owe a thousand obligations [i.e. James] & the distress and misery to another [i.e. William] to whom I am more indebted than I am to any man in the world’.²³

To James, however, Malcolm continued to pretend complete ignorance of what was going on, giving him no hint or warning of his fate. This led James to be increasingly suspicious of Malcolm’s friendship and intentions: ‘I have just received [a letter] from Malcolm,’ he reported to William at the end of 1801, ‘who if he knows anything of what is in store for me—and that he should not is scarcely within the bounds of credibility—is surely acting a strange part towards me.’²⁴

To add to James’s worries and growing sensation of isolation, his relations with the soldiers of the Subsidiary Force were at rock bottom. In the cantonments James was now regarded as the enemy: a turncoat Islamophile, who affected ‘ridiculous native dress’ and who had had the gall to question the honesty and probity of his brother officers. Colonel Vigors, the commander of the Force, had written to James at the end of October challenging him over his inquiries: ‘Hearing that reports have reached you of the inefficient state of the corps, composing the Sub[sidiar]y Force, I have thought it incumbent on myself, and a justice to the Officers commanding these Corps, to inspect them severally, and have now the satisfaction to assure you that they have answered the highest expectations, not only in regard to numbers of effective men … but also to uniformity of dress and proficiency in discipline.’²⁵

Vigors duly invited James to inspect the Force, an offer which James immediately accepted; but the inspection was a disaster. James was not greeted with his usual seventeen-gun salute, no guard of honour was there to receive him, and no Union Flag was raised.²⁶ Worse still, he was treated with disdain by the officers of the men he came to examine. On his return to the Residency he wrote a formal complaint, and copied it to Calcutta. He also picked up his pen to report to William what had happened, informing him that Vigors’s

avarice is of the most extreme and sordid kind, and not to be equalled by his avidity to amass money which by all accounts is boundless. It is the check which I have lately given to this gratification by requiring him to send me a monthly nerak [tariff rate] in order to set some bounds to his enormous and undue bazaar gains^fb that has excited (I have no doubt) the spirit of opposition which lately manifested itself. Though all this is bad enough, yet it is quite venial in comparison with his unreserved disclosure to all who would listen to him of the subject of my late [private] letter, his boastful account of his manly reply, and discussion of various points touching on our relative situations … The Colonel has certainly deceived me not a little.²⁷

Things had not improved by the following spring, and there was an unpleasant incident soon after the Palmers left Hyderabad when James reported that some of the Subsidiary Force officers let it be known that they would be ‘refusing to subscribe to a certain [Regimental] Ball, if I was invited’. Moreover, James’s letters continue to contain frequent references to his enemies in the cantonments, who ‘have been so busy in defaming and misrepresenting me’. He was also aware that these enemies ‘would scarcely have dared, I think, to indulge so freely as [they have done] had not the too prevalent idea of my disgrace and approaching end have encouraged them to perseverance’.²⁸

There was also the issue of James’s relations with General Palmer’s successor at Pune, Colonel Barry Close, an Anglo-Irish friend of Arthur Wellesley who very much took the Wellesleys’ line in his attitude to Indians in general and Indian princes in particular. Palmer had been astonished when Close turned up to replace him in Pune without any official instructions or credentials, so breaking all the most elementary courtesies of diplomacy: ‘If the Peishwa had a grain of spirit he would not receive him,’ the General had written to James in December, just before leaving for Hyderabad, ‘and callous as he [the Peishwa] may be, he must feel the contempt implied in appointing an Ambassador to his court and sending him thither without a letter of introduction.’²⁹

But it was not just the Peishwa that Close showed contempt for. By the spring of 1802, as James’s fate still remained uncertain, Close had begun sending his Calcutta despatches, which came via Hyderabad, sealed rather than open, so that James was unable to read the contents. This was an important change from the existing system and usages, which had allowed the Hyderabad Resident to brief himself on developments over the Maratha border.

Close’s actions clearly implied that he felt James was somehow unreliable, or untrustworthy, or a straightforward security risk. After hundreds of copies of James’s Residency correspondence had turned up in Tipu Sultan’s palace chancellery at Seringapatam in 1799, Close had good reason to suspect that security at Hyderabad was not all that it might be.³⁰ But the ‘mole’ responsible for those leaks—the Residency ‘intelligencer’ Laxmi Narayan—had been exposed and sacked three years earlier; and the clear implication was that Close was dubious about James’s own reliability. He had, after all, been privy to what Mir Alam had told Arthur Wellesley of James’s alleged deal (or accommodation) with Aristu Jah; he also knew about Khair un-Nissa, and might have suspected that her discretion was not to be relied upon, and that James’s pillow talk might easily make its way into other Hyderabad zenanas. Whatever his reservations were, they remained unarticulated. Even though James wrote formally to Close to protest, his appeal had no effect. The Pune dak continued to arrive in Hyderabad with its seals firmly attached.³¹

In the end it was William Kirkpatrick who saved James from this extended limbo and who rescued his career, just as nine years earlier it was he who had first kick-started it. Although officially William was just off to the Cape to recover his health, it was now very clear to him that his condition was too serious to be healed by a few weeks at the mineral baths. Deep down he knew that his career was over, and that if he stayed in India, or indeed ever returned to it, he would probably die. He therefore decided to do all he could to save the career of his half-brother, even if it meant sacrificing his own reputation with Wellesley in the process.

From what John Malcolm had told him in his letters, William knew that James had been cleared of the charge of raping Khair un-Nissa or of using force or threats to pressurise her family to hand her over: the Clive Enquiry had accepted that unusual though it was, the women of Khair un-Nissa’s family appeared to have set out to seduce the Resident, rather than the other way around.

Only one serious political charge remained unresolved: that of concealment. The Governor General was quite willing to forgive James for his moral lapse in sleeping with Khair un-Nissa, and was even prepared to overlook his failure of judgement (as Wellesley saw it) in allowing himself to be dragged, through his marriage, into a position where he was open to manipulation by the Hyderabadi durbar: Malcolm had written to William that Wellesley thought James ‘highly culpable considering his station, to have an intrigue at a native court with a woman of such rank’.³² Yet while James may have been culpable, the offence, Malcolm had also hinted, was not unforgivable, and certainly not enough in itself for James to lose his job. But what Wellesley was not prepared to put up with—reasonably enough—was his senior officials deliberately withholding vital political information from him. At the end of the Clive Enquiry, the charge remained that James had knowingly concealed important details about his affair from his superiors, and that his despatches and submissions on the subject had been deliberately misleading.

These charges were in fact unanswerable—James had indeed told barefaced lies to almost everyone, including his own brother, about the degree to which he had become entangled with Khair un-Nissa. William nonetheless took it upon himself to risk a reputation he had spent twenty years building up, and to write to John Malcolm telling him that James—very properly hesitating to explain such delicate matters in a public despatch—had made a full confession to William in his private letters, expecting him to pass it on discreetly to the Governor General; but that he, William, had hesitated to do so, as ‘I did not consider myself at liberty, or view it in any light as necessary, to betray the confidence which [James] had reposed on me on the occasion.’³³ It was, in other words, William’s failure, not James’s, that had caused the misunderstanding.

This story was not strictly truthful, but it nevertheless provided James with the perfect cover, and put the onus for failing to reveal the full truth about the affair firmly onto his elder brother. As John Malcolm eventually wrote to William, ‘in consequence of your communication [Lord Wellesley has finally] acquitted your brother of the charge of improper concealment & [has] therefore resolved to continue him in the station which he has filled with so much credit’.³⁴ The latter somewhat unexpected compliment was in part a reference to the fact that James had just successfully persuaded the Nizam to sign a third treaty with the Company, this time one that dealt with matters of commerce^fc—yet another sign of James’s unusual degree of influence with the Nizam, and his continuing value to the Company.

After five months of uncertainty, and three inquiries, James had again been forgiven for an affair which over and over again had come close to wrecking his career and reputation. But it was a short-lived respite. No sooner had Wellesley decided to forgive James than another anonymous letter arrived in Calcutta. This time it was a letter of support for James; but one which had a much more damaging effect than any letter of criticism.

Not only did it attack Wellesley in terms that the Governor General regarded as ‘very violent, menacing and indelicate’ as well as libellous, its inside knowledge of the case showed that it was written by a close friend or associate of Kirkpatrick. Its postmark showed moreover that it had been posted in the Residency, and must thus have been written by one of the very few people in Hyderabad who had access to the Residency post room. In the covering letter which Wellesley sent to James along with the offending tract, he demanded that Kirkpatrick immediately track down and unmask ‘Philothetes’, the author of a piece of invective which according to Wellesley ‘violated the Laws of respect and Subordination, by an injurious and dictatorial stile of address to the Supreme Authority in India’.³⁵

This was another scandal, and it broke at exactly the moment James least needed it. Worse still for him, the author—as must have been apparent to James as soon as he opened the package—was none other than the son of his closest and most intimate friends and allies, General Palmer and Fyze.

‘Philothetes’ was quite clearly the young Captain William Palmer, of the Nizam’s irregular cavalry.³⁶

William Palmer had been born in Lucknow in 1780, a year after Fyze had moved in with the General.

In Zoffany’s celebrated portrait of the family, painted when William was five, he is shown wearing a white Avadhi jama. His early years were spent in the cosmopolitan environment of Lucknow, then at the height of its golden age as the centre of north Indian courtly culture. At some point William was shipped off to England to be educated, and ended up completing his schooling at the Vanbrugh-designed Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.^fd When he returned to India in 1798, aged eighteen, and briefly moved in with his half-brother John Palmer, by now a successful Calcutta banker, he was able to speak English and Persian with equal fluency, and to operate in aristocratic English and Mughal environments with equal ease.³⁷

By the early years of the nineteenth century, many Anglo-Indians were beginning to find their mixed racial inheritance a major drawback: William’s contemporary Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, for example, felt that his mixed blood, ‘like a two edged blade, was made to cut both ways against him’.³⁸ But unlike Skinner—and indeedunlike most Anglo-Indians—William was born into the upper echelons of both British and Mughal society, and his father made sure that every resource was available so that he could take advantage of both sides of his ethnic identity and find his mixed blood a boon and a blessing rather than the insuperable obstacle it became to so many other mixed-race children. As William caught ship to India at the end of his English education, the General wrote proudly to his old friend Warren Hastings boasting about his children’s achievements, and how they were all now well set up and provided for.³⁹

Palmer’s first appointment, which James Kirkpatrick had arranged for him, was in the Finglas Brigade of the Nizam’s army, which he joined just in time to see action at the storming of Seringapatam in May 1799.^fe Thereafter he rose rapidly through the ranks, so that before long he was commanding a battalion and was in charge of collecting taxes across several Hyderabadi districts.⁴⁰ This was his position when his parents arrived in Hyderabad in January 1802.

Soldiering was not, however, what William intended to do with his life. In the course of his duties with the Nizam’s forces he had served in the devastated but fertile and potentially rich district of Berar, an area that had been badly scarred by nearly a century of intermittent warfare between the Mughals and the Marathas. Berar’s well-watered soils were however clearly capable of being profitably developed. As he rode around gathering taxes, William—perhaps inspired by the entrepreneurial example of his elder half-brother John—dreamt of somehow repopulating the area, opening it up and planting cotton, indigo and opium there. This, he realised, was quite feasible, as the harvest could be easily transported down to the coast if the Wardha and Godavari rivers were made navigable.

On his visits to Hyderabad, William would have heard James talking about other schemes which were then being provisionally floated to exploit the vast untapped resources of the Nizam’s dominions. One in particular seems to have made an impression on him: a scheme suggested by a private trader named Ebeneezer Roebuck to log the inaccessible malarial jungles and teak forests in the remote reaches of the Upper Godavari. The scheme never came off, but it was the cause of much discussion and correspondence at the Residency at exactly the time when William would have been present: during the visit of his parents in March 1802.⁴¹

Certainly the idea must have fermented in William’s head, because in due course he raised considerable capital—some of it from his half-brother John in Calcutta, then at the height of his reputation as the ‘Prince of Merchants’—for a major logging and shipbuilding scheme to exploit the extraordinary mineral, timber and agricultural riches of the wilder reaches and jungles of the Nizam’s vast state.

Moreover, at some point William seems to have realised that he had a major advantage over other businessmen that he could use to enormous effect. Because of his birth in India to an Indian mother, he was classified by the Company’s bureaucracy as an ‘East Indian’, not as a British subject. As such he was permitted to engage in banking operations within the Nizam’s dominions, something that was strictly forbidden to British subjects under the terms of the various treaties James had signed. He was also free to charge any rate of interest that he wished, unlike bankers in British India who were compelled by law to charge no more than 12 per cent. Untrammelled by Company regulations, within a few years William had put in place ambitious plans to open a merchant house that would engage in ‘banking and agency transactions’ while also

supplying the timber of the forests, on the banks of the Godavery, for the purpose of ship-building; these forests abounding in timber of a superior size and quality. We entertain the most sanguine hopes that we shall be able to open a navigation of four hundred miles, during four months of the year, on that river and the Wurda. The opening of this navigation will also facilitate the commercial intercourse subsisting between [the interior of] Berar and the coast.⁴²

The scale of William’s ambitions has echoes of the world of Conrad, with its steamships, up-country logging stations, ivory hunters, uncharted malarial forests and riverboats. Yet, driven forward with an almost manic energy, it was not long before many of these schemes had been realised: by 1815 William Palmer & Co. had grown to be the richest and most important commercial operation in the subcontinent outside British-controlled India; it also ended up bankrolling the Nizam and ‘acquired an ascendancy over the Minister that rendered him a creature of their will’.⁴³

In many ways William Palmer can be said to have brought nineteenth-century Western entrepreneurial capitalism to the late-Mughal world of the Deccan; but what is remarkable is that he did so in a way that was not entirely Western, and which was certainly quite independent of the East India Company. He used local bankers and, mostly, local money, and seems to have operated, at least partly, according to traditional Indian modes of doing business. Moreover, he sought influence and gained patronage by using time-honoured Mughal techniques of giving gifts and seeking favours from his mother’s friends in the Nizam’s zenana: according to a later British Resident, if William met any opposition to his plans, ‘the Women of the Palace would be brought over to favour the application’. ⁴⁴

In 1802 this all lay in the future. But throughout the time William was establishing himself in Hyderabad, he had continued to live the hybrid Anglo-Mughal lifestyle which had been such a distinguishing mark of his parents’ home. His house in Hyderabad gradually became a celebrated gathering place where the British and Hyderabadis met on equal terms. A revealing portrait of his domestic arrangements is given by an anonymous English traveller who visited him there in about 1810:

I passed one morning and took tiffin with a famous English merchant, who holds a singular sort of durbar every morning at which you may see shroffs [moneylenders] and merchants, officers and nobles, coming to beg, borrow, lend or transact business; all of which is done according to native customs. These Mr. P observes in everything connected with his establishment; even when alone, sitting on the floor to a dinner served in their fashion; reading the Arabian nights with his Moorish wives; presiding at nautches; and (de gustibus non est disputandum) listening with pleasure to the musical sound of the native tom-tom.

He is a man of uncommon talent and great information—very popular among the natives of course, and with the British also, for his liberality, ready and obliging politeness, and unbounded hospitality to all: to the poor man also he is very charitable. The choice of an Eastern mode of life is with him not altogether unnatural. He was born of a native mother, a female of Delhi of good descent.⁴⁵

William Palmer had been baptised a Christian, but Fyze had kept her cultural and religious identity as a Muslim, and it was to Indian Muslim women, not to British ones, that William naturally looked for love and companionship. At home in both worlds, he found the perfect arena for his talents where he could straddle Mughal and British society, in the shadow of James Kirkpatrick’s Hyderabad Residency.

Like the rest of his family, William clearly felt a marked kinship to and warmth for James, whose domestic arrangements so closely resembled his own; he also felt intense gratitude to a man who had helped him get started both as a soldier and as a businessman.^ffThe exact relationship between James and William Palmer at this period is unclear, but James had certainly aided the younger man in a variety of ways, and by 1805, if not before, had allowed him the use of some of the Residency buildings as an office for his new business; this not only provided a useful base but also lent William’s business operations the appearance of having the East India Company’s imprimatur, something it did not in reality in any way possess.⁴⁶ In return William had done errands and ‘confidential work’ for James, including finding out the details of the arms and corruption scandal going on in the cantonments.

For all these reasons William leapt to James’s defence when he saw that his patron was under attack from his enemies; but he could not have done it in a more damaging manner had he tried. His letter written under the pseudonym of ‘Philothetes’ was an extraordinary production: a fifteen-page rant in fantastically overblown prose, packed full of inappropriate classical references, passionately defending not just James, but the general right of English officials to marry and cohabit with Indian women, and remarking at the climax of its invective that its author could not ‘recollect any institution by which Residents are denied the Enjoyment of female society in the courts of eastern princes: nor a precedent by whose establishment such an Indulgence may be deemed criminal’.⁴⁷

For all its extravagant phrasing, the letter is fascinating for the light it sheds on the way James was then regarded in the cantonments: ‘In the Camp at Hyderabad,’ maintains ‘Philothetes’, ‘there is a factious party, whose very counsels are the Springs of Mischief.’ This party, he asserts, is eaten up with jealousy of James’s rapid rise: ‘On the elevation of Captain Kirkpatrick to the Representation of your Lordship at the Court of the Deccan, the companions of his youthful days offered their congratulations at the Mansion of the Resident. But, my Lord, their congratulations were chilled by Envy and their offerings disquieted by prejudice.’ So envious were Kirkpatrick’s former companions that when ‘Philothetes’ first came to Hyderabad, ‘my Ears were frequently regaled with anecdotes of the personal Eccentricities of Hushmut Jang’. Yet when he actually met him, ‘Gracious God! Affability, Politeness, and Hospitality smiled on his every countenance. The film dropped from my eyes.’

Nor, claimed ‘Philothetes’, was he alone in being impressed by James’s ‘engaging address and captivating manners’. James, he says, was exceptionally popular at the Hyderabadi durbar, and even Khair un-Nissa’s cousin Abdul Lateef Shushtari (’a respectable mussulman, to whose Name and Circumstances, your Lordship is not a stranger’) believed him to be entirely innocent in the matter of his relationship with Khair:

with the most pleasing satisfaction, I have learned that the Connection of Major Kirkpatrick with a female of that House arose in the warmest attachment of her heart, and has been cemented by the most liberal conduct on his part. He never aspired to her Seduction, nor ever sought an illicit enjoyment of her person. The Gratification of her fondest desire was her determined resolution. The disappointment of her wish would have closed her existence. In whatever point of view, my Lord, this Circumstance may be considered to the Character of Major Kirkpatrick no Crime can be attached; but the deviation from the Rules of morality according to its Restrictions only in the more polished societies of Europe.

He adds that the only reason the soldiers in the Subsidiary Force were unaware of this was that ‘throughout the Camp at Hyderabad there is not one man who possesses a sufficient knowledge of the Deckanee or Persian to open and support a conversation to whose result the stamp of precision can be legally applied’. Only James could properly speak the languages, and Wellesley should realise, says ‘Philothetes’, that ‘to the Resident of Hyderabad there is due from your Lordship the most Unlimited Confidence’. He then suggests that Wellesley seek confirmation of all this from ‘the late Resident of Poonah [i.e. the General, William’s father]’, who he says ‘will give you every Information. In a few days he will be at Calcutta.’

All this, though strangely and sometimes tactlessly expressed, would in itself have done James no harm. But where ‘Philothetes’ went badly wrong was to ask, in a manner that was deemed threatening and indeed containing hints of blackmail by Wellesley, whether the Governor General was himself entitled to criticise such amorous adventures: ‘To such an Imputation is the Character of your Lordship invulnerable? Has the daring insolence of curiosity presumed to explore the Mysteries of your secret apartments? In the inmost Recesses of your mind, are the Motives of all your actions opened to public inspection and public censure?’

The answer to this was of course no. For all his evident indignation at James’s conduct, Wellesley was no puritan. Indeed he was notoriously highly sexed, telling his wife Hyacinthe in London that if she did not join him in Calcutta it was inconceivable that he would remain faithful, as ‘I assure you that this climate excites one sexually most terribly.’ Later he repeated the same belief, simultaneously confessing that he had been true to his threat and was indeed indulging in every sort of vice: ‘As for sex, one must have it in this climate … je vais pralaquer dix fois au moins!!!!!!’^fg

The Governor General tended to take grave offence at the mildest criticism. A letter such as that written by ‘Philothetes’—in Wellesley’s eyes impudent, ignorant and threatening—sent him into a towering rage; and his response, dictated the same day to his long-suffering secretary Neil Edmonstone, rings with outraged viceregal indignation. While admitting that James was in no way responsible for what his anonymous supporter had written, Wellesley quite unreasonably went on to use the letter as a pretext for savaging James’s diplomatic record, claiming that ‘so far from possessing any claim to that elevated and commanding situation which this letter arrogates for you in a tone of such ridiculous pomp, your conduct in the execution of orders has frequently and on the most important occasions, required the direct interposition’ of Calcutta. He also reminded James that ‘you owe your continuance in your present station and the credit which you possess in it, at least as much to his Excellency’s forbearance and to his desire of forgiving occasional indiscretions, as to his love of justice’.⁴⁸

The only way James could regain the confidence of Lord Wellesley, concluded the tirade, was immediately to ‘employ your utmost endeavours for the discovery of the author of this anonymous Libel … His Excellency is confident that your zeal for the public service, together with your sense of your own character, will urge you to exert every degree of activity in discovering, and enabling His Excellency to bring to justice, a Criminal whose attempt requires the severe punishment of the Law.’

This, James realised immediately, he could never do. His response to Wellesley was measured and dignified, defending his exceptional record as Resident by mentioning merely that ‘the detail of my diplomatic services, and Lord Wellesley’s opinions on them, have long been upon record’. But he then wrote that, much as he regretted the upset the letter had caused and the insults it contained, he could in no way be expected to carry out a witch-hunt to discover the identity of ‘Philothetes’, or to be ‘instrumental in the disgrace and ruin of a person, who though he has undoubtedly merited his Lordship’s highest indignation, would be considered by the World at large as having incurred it by his zeal and attachment—however deplorable & mistaken—to my cause’.⁴⁹

This politely defiant reply fell far short of promising the sort of action Wellesley demanded. By early May, less than a month after being cleared of the charges contained in the Clive Report, and having survived one of the most thorough investigations ever mounted by the East India Company into the private life of one of its servants, James found that he was again back in the doghouse.

This time, however, he was too weary and disgusted with it all to really care. Frustrated in his career and his public life, but confident that Wellesley could not sack him for refusing to track down the writer of an anonymous letter of support, James retreated into the happiness of domesticity and fatherhood. Mentally withdrawing from the political front line, and more or less ignoring Lord Wellesley’s hurt pride, he began to focus instead on his wife and children—‘my dear little ones’, as he described them repeatedly to his brother William.

Though he continued as Resident, James’s letters show how pleasing his masters in Calcutta gradually grew less and less central to his daily concerns. By conciliation and friendship with the Nizam and the Hyderabadi durbar, he had pulled off a series of mutually beneficial treaties which set the relationship between Hyderabad and the Company on a permanent and sustainable footing. If Wellesley wished to wreck all that for the sake of greed, pride and out-and-out belligerency, then that, believed James, was his problem.

As so many have done since in the same situation, James Kirkpatrick effectively drew back, ‘to spend more time with his family’; he even took up home improvements and gardening. He went about these endeavours, however, on a rather different scale to most of his modern successors, beginning work on building what John Malcolm would later describe as a dream palace that was ‘surpassed in splendour and magnitude only by the Government House at Calcutta … [The Governor’s House] at Madras cannot even be compared to it.’

As James realised at the time, the palatial Residency that he planned, a perfect fusion of British and Mughlai tastes, and financed by the Nizam, would be a monument not only to himself, but to the close relations between Britain and Hyderabad that he had worked so hard to build, and which were now in danger of being soured for ever.⁵⁰

The British Residency in Hyderabad that James inherited from William was, as Mountstuart Elphinstone memorably pointed out in 1801, ‘laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan’.⁵¹

Ever since John Holland, the first British Resident, arrived in Hyderabad in 1779, the British had rented a beautiful but half-ruined Qutb Shahi riverside garden in which was situated ‘the house of a native gentleman, which was pleasant from being surrounded by small gardens and fountains’.⁵²This house—an open baradari pavilion lying at the centre of the rambling garden complex—had been turned into the principal dining hall and reception area of the Residency. Around it had grown up a spread of new neo-classical bungalows and mansions to house the Residency staff, many of which commanded views over the low garden wall to the waters of the Musi and the domes and minarets of the great city beyond.^fh

The Hyderabad Residency complex may have been a wonderful architectural expression of the cultural hybridity of its inhabitants; but in practical terms it was by 1800 a fairly ramshackle collection of buildings. James’s bungalow leaked, and attempts at patching it up had failed to stop the damp and decay. In August 1800, James had written to William that the upper half was ‘scarcely habitable’.⁵³ Two wet monsoon months later, the building had nearly collapsed, and James was forced to write to Calcutta to apply for funds as several of the Residency buildings were ‘now perfectly uninhabitable. Their condition indeed is such that they have with difficulty been prevented from falling so that their being taken down altogether is a matter of absolute necessity.’

Nor was decay the only problem. With the growing size of the Residency staff and the vast number of British soldiers coming to live in Hyderabad, the old Qutb Shahi pavilion which formed the centrepiece of the garden was no longer remotely adequate for throwing parties. As James wrote to Calcutta,

the Mussulman building which has always been used as a dining hall and place of public entertainment is both uncomfortable and inconvenient in a very great degree, from its being open and exposed to the South and from its roof being supported on large Gothic pillars which fill so considerable a space in the centre of the room that on particular public days I find it impossible to accommodate as I could wish the numerous guests which the increased and still increasing state of the Subsidiary Force renders me liable to.

James planned as a first improvement to ‘add a spacious Hall or Dining Room to the South or open side of [the pavilion] and immediately connected with it’. He also asked for permission to construct ‘a suite of apartments consisting of a sitting room for the reception of occasional visitors, a bed chamber and two smaller rooms for writing in or as temporary bedrooms—the whole to be sheltered by a verandah on the two sides most exposed to the weather’.⁵⁴

There was another reason for James’s sudden interest in rebuilding the Residency. In the summer of 1800, around the time he was negotiating the Subsidiary Treaty with the Nizam, his landlord, a venerable Hyderabadi amir named Nawab Shumshair Jung, had died of old age. Realising the opportunity this provided, James had asked the Nizam for both the Residency compound and some of the fields that immediately surrounded it, to be thrown in with the other land handed over to the British in the treaty.⁵⁵ The Nizam had agreed, and James’s letter asking Calcutta for funds to begin the rebuilding was written only four days after the treaty was signed. James was no longer a tenant: he was now the effective owner of the Residency, and while he had to wait for Calcutta’s say-so to rebuild the house, there was nothing to stop him immediately improving and replanning the gardens around him.

James already had the beginnings of a wonderful mango orchard thanks to the trees sent from Pune by General Palmer. Now he asked his brother William to help to procure some first-class peach trees and, a little later, enough orange trees to plant a decent orange grove. The detail of his requirements demonstrates the degree to which James was becoming a connoisseur in such matters: ‘I wish you would endeavour,’ he asked William, who was just about to catch ship back home,

to procure [in England], and send out to me under the charge of some careful trusty friend or acquaintance, a few well grown orange trees, the fruit of which can be warranted excellent of its kind. The best are, I imagine, those that are brought from Portugal. The Malta orange indeed is reckoned the highest flavoured fruit in Europe, and from its juice being red is supposed to be a graft on the Pomegranate.^fi It may be difficult, if not absolutely impracticable perhaps, to procure plants of this last …

You must know that I am turned a great gardener of late, and from what I have heard of the vast superiority of the Portuguese orange over any in this country, have a great notion that I could improve the fruit very much, by having a few European standards to engraft from. General Martin,^fj I am told, had one European orange tree at Lucknow the fruit of which was so vastly superior to anything of the kind cultivated there (where they pique themselves on the goodness of their fruit) as to render the best flavour of the best oranges of Lucknow growth perfectly insipid.

He added: ‘By the means of a few Alphonso and Massagon plants which I got from our friend [General Palmer] I hope in a few years to improve the mangoes here wonderfully … ’⁵⁶ A year later, James was still searching for more varieties of mango, and told his agent in Bombay that he was ‘desirous if it is practicable to have an orchard of those fine fruits at once, and I have now in my garden an avenue of many trees of six years growth that will I think all yield fruit next season, if only I could engraft them all from mature grafts’.⁵⁷

In the months following James’s rupture with Wellesley over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, his correspondence became more and more centred on the ‘improvements’ he was planning at the Residency. Disillusioned with diplomacy and the Company’s ambitions, which he now saw were in danger of destroying a world and a civilisation he had come to love, he concentrated instead on building a nest for his little family, and living with his wife and children in a style which mixed Mughal tastes with the ambitions of a Georgian gentleman ‘improving’ his estates.

One day he would write to his agent in Madras asking for ‘a handsome house clock’, some good ‘wheels for my chariot’ and ‘three pipes of the very best Madeira together with twelve dozen of choice Malmsey wine’; the next, he sought out the type of Mughal goods which catered to his more Indianised tastes: from Lucknow he ordered a set of best-quality hookah snakes, a large pack of scented Lucknavi tobacco and some soorayes (or surahis)—the traditional north Indian water-coolers which he believed were of much better quality than those made in Hyderabad.⁵⁸

A consistent worry was the lack of any decent china or table linen for entertaining visitors, and for years James kept writing to his various agents with requests for ‘creditable table ware, equipment I consider requisite to the station I fill, and yet it is what this Residency certainly has not had to boast of since I have been at the head of it. My table cloths and napkins I have hitherto had made up from such cloth as bazaars here afford, that is very flimsy and extravagantly dear; and my China ware is a motley collection of occasional auctions’.^59fk

A flourishing vegetable garden was another persistent goal of James’s: of one friend in Calcutta he asked for seeds of peas, French beans, lettuce, endive and celery, ‘to which may be added a little choice cabbage and cawliflower seed’.⁶⁰ In return for these, all he could offer were seeds of aubergines, which appears to have been very much the Hyderabadi vegetable of choice in the late eighteenth century. James particularly pined for ‘a good supply of potatoes, being a vegetable which I like much but have not tasted for these two years and more’—interesting evidence that at this period the potato was only grown around the three Presidency towns—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras—though it is hard now to imagine Indian cooking without aloo.⁶¹

James even tried breaking the ice with General Palmer’s uncommunicative successor in Pune, Colonel Barry Close, with some fruit-tree diplomacy. In the course of an exchange of elephants between the two men, James took up an offer from the bluff soldier of some saplings from the General’s old peach trees: ‘The Ceylon Elephant shall be sent off to you in the course of a few days,’ wrote James,

and I will readily avail myself by this opportunity of your kind offer of a few Peach Plants, which will be highly acceptable. I have now in my Garden … three very fine ungrafted China Peach Trees sent to me with several other kinds of China Fruit Trees from the botanical garden [in Calcutta] by Doctor Roxburgh.^fl If these China plants thrive—and many of them are as yet in good health, I shall be able to add three or four very fine fruits to your present stock at Poonah—The peaches you have been so good as to promise a small supply of, will also be very acceptable if not as an immediate relish, at least as the source at least of much future Enjoyment to the palate.^62fm

Within two years, James had arranged all these fruit trees into a huge orchard and kitchen garden ‘about half a mile in circumference, completely walled in, and abounding in the choicest Grapes, Mangoes (from Bombay), Peaches, Apples, Oranges, Pine Apples, Strawberries, Raspberries, together with all the horticultural productions of the best sort peculiar to Indian Gardens, or introduced into them of late years from Europe’.⁶³

He also tried to acquire a variety of gardeners from different horticultural traditions. In May 1802 he sent requests to his agent in Madras to try to find a good English gardener; five months later he was writing to Bombay trying to find one from China, having heard that Chinese gardeners were to be found in that city, and that they were particularly skilled in the growing of vegetables. For entertainments he also wished to buy

a large assortment of coloured lamps, such as are used in illuminations, and are I understand to be had in ever such quantities in and at very reasonable rate in China … [There are] two kinds, one, large lamps for hanging in trees, the other small and globular, in use for common illuminations such as emblematic figurines and mottos which they are made to represent by judicious arrangement and disposition—of the former a few hundred—or perhaps even one hundred would be sufficient for my purpose, but of the latter, a great many thousand will I imagine be requisite for an illumination or anything of a grand scale. The price of these things I am utterly unacquainted with … but if they can be procured at a moderate rate, that is a sum which would not absolutely ruin me, I should esteem it as a particular favour if you would commission such a supply for me from China.⁶⁴

Part of James seems to have felt a faint homesickness for England. Certainly, at the other side of his estate from the Mughal watercourses of ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’, in the farmland he had acquired in the treaty of 1800, he wished to create the sort of gentle, informal park that William Kent, Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton had made fashionable in the England of his youth: an arrangement that had become as central to British conceptions of peaceful, civilised refinement, as cool rippling waters and the shade of overarching broadleaf trees was to that of the Mughals. For this purpose he got teams of men to lay out, on the main axis of the Mughal pavilion, ‘Pleasure Grounds, and a paddock well stocked with Deer, of nearly a mile in circumference’.⁶⁵ To keep the deer company, he ordered from Bombay some elk and a herd of ‘Abyssinian sheep’.^66fn

Creating an expanse of pseudo-English parkland was not, however, without its problems in the middle of India, and by the end of the year James had had to send to Bombay for ‘a fire engine, or even two, to water my trees and Pleasure Grounds’ to prevent the grass withering in the intense Deccani heat.⁶⁷

Visitors to the Residency make it clear, however, that the overall style of James’s very extensive gardens remained principally Indian in inspiration: according to Malcolm, for example, they were ‘laid out more in the Oriental than European style’. Moreover, James told Kennaway that ‘the Hindoostanny Garden’ was still as he would remember it, and that he had deliberately kept it unchanged. This ‘Hindoostanny Garden’ appears to have been a typical irrigated Mughal char bagh with rippling rills, thickets of fruit trees and flowing fountains; it lay in the corner of the compound beside Khair un-Nissa’s Rang Mahal.

With James’s clear fondness for Indian paradise gardens in mind,^fo it is intriguing to wonder how much he discussed gardening with the Nizam, Aristu Jah and his friends in the Hyderabad durbar. For just as Nizam Ali Khan’s highly cultured reign had led to a revival of Hyderabad as a centre of Deccani literary and artistic endeavour, so the Nizam’s interest in the art of gardening led to a revival of the Deccan’s remarkable traditions of Indo-Islamic horticulture.

The court chronicles of Nizam Ali’s reign from the 1790s onwards are suddenly full of references to visits to gardens, and to new gardens being built around Hyderabad: for example Aristu Jah’s chief wife, Sarwar Afza Begum, built a huge new char bagh named Suroor Nagar, where the Minister used to go to relax. Beside it she created a deer park where Aristu Jah, the Nizam and the men of their families would hunt black buck.⁶⁸ Mir Alam was also a passionate lover of gardens, and was so proud of his creations that towards the end of his life he opened his char bagh to the public in spring; according to the Gulzar-i-Asafiya people would flock there to relax and to fly kites.⁶⁹ The Hyderabadi miniatures of the period, especially those by the court artist Venkatchellam, are particularly concerned with the cultivated Arcadia of the pleasure garden, and the fountains and ranked cedar trees of the irrigated garden became the standard background to all Hyderabadi portraits of the time.⁷⁰ The famous Venkatchellam image of Aristu Jah’s son Ma’ali Mian, for example, shows him sitting in a garden sniffing a flower and admiring a tame hawk as five small fountain jets play amid the roses and dragonflies at his feet, and clouds of rosy parakeets fly to roost in the banana trees and toddy palms that frame the scene.⁷¹

Moreover, it was during Nizam Ali’s reign that a great number of gardening books came to be written, translated and copied: one particularly influential manual named the Risala i-Baghbani was written in Golconda at the beginning of Nizam Ali’s reign in 1762. These books contain wonderful passages of advice to Hyderabadi gardeners which mix the scientific with the pseudo-scientific, the useful and well-observed with more eccentric—and probably rather less useful—items of mali’s lore and old wives’ tales. TheRisala, for example, recommends that melons can be made especially sweet and tasty if, before planting, their seeds are stored in mounds of fresh rose petals, and if honey, dates, cows’ milk and chopped liquorice are dug into the plants’ roots. Bananas meanwhile can be encouraged to elongate to become as long and as firm as elephant tusks ‘if an iron bar dipped in a steamy mix of animal wastes’ is used to ‘scorch’ the tree.⁷²

The Khazan wa-Bahar, another contemporary Deccani gardening treatise, contains a great deal of detailed information which would have been of interest to James. This is especially so in the section on the planting of fruit trees, which it recommends should be done by the light of the waning moon if the gardener wishes to promote the growth of fruit rather than the trees’ size. To prevent disease the earth should be fertilised with pigeon dung and olive-leaf extract, while wild onions should be planted around the tree’s base. The anonymous writer also has advice to those, like James, who had problems getting their mango trees to fruit. A barren tree, he advises, will suddenly spring into life if it is loudly threatened with the axe, or if the appropriate Koranic verses are tied to its branches.⁷³ Had James read the Khazan wa-Bahar he would have learned that he could have produced seedless grapes by applying musk and opium to the roots of his vines; grow bright-red apples by pegging down the lower branches with an iron bar; and stimulate his peach trees to fruit by inserting pine or willow cuttings in the roots. He would also have learned of some intriguing methods of ecologically sound pest control: black hellebore and mustard planted at the entrance of a garden would keep away snakes, while filling his vegetable patch with turnips, cabbage, radish and broad beans would free the garden from mosquitoes.

Another concept that James would have come across among the garden connoisseurs of Hyderabad was the lovely idea of the evening garden. By day, the ‘flowers of the sun’ were there to be admired for their beauty; but as the sun set at the end of the day, other ‘flowers of the night’ came to the fore, to be enjoyed for their scent or for the glow of their foliage in the light of the moon. In these specially planted areas, marble pavilions would be arranged with bolsters and carpets for nights of wine, music, poetry and the company of women, all surrounded by beds of carefully selected night flowers. Here the heady perfume of tuberose would mix with that of chandni, the moon-flower, said to diffuse the sweetest perfume on nights when the moon shone brightly. The importance of such scents was a central concept in Islamic thought, an idea which derived from the Hadith, attributed to the Prophet: ‘Scent is the food of the soul, and the soul is the vehicle of the faculties of man.’⁷⁴

It is impossible now to say whether James was familiar with the finer points of the aesthetics of the Deccani garden, and whether he made an attempt to maintain his Residency char bagh according to these traditions. However, given what is known about his fondness for Hyderabadi food, architecture, clothes, poetry and women, and given his feeling for plants and gardening, it would be extraordinary if he did not. Certainly there are two clear hints that he was indeed as au fait with current fashions in Hyderabadi garden design as one would have expected. The first is his eclectic choice of trees for the Residency, many of which are still alive and which show a close similarity to those selected at the same time by Mah Laqa Bai Chanda in the shady walled garden she built to surround her mother’s tomb below the hill of Maula Ali, notably the extensive use of the relatively rare mulsarry (or Indian medlar).^fp

The second hint is the Residency pigeon tower, and the pigeon pots which still survive in the ruins of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal. Pigeon-fancying was never a feature of the Georgian gentleman’s house, and no other examples are known in British India. It was however central to the idea of refinement in the social life of a Mughal nobleman, with flying pigeons regarded as an essential part of the cultivated enjoyment of a gentleman’s pleasure garden. This seems to have been especially the case in Hyderabad: the Khazan wa-Bahar dedicates a whole chapter to the subject of the pigeon and its place in the garden of a civilised Hyderabadi amir.

Not only were pigeons supposed to keep snakes away, and their excrement deemed ideal for the cultivation of fruit trees; their voices—or rather their billing and cooing—were believed to be stimulating for the human intellect. The anonymous author of theKhazan advises his reader to burn incense and to mix mastaki (mastic or terbinth) and honey in the pigeons’ water, in order to keep them content and happy in the garden.⁷⁵

Somehow, it seems impossible to imagine that James and Khair un-Nissa did not closely follow this advice.

After the departure of the Palmers in April 1802, explicit details of the daily life and routine of James’s two children and their young mother become frustratingly elusive. It is as if they have retreated out of the sudden shaft of sunlight provoked by the visit of Fyze and the General, and disappeared back into the shadows. We know they are there, and it is clear that James is increasingly spending his time with them; but only occasionally do the clouds roll back to let the sun briefly break through once more. One day Khair and Sahib Allum are glimpsed sending their greetings and more parcels of bangles to Fyze and Fanny Palmer; on another the two children are being sent off to Dr Ure to be inoculated against smallpox, or possibly cholera: as James reported to the General in October 1802, ‘Both my little ones here have been vaccinated, and are enjoying excellent health and spirits … By the bye, I have prevailed on Nizzy and Solomon to render vaccination general, by introducing the practice into their own families.’⁷⁶

Nevertheless, reading carefully between the lines, it is possible to piece together some fairly detailed information about James’s domestic life and the choices that he made as to the upbringing of his young family. It is quite clear, for example, that the children were brought up by Khair and her mother—assisted by a great retinue of serving girls, aseels and wetnurses—in a more or less entirely Hyderabadi environment. They were raised as Muslims, had Mughal names, spoke Persian (or possibly Deccani Urdu) as their first language (Khair un-Nissa spoke no English⁷⁷) and wore typical aristocratic Hyderabadi dress. They do not seem to have been introduced to the Europeans of the Residency,⁷⁸ and given their aristocratic status were probably not encouraged to play with the other Anglo-Indian children on the campus, such as Henry Russell’s child by his unnamed (and therefore probably non-aristocratic) mistress.⁷⁹ All the indications are that the mahal was like a detached fragment of the old city dropped into the middle of the semi-Anglicised world of the Residency, and that James’s children mixed mainly with the children of the zenanas of other Hyderabadi nobles, and especially with the inhabitants of Aristu Jah’s mansion.⁸⁰

Held firmly within the cultural and religious embrace of Mughlai Hyderabad, the children must presumably have undergone the normal cycle of ceremonies and initiations that would mark the childhood of any other Deccani Muslim child of their rank and status. The birth itself was the first staging-post on this ceremonial journey. On the day of delivery, almost as soon as the baby had been cleaned and swaddled, the call to prayer, the Azan, would be recited into the babe’s right ear, followed by the Kalima (or creed), which would be read into the left. The idea was to introduce the holy words into the ears of the child as it first opened its eyes, after which paan would be distributed among eagerly waiting friends and relatives. Then a little piece of dried date, chewed by a respected scholar or qazi, would be inserted into the child’s mouth, followed shortly afterwards by a little honey water, sucked through a piece of clean, soft cloth—the former being a Middle Eastern custom, the latter a Hindu one, both of which were absorbed into and became part of the composite Deccani Mughal culture. After this, the child would be applied to the breast for the first time. As was the custom among aristocratic Mughal women, Khair un-Nissa did not breastfeed her children herself, instead giving them to a wetnurse, who in some Mughal zenanas could continue feeding the child up to the age of three or even four.⁸¹

The choice of a wetnurse was considered a matter of the greatest importance, as it was believed that with her milk were transferred some of her spiritual and moral qualities. Honest, pious, good-tempered women of unimpeachable reputation were sought out for the job, especially those from grand or Sayyid families who had for one reason or another fallen into poverty; after they had finished suckling, they and their own children were brought to live in the family mansion as honoured and respected members of the household.^82fq Nothing is known of the family backgrounds of Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum’s wetnurses, Ummat ul-Fatimeh and Maham Aloopaim[?],^fr but both continued to live in Sharaf un-Nissa’s household, with their sons and daughters, and were still there forty years later when Sharaf un-Nissa sent their greetings to her two beloved grandchildren.⁸³

Two or three days into breastfeeding a girl, another small rite of passage took place. In India it has always been the custom—though the practice is completely unknown in the West—to squeeze the nipples of a suckling child so that small ‘milkdrops’ emerge. This is believed to be of great medicinal value, and is said to ensure the future well-being of the breast. In the case of female babies of Mughal families, the brother of the infant was asked to suckle the ‘milkdrop’ so produced; this was believed to create a deep bond of love between a brother and his sister, as the Emperor Jehangir recorded in his diaries. His sister Shakar un-Nissa Begum was, he writes,

of good disposition and naturally compassionate towards all people. From infancy and childhood she had been extremely fond of me, and there can be few such close relationships between a brother and a sister. The first time when, according to the custom of pressing the breast of a child and a drop of milk is perceptible, they pressed my sister’s breast and a drop of milk appeared, my revered father [the Emperor Akbar] said to me: ‘Baba! Drink this milk that in truth this sister may be to thee as a mother.’ God the Knower of Secrets, knows that from that day forward, after I drank that drop of milk, I have felt love for my sister such as children have for their mothers... ⁸⁴

The custom is still current among many Indian families—Hindu and Muslim—today. It was certainly the practice in Mughal families of James Kirkpatrick’s period, and the women of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal would no doubt have expected Sahib Allum to taste his sister’s ‘milkdrops’ in just this manner.^85fs

On the sixth, seventh or ninth day after the birth, a Mughal family would normally hold the chatthi, or birth celebration, when the mother and child would be bathed and clothed in costly new dresses—another Mughal borrowing from Hindu tradition. The same day, the aqiqa, or the first shaving of the child’s head, would take place with a silver razor; the shaved head was rubbed in saffron, and goats sacrificed (two for a boy, one for a girl) to remove impurities and preserve against the evil eye. Alms would then be distributed among the poor.

The evening of the chatthi, tradition dictated that the house would be cleaned and illuminated, and guests entertained by fireworks, singers and dancing girls, as well as feasted with the most precious and costly food. Guests would present gifts of infants’ clothes, such as embroidered kurtas andtopis (long shirts and skullcaps), with further trunkloads of presents—jewels, toys and sweetmeats—being presented by the mother’s relations. Finally, at the climax of the chatthi, the mother of the child, along with her girlfriends, would carry the infant into an open courtyard and then, for the first time, ‘tare dikhana’, show the child the stars in the night sky. While this was happening, so the Mughals believed, the child’s destiny was written by the angel whose duty it was to record a person’s fate.⁸⁶

Khair un-Nissa, one can presume, would have insisted on all the basic traditional ceremonies being performed for her children: the remark in Sahib Allum’s birth note, that Khair called her son Ali after dreaming of the Prophet’s son-in-law, would seem to point to her particular piety. Nor does James seem likely to have opposed his children being brought up as Muslims. He had, after all, been prepared himself to undergo a formal conversion ceremony to marry Khair, and although there is no unequivocal evidence that he regularly practised his new faith, or regarded himself as an active Muslim, his mother-in-law, who lived closely with him, certainly believed him to be such, as did his Munshi, Aziz Ullah.^ft

What is certain is that James respected Islam and made sure, for example, that the Residency gave money to Hyderabad Sufi shrines. But his attraction to the faith is likely to have been as much cultural as religious. His own letters to Europeans deliberately use vague and Deist terms for God—he refers at one stage for example to ‘Bounteous Providence’⁸⁷—rather than more specifically sectarian terms such as ‘Christ’ or ‘Allah’, and this vague approach to religious boundaries would seem to have fitted in well with the widespread Indian belief, very much lying at the heart of Deccani culture with its strong Sufi and Bhakti influences, that all faiths were really one, and that there were many different paths up the mountain. Hyderabad’s principal festivals, after all, were Shi’ite but were attended by Sunni Muslims, Christians and Hindus alike. Clear European ideas of the firm and heavily defended frontiers separating different religions were quite alien to Hyderabadi culture, and in this fluid and porous atmosphere James’s broadly Deist approach to his faith would have fitted in easily both with those Europeans who had embraced the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and with the general outlook of the Hyderabadis around him.^fu

Even so, it would be intriguing to know if James would have been confident enough to hold such large and public non-Christian ceremonies as the chatthi for his wife and babies in the Residency compound, within view of his less open-minded colleagues. If not, might he have held them in Bâqar Ali Khan’s mansion in the old city? It is clear that Khair and Sharaf un-Nissa kept their deorhi townhouse in use, frequently visiting Sharaf’s mother Durdanah Begum who was still residing there, while living principally at the Residency mahal. We also know, intriguingly, that James used to keep ‘three or four [spare] setts’ of his Mughal robes, cummerbunds and turbans there, including some of the especially fine quality normally used by nobles at the durbar.⁸⁸ This then was perhaps the most likely place for him to have held the chatthi, in a venue that Khair’s relations could have more easily reached and felt at ease within—though even so the ceremonies would have doubtless appeared a little strange to Hyderabadis, as James had no female family relations on his side to host the zenana celebrations as in a normal Mughal family.

In the weeks and months that followed the birth of James’s children, a further succession of rites and ceremonies would continue to mark the babies’ progress to health and toddlerhood. Most of these took place in the zenana wing with only women invited, and commemorated various significant mileposts in the child’s life: the chillah, marking the child’s fortieth day and the mother’s release from confinement;^fv the ceremony attendant on the first piercing of a girl’s ears by a barber to allow her to wear earrings;^fw or the moment when a little girl’s hair was plaited for the first time,^‡ all of which were followed by a small celebration and a general distribution of sweets.

The final ceremony of early childhood was the bismillah, when a child’s education would begin, usually at the age of three or (more usually) four.^fx A girl was dressed as a bride and a special scented powder was rubbed over her body; boys were dressed as grooms. They were then presented to their tutor in the presence of guests, after which they recited, following the tutor’s instruction, the whole of the ninety-sixth chapter of the Koran, the Surah Iqra. After this their study of the Arabic alphabet would begin.

Throughout her children’s childhood, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Khair un-Nissa.

Though she was the central figure in the life of James’s family, and clearly a quietly forceful personality, the loss of her letters means that today we can see her only obliquely, reflected through the eyes of her lover, her husband, her mother and her children. Only rarely—and then indirectly—are her own words recorded. Nevertheless, through the impressions of her family and her own actions, a coherent mosaic does emerge.

Khair was clearly a pious, impulsive and emotional woman, as well as being a remarkably brave and determined figure when the need arose, and few people—certainly not her mother, grandmother or husband—seemed willing or able to stand in her way once she had made up her mind about something.^fy She was educated and literate and wrote frequent letters. She was also very generous—constantly loading her friends with presents of clothes and jewellery—and had the gift of friendship: she is frequently recorded as being surrounded by her friends.⁸⁹ Her children remembered her as a gentle and loving mother, and a much milder figure than James, whom Sahib Allum recalled, surprisingly perhaps, as a slightly stern father—at least initially: many years later he wrote to his sister that he had discovered some copies of James’s old letters to the Handsome Colonel in which it was clear that ‘you [Sahib Begum] were allowed to be over indulged in consequence of my father having found the ill-effect of over-severity to me, and the terror of which severity he says all his subsequent kindness could hardly soothe me out of’.⁹⁰

We do catch the occasional glimpse of Khair un-Nissa’s hobbies and pastimes. The evidence of the pigeon pots in her mahal would seem to indicate that she liked flying pigeons, as did many other Hyderabadi Begums, judging by the frequency with which it appears as a motif of Hyderabadi painting at this time. She was also creative, amusing herself making (or at least designing) jewellery and bangles, and together she and James developed an interest in precious stones. In a postscript to one of his letters to William, James lets slip that he and Khair ‘have discovered here by mere accident that the opal which turns opaque in the hot winds completely recovers its clearness and colour by immersion in water, for a greater or less time according to their size and degree of opacity. The opal must therefore be classed among the Hydrophanous gems.’⁹¹ It is a lovely image: Khair un-Nissa busily creating her jewellery; James looking on, the amateur Georgian gemmologist scratching his head as the opals change colour and trying to work out his geological classifications.

One set of her jewel creations Khair sent as a present for her nieces, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters. Many years later a necklace from this consignment found its way back to Sahib Begum, who treasured it as a rare memento of her long-dead mother. In a letter to Sharaf un-Nissa she wrote: ‘I possess a necklace & bracelets of beads interweaved with small pearls made by my mother & sent by my mother to one of my cousins—as it has passed through my mother’s fingers, it is the possession I treasure the most.’⁹² Khair also made (or, again, at least designed) clothes, which she sent as presents to her family and friends, embroidery being one of the traditional pursuits of Mughal Begums, and a skill in which Nur Jehan (and many other imperial princesses such as Aurangzeb’s daughter Zeb un-Nissa) was especially accomplished. As an adult, one of Sahib Begum’s strongest memories of her Hyderabadi childhood was ‘the place [presumably just outside the mahal] where the tailors worked’.⁹³

As to the games and the toys with which Khair played with her children, Sahib Begum later remembered some sort of slide on the flat roof of the mahal, while we know that James asked his agent to send out from England ‘a few Europe dolls in high Court Dress’ for the children to play with—possibly as a way of familiarising them with European dress and complexions.

As a home for the dolls, James built a four-foot-high model of his planned new Residency mansion. The model still lies (albeit now in a ruinous state) immediately behind the remains of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal and within its old enclosure wall. Later tradition in the Residency has it that it was built for Khair, who was locked so deep in purdah that she could not go around the front of the house to see what it looked like—but this story (still current in the town) clearly has no basis in reality, as there is ample evidence that Khair frequently and freely travelled around Hyderabad to visit her friends and family. It would also have been normal for aristocratic Mughal women in purdah to travel out from their mansions for picnics, pilgrimages, visits to shrines and hunting expeditions. ⁹⁴The model is much more likely to be a dolls’ house which James constructed, possibly as a birthday present, for one or both of his beloved children.^fz

It was some time before a reply was received from Calcutta in response to James’s request for money to repair and rebuild his collapsing Residency. Funds were sanctioned, but they fell far short of what James wanted or needed: a ceiling of twenty-five thousand rupees^ga was put on the expenditure.

This far from generous offer was particularly mean coming from Wellesley, who had just earmarked the most colossal sum for building himself a vast new Government House in Calcutta, in order, so he said, to protect him from the ‘stupidity and ill-bred familiarity’ of Calcutta society; at the end of four years, the house, modelled on Keddlestone Hall in Derbyshire, had cost a colossal £63,291.^gb Visitors certainly admired the new building, designed by Lieutenant Charles Wyatt of the Bengal Engineers, and Lord Valentia famously observed that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’; but it was this spendthrift use of Company funds that more than anything gradually eroded Wellesley’s support among the Company Directors, and put in train a series of decisions in London that ended with his recall in 1805.⁹⁵

Already, by early 1803, the Directors of the Company were sending shots across Wellesley’s bows, fiercely attacking Lord Clive’s far less grand constructions in Madras, and making it quite clear that ‘it by no means appears to us essential to the well-being of our Government in India that the pomp, magnificence and ostentation of the Native Governments should be adopted by the former; the expense that such a system would naturally lead to must prove highly injurious to our commercial interests. ’⁹⁶ But no one in London, it seems, had the slightest idea of the scale of the building Wellesley was engaged in constructing, and when the bill arrived at the Company headquarters in Leadenhall Street, the Directors were appalled by ‘this work of unexampled extent and magnificence … undertaken without any previous or regular communication with us’.⁹⁷

It is not clear whether James hinted about the Residency’s financial straits to Aristu Jah, or whether the Minister came to learn of the state of the Residency buildings by direct observation. Whatever the truth, sometime in 1802 he suggested to James that in the absence of Company funds he might apply to the Nizam for money, an offer which James immediately took up. According to the story which James later told John Malcolm, he

requested the Engineer of the English force stationed at Hyderabad to make an exact survey of the spot, and when this was finished upon a large sheet carried to the Durbar, where showing it to the Nizam, requested he would give the English Government a grant of the land. The Prince, after gravely examining the survey, said he was sorry he could not comply with the request.

When the Resident was retiring, not a little disconcerted at the refusal of a favour which seemed so trifling, the Minister⁹⁸ said to him with a smile, ‘Do not be annoyed. You frightened the Nizam with the size of the plan you showed him. Your fields were almost as large as any of the maps of his Kingdom he had yet seen. No wonder,’ said he, laughing, ‘that he did not like to make such a cession. Make a survey upon a reduced scale, and the difficulty will vanish.’ The Resident could hardly believe this would be the case. But when, at his next interview, he presented the same plan upon a small card, the ready and cheerful assent of the Prince satisfied him that the [Minister] had been quite correct in his guess of the cause of the former failure.⁹⁹

In his youth Nizam Ali Khan had won himself the throne by a combination of ruthlessness and charisma; he was also a notable orator.^gc But by 1802 this once formidable warrior was a toothless sixty-eight-year-old, and after a lifetime of energetic activity had recently suffered not one but two debilitating strokes, which had left him weak, listless and partly paralysed. He now spent his days sipping camels’ milk (the cure his unani doctors had recommended for his paralysed right arm and leg) and fishing for tame carp in the pools of the palace, a diversion in which he sometimes invited James to join him. His other great passions were flying pigeons, evenings of music and poetry, and disembowelling European clocks.

Over his years in Hyderabad James had grown very fond of the Nizam, and not only indulged all his whims, but went out of his way to please ‘the old gentleman’ (as he usually called him in his letters). James had been present at the late-night music party when the Nizam had had his first stroke after becoming over-excited by the dancing of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Subsequently he had gone out of his way to find him a pair of ‘prodigious’ spice island doves, ‘each as large as a goose’, as ornaments for his pigeon collection, and a young lioness for his menagerie. These presents were not just a function of James’s undoubted generosity; they were useful policy, and James privately believed that he might never have pulled off the Subsidiary Treaty of 1800 had he not found the Nizam three items for which he had especially asked: a particularly intricate piece of clockwork ‘with cascades and fountains represented by glass set in motion’, ‘an artificial singing bird … an automaton, set with jewels … representing the plumage [and] thirdly a fur cloak … from Nepaul … a most acceptable present to the old gentleman, who even in this hot weather is always wrapped up in a fur dress or shawls’.¹⁰⁰

James also did his best to protect the Nizam from the host of dubious magicians, faith-healers and Dervish quacks who, at Aristu Jah’s bidding, tended to collect around his sickbed (Aristu Jah being, according to James, ‘besotted with astrology and necromancy’¹⁰¹). He was able to arrest English quacks who had manoeuvred their way into the Nizam’s presence—in May 1802 he expelled from Hyderabad ‘an imposter who had passed himself off with the Nizam and the Minister as a famous alchemist’ ¹⁰²—but he had less influence with local Hyderabadi faith-healers and medicine men, and was particularly worried by one ‘wizard’ who began feeding the ‘old gentleman’ large quantities of mercury. As James told William:

I must inform you that the Nizam though he looked so much better at my late visit has taken it into his head to try a medicine which if he continues (as I understand he means to do) for any considerable time, will, by all I can learn, send him to a certainty to his eternal home in a twelve month or less. This medicine is neither more or less than an amalgam of mercury recommended to him by an ambitious quack as an infallible cure for the palsy, and so it certainly is in one sense … By way of having company in the shades below, he kindly associates Solomon [Aristu Jah], and the Bakshi Begum [his senior wife] in this regimen, and I saw Solomon and himself take their prescribed doses together, at my late audience.¹⁰³

Six months later, James was surprised to discover that the Nizam was still taking the mercury, and yet showing remarkably few signs of its ill-effects, though James hoped that he was beginning to tire of the ‘wizard’ who was feeding it to him: ‘His Highness certainly has, as Colonel Palmer observes, as many lives as a cat,’ he wrote,

or he surely what with age, infirmity, debauchery and quackery would have been numbered ’ere this year with his forefathers. He is now taking mercury again (which once was so near doing his business^gd) under the direction of the Wizard, introduced to him by Conjuror Solomon, who still has great faith in his diabolic medical skills. The wizard himself however disclaims infallibility, and if my private information can be relied upon, is preparing, probably from fear, to vanish: having already by way of preparation declared, that when the foul fiend, or djinn whom he avows to converse with, takes a stick into his hand, he thinks nothing of seizing and transporting him in the twinkling of an eye to the antipodes.¹⁰⁴

James’s affection for the increasingly eccentric Nizam was more than returned. The Nizam used to address him as ‘Beloved Son’, and once the plan for the Residency had been reduced to the size of a card he had been happy to authorise not only the handing over of the adjacent fields, but had generously offered to cover the cost of the rebuilding himself.

No sooner had the Nizam agreed to pay for the building than James set to work planning a Residency mansion rather larger and more substantial than he had originally envisaged when applying for funds from Calcutta. The magnificent Residency at Hyderabad has traditionally been attributed to Samuel Russell, and there is no doubt that Russell oversaw the last part of the building’s completion, and may have added to or refined the final plan. But equally it is quite clear from James’s letters that the initial plans, and the beginning of construction, were undertaken by James himself with the help of an anonymous Indian ‘maistry’ ^ge architect, who was apparently trained in Mughal methods before being taught a basic grammar of contemporary neo-classical forms by the British. James’s letters reveal that behind the construction of the apparently perfect European classical form of the Palladian Hyderabad Residency lay a Mughal-trained architect. As with so many features of life in the East India Company, look under an apparently English veneer and one finds a more complicated, hybrid Anglo-Mughal reality.

In October 1802, some six months after the storm over the ‘Philothetes’ letter, James wrote to James Brunton, a friend in Madras, with a set of detailed instructions and a request for him to start work collecting the men and materials that would be needed to begin work on his great project. Very little is known about the details of the architecture of the East India Company at this period, as buildings tended to be erected in a fairly ad hoc fashion by military engineers rather than trained architects. Most buildings in the three British Presidency towns were copies of originals in England, constructed from plates in books like Robert Adam’s Works of Architecture or Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, although they were given a superficial gloss of Oriental features, such as blinds and verandahs, essential for the climate. Few original plans, or correspondence, survive to indicate the ideas, conceptions and ambitions that lay behind these buildings, and in this—as in so many other areas—James’s letters are unusually illuminating and well worth quoting in full: ‘Being about to build a new mansion at this Residency,’ he wrote to Brunton on 6 October 1802,

and desirous of it being erected both with taste and solidity, I could wish to have the advice and aid of a Madras Native Architect, and a few artisans, such as Maistry Bricklayers, Smiths and Carpenters. You will therefore oblige me by setting on foot enquiries immediately and procuring me one of the first description, two or three of the second, and one of each of the latter, taking particular care that they are each sufficiently expert in their respected professions, and that their monthly wages shall be on as reasonable a scale as possible.

I am willing to pay them their travelling expenses and to make such addition to the wages which Men of their description earn at Madras as you may deem liberal; and maybe a sufficient encouragement to them to undertake the journey with perhaps one half or two thirds more than they got in their own country—with an engagement of one year certain.

What I mean by a native architect, is what is termed here a Ruaz or an expert accomplished mason, conversant in the different orders of European architecture. The Maistry bricklayers I require must work themselves in brick and mortar as an example to the native Hyderabad bricklayers who will work under them, and be masters of the art of laying on fine chunam [polished lime plaster]. The maistry smith and carpenter must also be expert in handicrafts, and well acquainted with house timber work—such as ceiling, flooring, door and window making; which the smiths and carpenters here are but rough workmen in.¹⁰⁵

In a final, characteristically thoughtful postscript, James said he was happy to arrange for part of the workmen’s wages to be paid direct to their families in Madras.

Within a few months the masons and architects had been found and duly despatched to Hyderabad. By the early summer of 1803, the foundations were already being laid for one of the most ambitious buildings to be erected in the Deccan for over a hundred years. James’s main concern now was to remain in his post long enough to complete this project; and on this score he had good reason to worry.

Not only was he completely and irreparably out of favour with Lord Wellesley, his health was in decline too. His rheumatism grew worse over the course of 1802, and towards the end of the year he developed some severe hepatitic complaint that left him bedridden for a month, and very weak for the entire first quarter of 1803. He never entirely recovered from the disease and suffered from intermittent relapses the rest of his life. For the first time, Dr Ure began to mutter about James considering following his half-brother William back to Europe.

England was no longer the place that James really considered to be his home. He had been born in India, and had spent all but eleven years of his life there. Like General Palmer, he felt most himself in India, and returning to England was the last thing he wanted. But as his health continued to decline, it increasingly became a prospect he was forced to hold in reserve, to consider as a final option, if the worst came to the worst.