White Mughals Read online

  In his letters home at this time James duly writes of Tipu’s ‘boundless ambition and unrelenting cruelty’, but even at this early period he was unusual among his compatriots in that he saw many qualities to admire in the Sultan of Mysore. He writes that, ‘born and bred in camp, and tutored in the science of war under a great master [i.e. his father Haidar Ali], Tipoo possesses all the characteristic valour and hardiness of the soldier while his achievements in the Fields of Mars are far from discrediting the precepts inculcated by his father’. The various British reverses and defeats bore ample witness to Tipu’s ‘skill in arms. If he is at all addicted to, or versed with the arts of peace it has scarcely been in his power to cultivate them … his whole reign having been one continued state of military preparations or actual warfare’. Moreover, James was astonished by Tipu Sultan’s bravery and his spirit of resistance. Despite the Company’s successful counterattack there was no evidence that Tipu’s ‘firmness is shaken or his perseverance abated’, and although four armies were now advancing in strength towards him, ‘if he has as yet made any offers of submission it is more than I have heard of’.33

  In contrast, James’s elder brother William saw Tipu merely as a caricature: a one-dimensional monster, the worst possible incarnation of ‘Oriental despotism’. For him Tipu was a ‘cruel and relentless enemy’, an ‘intolerant bigot’, a ‘furious fanatic’, an ‘oppressive and unjust ruler … [a] sanguinary tyrant, [a] perfidious negociator’, and, to top it all, a ‘mean and minute economist’.34 In these very different perceptions of Indian rule lay the seeds of much future disagreement between the two brothers.

  James survived the bloodshed of the Third Mysore War quite unscathed, only to be badly wounded three months later, in bed, by his own orderly. One morning he woke on his camp bed to find the man, ‘who was of Mughal descent’, stealing from his trunk. The orderly rushed out, then reappeared shortly afterwards with two of James’s own swords. James wrote an anonymous third-person account of the incident for the Madras Courier:… defenceless and nearly naked as he had risen from his bed … two deadly blows were warded by his hands which though cut deeply were saved from absolute amputation by a letter which happened providentially to be clenched in it. Thus maimed and incapable of further resistance, his last resource was in flight, in attempting which two other wounds inflicted with a deadly aim brought him down. When the blood thirsty and insatiable miscreant thinking he had dispatched him, turned about in search of more victims but not finding any within his reach, and having worked as he doubtless thought at the time mischief hopeless of pardon, he drew his dagger, and in a frenzy of despair, plunged it eight successive times into his own remorseless bosom.35

  The attack shook James, and made him fundamentally review his life in India. During his convalescence he wrote to the Handsome Colonel, weighing up where he stood in the service after fourteen years. He was not optimistic: ‘My prospects of promotion,’ he wrote, ‘are as distant at this moment as when I embarked, there being at this moment a hundred Lieutenants above me on the infantry list [who would all receive promotion before him]. Should matters remain on this present footing I cannot reasonably expect more than ten steps yearly, at which rate ten long years must elapse before I attain the rank of Captain—that is to say after a service or rather servitude of three and twenty years.’36 It was a promotion his talented elder brother had managed after just a decade in India.

  James had had some letters of introduction at the beginning of the war, but they did not seem to have had the slightest effect. He had given General Sir William Meadows his letter, but ‘the little general was too deeply engaged storming forts and other warlike achievements to acknowledge their receipt, so I can say nothing as to the benefits I may expect to reap from them’. He had letters ‘from Col. Fullarton to his relation Col. Maxwell still unused, and Col. Maxwell is said to have great influence with Lord Cornwallis’. But all in all, James acknowledged, his prospects were not promising, and he pleaded with his father to exert his influence somehow to improve his lot.37 Suddenly missing the comforts and facilities of home, he also asked the Colonel to send out ‘a few dozen of Velna’s Vegetable Syrup, the efficacy of which I was made fully sensible of in my passage out. The want of vegetables during a long campaign has occasioned a return of my old scorbutic complaint.’

  At this point, just when he least expected it, influence was exerted on James’s behalf only just four months later; and it came from a totally unexpected and quite unsolicited quarter. In July, his brother’s friend, the newly knighted Sir John Kennaway, wrote to him out of the blue from Hyderabad inviting him to stay, and offering to help him in any way he could. At James’s request, Kennaway intervened with James’s commanding officer, and by August had got him the command of the distant fort at Vizianagram, in tribal territory thirty miles north-west of the important east-coast port of Vizagapatam.38 Vizianagram is, even today, a remote and impoverished spot, surrounded by barren hills and scrappy, scattered tribal outposts. At the end of the eighteenth century it was even more inaccessible, far removed from the centre of things. But at least it was a command, a start.

  Then, only three months after James’s appointment at Vizianagram, William wrote to him from Calcutta with the news of his new appointment as Resident at Hyderabad. He invited his brother to join him in some capacity there, telling him to think about the offer, and that they would discuss it when they met: William would be passing Vizagapatam on his way from Bengal in six weeks’ time.

  William’s journey down the east coast was a slow one. French privateers working out of Mauritius made it impossible for him to travel by boat,39 much the quickest route: ten days on a good wind could have taken him to the port of Masulipatam, then a week’s journey up the old Golconda road would have brought him to Hyderabad. But as this was impossible, he was forced to travel by camel and elephant, and to make his way slowly down the spine of the Eastern Ghats, between the peaks and teak forests of the ghats and the blue coves and inlets of the Bay of Bengal. The brothers met at Vizagapatam, on the northern reaches of the Coromandel coast.ak

  It was a warm Christmas Eve, and James took little persuading to give up his garrison duties and throw in his lot with William. That night, on James’s instructions, the two brothers drafted a letter in William’s name to James’s commanding officer asking him to approve a transfer to Hyderabad.

  The brothers spent Christmas together, probably for the first time. But it quickly became clear that James’s discharge would take longer than hoped to wind its way through the Company’s military bureaucracy. It was agreed, therefore, that for the time being he should stay in Vizianagram, and William should head on to Hyderabad alone. After a long period of truce and even friendship, war was again said to be brewing between the Nizam of Hyderabad and his old enemies the Marathas, and it was vital for William to get to Hyderabad as soon as possible to do what he could to forestall it.

  William arrived in Hyderabad a month later to find—ominously—that Nizam Ali Khan, the elderly ruler of Hyderabad, was not in his city, but had decamped to the ancient Deccani capital of Bidar, the impregnable fortress that most closely abutted the Hyderabad—Maratha frontier. There it was said he was already engaged in amassing a grand army. Stopping in Hyderabad only long enough to order ‘wax candles, Patna potatoes, some raspberry and cherry brandy, garden peas, good coffee, a pipe of hock and some good red port’,40 William got back on his elephant and set off on the eighty-mile journey to Bidar.

  The road passed through a landscape whose wasted state testified to the unstable and violent history of the region over the previous 150 years. The flat expanses of neglected and untilled former cotton fields were dotted with heavily fortified villages and burned-out fortlets. A contemporary English traveller described the same journey in pessimistic terms: ‘as for the country I have passed through, nothing can be more melancholy than the appearance of it. Deserted villages, unfrequented roads, and the traces of former cultivation, make the scene more pai
nful than it otherwise would be, by showing what it has once been, and aggravating the look of the present misery, by the contrast of former blessings.’ The same observer also mentioned passing ‘some bodies of predatory horse plundering the country we have passed through’, though the freebooters avoided tangling with him due to his armed escort.41

  Nor was this just an English view of the country. According to the Iranian traveller Abdul Lateef Shushtari, who was related to one of the most powerful clans in Hyderabad and in 1794 was acting as the Nizam’s vakilal in Calcutta, the countryside around the capital grew more and more ruinous the closer you got to the Maratha frontier: ‘Now, because of rebellious enemies and oppressive tax-collectors, the whole country has become a ruin, its inhabitants scattered and miserable; those few unable to flee are afflicted with famine. Leadership has broken down, the laws of governance are disrupted … There are so many ruins and abandoned homes, that though the region has a peerless climate, nevertheless the country is now worse than in most other places in India.’42

  After a four-day journey through this increasingly war-blackened landscape, William saw rising ahead of him the grim battlements of Bidar.

  Even today, after a century and a half of decline and neglect, Bidar is still one of the most magnificent fortresses in India. Then it was unmatched. It was built on a great plug of dark brown basalt rising steeply out of the flat planispheres of the Deccan plateau. In every direction, great loops of bleak black crenelations swept for miles over hills and down steep valleys, a seemingly endless expanse of towers and walls, gateways and bastions, arch-shaped merlons and fortified escarpments. Within the embrace of these battlements lay a perfect oasis: white-budded cotton fields and gardens filled with rich well-watered black earth, where bullocks ploughed small neatly-tilled strips edged in palm groves and guava orchards, a great green splash of fertile farmland and a stark contrast to the wasteland immediately outside the walls.

  To one side, by the river, lay the dhobi ghats from which came the splash and thud of washermen slapping their clothes on the basalt steps, while in the distance was a small lotus-choked lake punctuated at its corners by domed chattri pavilions. Beyond, in the barren wastes outside the walls and the reach of the irrigation runnels, a scattering of bulbous whitewashed domes signalled the presence of the medieval royal necropolis of Ashtur; in the scrub around it stood two rambling Sufi shrines packed with pilgrims and miracle-seekers come to solicit the aid of long-dead sheikhs.

  On the evening of 10 February 1794, three months after he left Calcutta, William Kirkpatrick and his escort passed by the necropolis and entered Bidar under the dogleg of the massive Golconda Gate. They crossed through ring after ring of town and citadel walls, and over a series of deep ditches cut out of the living rock by gangs of medieval slaves. All around in the narrow, crowded streets, between the ancient shrines and the spice souk, the horse and the diamond merchants, the textile sellers and the karkhanas (workshops) where the town’s craftsmen were hammering away at their Bidri-ware pots and hookahs, the newcomers saw evidence of the gathering army, as hordes of freelances from all over India congregated on the city to seek service.

  At the best of times the bazaars of the Deccan were filled with a mix of peoples from all over the East; but at this moment Bidar was bursting with a particularly diverse group of mercenary cavalry: Arabs from the Hadramaut, bearded Sikhs from the Punjab, knots of turbaned Afghans and Pathans from the frontier and their Rohilla cousins from the Ganges plains. Wandering through the bazaars too were groups of the Nizam’s regular infantry, the red-jacketed sepoys trained by the French commander, Michel Joachim Raymond, with their black tricorn hats, white shirts and short shin-length boots.43 William’s new Assistant, William Steuart, whom William had just met for the first time in Hyderabad, was impressed: ‘The Nizam’s army … looked larger than ever I saw Scindia’s,’ he wrote. ‘He maintains few foot soldiers, but his cavalry are reckoned 40,000. Such as I have seen are excellent; the men are well dressed & the chiefs pride themselves in giving a uniform long gown to their troopers to distinguish them, some having jackets with two crossed swords in the way of chintz, others with one sword and some plume of yellow or red.’44

  The cosmopolitan mix in the bazaars was reflected in the architecture of the streets through which these crowds surged. While the bazaars and the fortifications were entirely Indian in style, many of the structures within the city looked for their inspiration to the heart of the Islamic world, bypassing the experiments of the Mughals in northern India to borrow direct from the tilework of the distant Ottomans, or the architectural models of Transoxiana. From atop his elephant Kirkpatrick could see what appeared to be displaced fragments of Timurid Bukhara and Samarkand: melon-ribbed domes that might happily have topped the tomb of Timur himself; delicate lozenges of highly coloured Izniklike tilework with blues as startling as a sapphire in an Ottoman dagger; even a madrassa which would not look in the least bit out of place in the maidan of Safavid Isfahan.

  By late evening, having passed slowly through miles of choked bazaars, the English party finally reached the inner courtyard of the citadel. William’s first letter from Bidar is brief and official, noting only that the Minister, Aristu Jah,am had abandoned precedent and etiquette and had personally conducted him straight to the Nizam’s durbar in an effort to be friendly, and to impress upon him ‘the anxious desire of the Nizam to connect himself as closely as possible with our government’.45

  William Steuart, however, left a much fuller description of the Nizam’s durbar at around this time. The Nizam and his Minister he mentions only briefly: ‘The Nizam is polite and extremely attentive,’ he wrote, ‘but his mermidons are haughty and overbearing in a high degree. His Minister is a clever but lazy hound whose avowed maxim is to distress all the subjects in order to please the avaricious disposition of his master whose beard he holds with both hands & with it can manage as he likes.’46

  This assessment by Steuart greatly underestimated the achievement of the two men who between them saved their kingdom from almost certain extinction: when Nizam Ali Khan acceded to the throne thirty-two years earlier in 1762, few would have guessed that, almost alone of the contending forces of the Deccan, it would be Hyderabad that would survive the vicissitudes of the next seventy-five years.

  Although he underestimates the Nizam Ali Khan and his Minister, Steuart gives a revealing account of what it was actually like to attend the Nizam’s durbar, and the telling way it mixed Indian with Middle Eastern custom: eating paan, for example, in the Indian fashion, while drinking small cups of coffee à la Turque: ‘The chiefs after presenting Nuzzirs [symbolic offerings] retire to the adab gah & make their humble obeisance,’I he wrote.

  Afterwards [they] have permission to approach but seldom sit down. There is more state and pomp here than I ever saw at [the Mughal Emperor] Shah Alam’s durbar. Agreeably to the custom of the Nizam’s family he [Nizam Ali Khan] never smokes but swallows large balls of paun which as he has no teeth he cannot chew; he drinks a great deal of coffee, & extremely warm, having a fire in the middle of the durbar to heat it & cup bearers who deliver it in quick rotation in small agate cups. He keeps a great many women, has had or rather they have had 200 children of which number 30 are still alive & of these seven are sons & 23 daughters. The heir apparent looks as old as his father (who is 62) but I imagine is not above 37.

  The durbar usually assembles at night; silver candlesticks wax & tallow candles, a constant supply of blue lights one after another held up on blue poles have a pretty effect; some amber tapers are kept burning near his Highness but their smell is so strong that I imagine it serves more to drown that of the tallow which certainly is not agreeable; one stink to drown away another.

  Jewels are worn by all the chiefs, such as sarpèches [turban ornaments], pearl necklaces, bazoo bunds [armbands], & even those kurrahs over the wrist which women only in Hindustan wear. The Mussulmens here look like Hindoos, shave close & wear small turbans, long gowns like pei
shwas and cut the hair near the ear in the regular way of the uncut [i.e. uncircumcised] fellows.

  The buildings in which the durbar took place reflected the magnificence of the gathering. William Kirkpatrick was very struck by the stark contrast between the grimness of the outer fortress and the intricate decoration of the private mosques and the apartments of the palaces in the inner citadel. Deccani craftsmen always compensated for their forbidding building material by filling their interiors with fantasies of tilework or stucco, carved woodwork and trompe-l’oeil wall paintings. Of nowhere was this more true than the Rangin Mahal, one of the most sublime medieval interiors in India, where William must have had his private audience with the Nizam. Here the walls were covered alternately with intricate tilework and sculpted panels of arabesques, the hard volcanic granite manipulated as easily as if it were as soft as plaster and as delicate as a lace ruff.

  This atmosphere of sophisticated courtly sensuality is found in its most concentrated form in the Deccani miniatures which were being painted in the ateliers of the Nizam’s palaces.an In the images produced in these workshops, water drips from fountains, parakeets fly to roost and peacocks cry from the mango trees.

  Nothing about these charmed garden scenes indicates that the Marathas might ride into the outskirts of the city at any minute, burning and pillaging. Indeed, this calm artistic idyll stood in complete and direct contrast to the political reality of upheavals and traumas across the entire eighteenth-century Deccan. The Nizam’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had founded the semi-independent state of Hyderabad out of the disintegrating southern provinces of the Mughal Empire in the years following 1724. He was an austere figure, like his idol, the puritanical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, instinctively disapproving of the arts and especially of the un-Koranic skill of miniature portrait-painting. A close watch was kept on his nobles, and those who held illicit parties during Muharram were reported to him by his spies. Permission for dance displays and nautches had to be sought from the durbar and was only granted on the occasion of festivals and marriages.47