White Mughals Page 13

  Nizam ul-Mulk was an ingenious general but an even more talented statesman, using bribery and intrigue to achieve what his old-fashioned and outmoded Mughal armies could not. While breaking from the direct control of Delhi, he made a point of maintaining his nominal loyalty to the Mughal Emperor, and throughout the eighteenth century the people of Hyderabad continued to refer to themselves as Mughals and saw their state as a semi-detached fragment of the old empire of Akbar and Shah Jehan. Nizam ul-Mulk also kept a careful watch on the Marathas, using spies and diplomacy to keep them in check. He warned his followers: ‘The Emperor Aurangzeb with his immense army and the expenditure of the entire treasure of Hindustan could not defeat them. Many families were ruined and yet no benefit came out of this campaign. I have made them obedient and faithful to me through diplomacy.’48

  At his death in 1748, this carefully-created structure tottered towards collapse as Nizam ul-Mulk’s sons fought among themselves and tried to establish themselves as rulers by entering into rival alliances with the neighbouring powers, notably the Marathas to the north and west and the French at Pondicherry to the east. It was fourteen years before Nizam Ali Khan—an illegitimate younger son—finally established himself on the throne, throwing his elder brother Salabat Jang into the dungeons of Bidar, where he was strangled.

  By this time, the state looked as if it stood on the verge of extinction as the Marathas, the French, the English and the armies of Haidar Ali of Mysore swooped down on the extremities of Hyderabad like vultures, seizing chunks of the Nizam’s dominions for their own purposes. Yet Hyderabad did not collapse, thanks largely to the diplomacy and the carefully-constructed system of alliances created by Nizam Ali Khan. Militarily, Hyderabad was the weakest of the competing states of the Deccan when he took control, but only it and the East India Company would remain important powers by the time of his death. It was his extraordinary achievement to turn the state from the Sick Man of Late Mughal India into the vital strategic asset of the eighteenth-century Cold War, without whose friendship and support no power could gain dominance in India.

  In 1794, when the Kirkpatrick brothers first met him, the Nizam was over sixty years old, a tall, gaunt figure who had lost his teeth and hair, but who retained his watchfulness and his skill at manipulating both the rival factions at his court and the weaknesses of his external enemies. A contemporary miniature of him shows him as an old man—emaciated, lightly freckled and clean-shaven—leaning back on the bolsters of his musnud;ao to one side are placed a sword and a spittoon.49 He is depicted as wise yet cautious, deep in conversation with his Minister in front of a white marble pavilion. He wears a semi-transparent jama of white muslin, and a tight white turban out of which emerges a jewelled aigrette. He has a gilded cummerbund, and a band of large pink gems gleam on his turban. James Kirkpatrick, who got to know him well, left a detailed pen portrait of him:His stature is of the tallest and his frame still retains indications of that robustness, for which in his youth he was remarkable. His complexion is dark and his features, though never handsome, are by no means deficient in expression, bespeaking a thoughtful and not unintelligent mind. His mien is graceful and dignified, and his address replete with that princely courtesy and condescension, which while sufficiently calculated to inspire ease and confidence in all who approach him, bespeaks him not forgetful of his own dignity, or of the illustrious lineage he lays claim to and professes to set a high value upon.

  He has generally I believe, been considered as a Prince who though not endowed with either splendid talents or great mental resources, has proved himself on some trying occasions not deficient in those arts which are considered in the East as constituting the essence of Government … His defects as a warrior are amply compensated by his skill as a politician.50

  Most contemporary observers, however, attributed the extraordinary skill with which the Hyderabadis had manoeuvred their way through the minefields of Deccani politics less to Nizam Ali Khan than to his brilliantand wily Prime Minister, Aristu Jah, ‘the Glory of Aristotle’. Though a ruthless politician, Aristu Jah was a deeply civilised man, and his extensive patronage of both painters and poets led to a revival in both arts after the austere rule of Nizam ul-Mulk. Perhaps partly because of this, a great many miniatures of him survive. They show a tall, cunning-looking man, heavily built with a wily expression, a hooked nose and a carefully trimmed beard. He is always shown towering over his contemporaries with a small red turban, a simple string of pearls over his chest, and another pearl bracelet around his right wrist; in his hand, invariably, is the snake of a gold hookah. Contemporary Hyderabadi chronicles say he never left this pipe for a second, and that ‘the smell of his scented tobacco’ was one of the great features of the Minister’s durbar. This passion for his pipe was something that also struck Edward Strachey when he met Aristu Jah:The minister was smoking in the proper oriental style. He neither laid hold of his hookah nor did he open his mouth purposely to receive the mouthpiece, but his servant watched him, and put the point of it close to his lips. Now and then he stroked the minister’s whiskers with it and when a good opportunity offered [itself ] poked it a little way into his mouth. The minister who did not appear to have observed it before took a whiff. When he began to speak, the man took it out again, stroked his whiskers with the mouthpiece and again put it to his master’s mouth at the proper time. When the minister made a movement as if he was disposed to spit, one of his faithful attendants held out both hands and received a huge mouthful of spittle, with great care he then wiped it on a cloth which was by him and wrapped it up carefully, appearing then ready to receive in his hands any such deposit however precious, which his master might think fit to place there.51

  In the durbar, alongside Aristu Jah and the Nizam, there was a third figure who would play a major role in the lives of both Kirkpatrick brothers, and indeed in time was to become a close relation by marriage of James. Mir Alam had risen to power from respectable but impoverished origins as the Private Secretary to Aristu Jah. When John Kennaway arrived in Hyderabad he saw Mir Alam merely as a sycophant in the train of the Minister: ‘I do not think he has much influence even with the Minister whose every sentiment and opinion he adopts with a blind servility, ’ he wrote in 1788.52

  Since then, however, Mir Alam had led a successful embassy to Calcutta, had befriended Lord Cornwallis and been made the Nizam’s vakil to the Company, through whom the Nizam’s relations with the British were to be channelled. As a result the Mir was beginning to show signs of increasing independence from Aristu Jah, his former patron, especially in the matter of the looming conflict with the Marathas, which he openly opposed, and compared to needlessly ‘throwing sand in a hornets’ nest’.53

  For much of his reign, Nizam Ali Khan had indeed avoided making war with the Marathas, and followed his father’s advice to woo them with diplomacy rather than challenge them with arms. Now however, partly under the influence of the Minister, he had decided to change his policy, and with the aid of his new infantry regiments trained by General Raymond, had allowed himself to be persuaded that it might finally be possible for his troops to meet the Marathas in battle. For this reason he and Aristu Jah were very anxious to forge an alliance with the English through William, and to enlist the armies of the Company on their side. Aristu Jah was the most Anglophile of the Nizam’s advisers, and alone in the durbar realised the real and growing military strength of the Company. His ideas, however, were not widely shared, and another powerful faction at court, led by the Paigah nobles who made up the Nizam’s praetorian guard, made no secret of the fact that they would have liked Hyderabad to ally with the Marathas and against the English. A third faction wished the Nizam to make an alliance with Tipu and the French.

  What no one at court knew yet was that Sir John Shore, the new Governor General, had already decided to reject the Nizam’s request to the Company to unite against the Marathas. Before William Kirkpatrick set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed him to stick to the existing Triple Alliance,
signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas, the Nizam and the Company together as allies, and which isolated the Company’s great enemy Tipu Sultan, who remained outside the alliance. Events would show that this was a crucial error of judgement by Shore, and one that very nearly destroyed both the state of Hyderabad and the Company’s still fragile presence in southern and central India.

  William Kirkpatrick initially made a very good impression on the Nizam’s court, not least for his exceptional linguistic abilities. Gobind Krishen, the Maratha vakil at the Hyderabad durbar, reported to Pune: ‘This Kirkpatrick has wonderful intelligence and mastery of Persian speech, is equally careful in writing, understands accounts, and is well informed in public business and is versed in astronomy. In this way he is expert in everything.’54 William realised, however, that his popularity at the Nizam’s court would greatly diminish as soon as the Minister realised that he would not be persuaded to join in the projected campaign against the Marathas. As negotiations between the Nizam and the Marathas continued over the course of the next few months, and with the two sides openly preparing for war, William wrote to Shore that he was resisting all the attempts of Aristu Jah and the Nizam to lure the British ‘from our system of moderation and neutrality’.

  He also did his best to persuade the Hyderabadis that in his opinion their army was simply not up to taking on the celebrated infantry regiments of the Marathas. These were trained in the latest French military techniques by one of the greatest military figures of eighteenth-century India, Comte Benoît de Boigne, and famed for their ‘wall of fire and iron’, which had wreaked havoc upon even the best-drilled Indian armies sent against them.55 Aristu Jah, wrote Kirkpatrick, did not seem to think ‘the danger so imminent, as I should be inclined to do, were a brigade of De Boigne’s to be actually employed against him, for in this case I am afraid that the business would be over before the people at home would be able to send out the necessary orders for our taking this state under our protection’.56

  By December, however, Kirkpatrick realised that he was failing to get his message across: not only the Nizam, but the entire camp at Bidar had convinced themselves that victory against the Marathas was within their grasp. Every night the dancing girls sang songs about the forthcoming triumph, and Aristu Jah even announced to the court that when they took Pune he would send his Maratha counterpart Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, off to exile in Benares ‘with a cloth about his loins, and a pot of water in his hands, to mutter incantations on the banks of the Ganges’. ‘There would appear to be a storm brewing in the head of [Aristu Jah],’ William Kirkpatrick wrote to Shore, ‘which may possibly burst at no great distance of time … Whenever it takes place I shall dread its consequence; and not be without my fears of these consequences being ere long.’57

  Kirkpatrick was right to be anxious. In December 1794, just as news arrived that his brother James had finally succeeded in getting transferred from Vizianagram to Hyderabad and was already on his way, the order was given. The Nizam’s huge army lumbered out of the safety of Bidar and headed off to war in the direction of the Maratha capital of Pune.

  The campaign was as short as it was disastrous.

  For three months the Nizam’s army advanced slowly towards Pune along the banks of the Manjirah River. The Marathas advanced equally slowly towards the Mughals (as the Hyderabadis called themselvesap). Of the two armies, the Marathas’ was slightly larger—around 130,000 men against the Mughal total of around ninety thousand; the Maratha force was also much the more experienced and better led. Both armies were equally divided between cavalry and infantry, though only the Hyderbadis had a regiment of female infantry dressed in British-style redcoats, brought along primarily to protect the Nizam’s harem women, who also came along on the trip in a long caravan of covered elephant howdahs.58

  The slow march towards Pune was marked by frequent courtly but inconclusive negotiations between the two sides; to the end the Nizam insisted that he was not invading the Maratha territories, merely enjoying a prolonged hunting expedition along the marches of his territory. At every stage, negotiation was preferred to fighting, and intrigue to outright war. Like the baroque social etiquette of the Nizam’s court, the military strategy of the Nizam seemed like an elaborate and courtly charade, a slow and penetrating game of chess rather than a real campaign with living soldiers suffering actual fatalities.

  While negotiations continued, both sides spent much of their energies on attempts at destabilising the army of the other through bribes and covert intelligence work. Aristu Jah spent a vast sum—rumoured to be around one crore rupeesaq—trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Scindia and his famous de Boigne brigades to desert the Maratha army, while Nana Phadnavis spent a smaller sum—reportedly around seven lakh rupeesar—trying to encourage the pro-Maratha and pro-Tipu factions in the Hyderabad durbar to betray Aristu Jah. Mir Alam, Aristu Jah’s former protégé, was believed to be among those who received Nana bribes.59 The British Resident in Pune, Sir Charles Warre Malet, thought Mir Alam’s behaviour particularly suspicious when he came to the Maratha court to negotiate, and he relayed his suspicions back to William: ‘He appears to have done little else since his arrival at Pune,’ wrote Kirkpatrick to Shore, ‘but complain and insinuate perpetual suspicions [of Aristu Jah] to Sir Charles Malet, the utility of which I have never been able to discover. On the contrary they only serve to perplex and procrastinate matters.’60

  Aristu Jah, meanwhile, concentrated all his efforts on trying to persuade Kirkpatrick to throw in his lot—and more specifically the armies of the East India Company, especially the two British regiments stationed at Hyderabad—with the Nizam. But William refused to alter his position: in this war, he maintained, the Company was to be strictly neutral. He even rather stiffly refused to answer Aristu Jah’s question as to which route the Hyderabad army would do best to take, saying it was ‘against all sense of propriety’ for him to give advice on such a matter.

  Finally, on the evening of 14 March 1795, the Nizam’s army arrived at the top of a ridge known as the Moori Ghat, and looked down to see the Maratha army encamped a day’s march below them. At eight o’clock the following morning, 15 March, the Nizam gave the order for his troops to descend from the heights of the ghat. The Marathas were waiting for them at the bottom.

  Firing began soon after lunch, at around 2 p.m. It was the two rival battalions of French-trained infantry that came into contact first, with the ‘Corps Français de Raymond’ fighting under the French Republican tricolore and making steady progress into the centre of their Maratha counterparts, the famous de Boigne brigades, who fought under the French Bourbon emblems. To William’s great surprise, Raymond’s twelve newly raised infantry regiments used their higher altitude to great effect, showering de Boigne’s flanks with sprays of grapeshot. Kirkpatrick was more surprised still when the Mughal Women’s Regiment, the Zuffur Plutun or Victorious Battalion, advanced equally steadily downhill with their muskets, and succeeded in holding their own against the Maratha right wing.as By nightfall, Raymond’s force, deserted by their Paigah cavalry escort, had been forced to retreat a little in the face of a fierce cannonade from de Boigne’s artillery. But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning.

  No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a sudden panic broke out in the Nizam’s camp. Looking back on the rout the following morning, William wrote:The events appear to me like a kind of dream, so unexpected, so unaccountable, and so amazing were they. Nothing in the least can be reasonably said to have gone wrong on the part of the Nizam’s army that was slightly engaged with the enemy. A couple of Sirdars [noblemen] of some note were killed, and perhaps a hundred men: but His Highnesses troops were in quiet possession of the ground they wanted to occupy f
or the night at 11pm, when the pusillanimity of the Nizam or of his Minister, or of both together, led to the fatal resolution of falling back … The consequences were such as might be expected: universal trepidation and great loss of baggage:—but these were only the immediate consequences. Those that are likely to follow threaten very seriously the future independence of this state, since it seems but too probable that His Highness will be obliged to yield to all the demands of the Pune government. 61

  What in fact had happened, as Kirkpatrick later learned, was that an intermittent cannonade by the Marathas had panicked the Nizam’s women, and especially Bakshi Begum, the Nizam’s most senior wife, who threatened to unveil herself in public if the Nizam did not take his entire zenana (harem) into the shelter of the small and half-ruined moated fort of Khardla. This lay at the very bottom of Moori Ghat, just over three miles behind the front line. During the confusion of the Nizam’s inexplicable retreat, a small party of Marathas looking for water stumbled across a Mughal picket, and the brief exchange of fire in the dark was enough to throw the remaining Hyderabadi troops into a complete panic. They rushed back to the walls of the Khardla Fort, leaving all their guns, baggage camels, ammunition wagons, stores and food behind them.

  When dawn broke the following morning, the Marathas found to their amazement that the Mughals had not only thrown away their strategic advantage, but left their arms, ammunition and supplies scattered over the battlefield while taking shelter in an utterly indefensible position. Charles Malet wrote in his official report that morning that ‘we are necessarily astonished at the important consequence that ensued in the unaccountable flight of the Nizam’s army, by which not only the respectability of his personal character and government was sacrificed, but the very existence of himself and his army endangered’.62 Their amazement did not, however, stop the Marathas from taking full advantage of the Mughal reverse: by ten o’clock in the morning they had brought in four hundred abandoned Mughal ammunition carts, two thousand camels and fifteen heavy cannon. By eleven they had completely surrounded the army of Hyderabad, and began raining shot down on the fort from the sixty cannon which they managed to manoeuvre onto the lower slopes of Moori Ghat. There had hardly been a battle; but already it was all over for the Nizam.63