The Age of Kali Page 20

  ‘On a festival day,’ said Pandyan, ‘Ammah cannot refuse anything, if you ask her with a clean mind.’

  It was now well after eleven, an hour after the ceremony should have begun, and the Brahmins were still waiting for the exact moment, determined by the astrologers, for Meenakshi and Sundareshvara to begin their journey around the lake. As we spoke, a ripple of expectation passed through the crowd. From the small Maryamman temple by the lakeside the Brahmins were now emerging in a file, their oiled bodies glistening in the light of their flickering camphor torches. As they processed out, the crowd parted before them, and they made their way slowly to the ghat steps leading down to the waters of the tank, where the raft was waiting. In the morning it had looked a rather flimsy and makeshift object, with its crude woodwork and naïvely painted papier mâché; but now, ablaze with lamps in the burnished darkness, it was transformed in to something gilded and magnificent: a huge floating temple, suspended on the dark waters of the tank. In the centre of the raft, reclining in their silken palkis amid their robes and garlands, were the golden images of Meenakshi and Sundareshvara.

  With a beating of drums, forty or fifty well-built villagers filed out of the temple and took up their stations along the side of the tank parapet.

  ‘These are villagers from Antonedi,’ said Mohan Pundit, a temple priest I had met earlier that morning. He had just helped me manoeuvre through the police cordon to a spot on the edge of the ghat from where I was now watching proceedings. ‘It has been the privilege of these people to pull rope since the time of our King Tirumala Nayyak, four hundred years ago.’

  At a signal from the head priest, the men picked up a great thick rope several hundred feet long that was attached to the raft, and with a fanfare from the temple band – all wailing nagashwarams and dancing drums – they shouldered the burden and began to pull.

  Slowly the raft began to move around the tank, followed by a small flotilla of Brahmins in overloaded dinghies, some of which contained as many as twenty people and were listing dangerously. As the villagers pulled, and the boat slowly circled the tank, the overexcited crowd surged around the tank, cheering and clapping and singing bhajans.

  For an hour the raft circled and the crowd sang and cheered. Children giggled on the shoulders of their fathers, licking ice creams and begging their parents to buy them more chickpeas, or perhaps some milky ladoos from the mithai-wallah. The band played and the crowd clapped. This, I thought, not for the first time that day, is what one of the great medieval festivals must have been like.

  Finally it was time to prepare the goddess for her final seduction of Lord Sundareshvara. The raft pulled in to the ghat and the idols, still on their palanquin, were raised on to the shoulders of the priests and carried ashore. It was a heavy burden, and as the priests staggered to the top of the steps, bowed under the weight, the crowd let out one last great cheer.

  ‘I’ve never seen a crowd enjoying themselves so much,’ I said to Mohan Pundit.

  The people come here,’ he replied, ‘and for one day they forget that they are hungry and poor. The goddess takes them away from themselves. Ammah does this for them, and for this reason they love her and are happy.’

  Under the Char Minar

  HYDERABAD, 1998

  ‘Fibs,’ said Mir Moazam Husain. ‘That’s what everyone of your generation thinks I’m telling, at least when I talk about Hyderabad in the old days. You all think I’m telling the most outrageous pack of fibs.’

  The old man settled back and shook his head, half amused, half frustrated. ‘My grandchildren, for instance. I can see the wonder in their eyes as I talk. For them the old world of Hyderabad is almost inconceivable: they can hardly imagine that such a world could exist.’

  ‘But what exactly can’t they imagine?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, the whole bang-shoot, really: the Nizam and his nobles and their palaces and their zenanas and the entire what-have-you that went with old Hyderabad State. But it’s all true. Every word.’

  Mir Moazam was a sprightly and intelligent eighty-four-year-old with a broad forehead and sparkling brown eyes. Though he talked elegaically about the past, there was no bitterness in his voice. ‘The palace I grew up in,’ he continued, ‘had a staff of 927 people, including three doctors. There was even a small regiment of women, eight or ten of whom were of African extraction, who were there just to guard the main gate of the zenana. But tell that to my grandchildren. They’ve seen how we live today, and they just think that I’m making it up. Especially when I start telling them about my grandfather.’

  ‘Your grandfather?’

  ‘My grandfather, Fakrool Mulk. The name means “Pride of the Realm”. He was a remarkable man, a great servant of the state, but he was also – how shall I put it – a larger-than-life character.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘You probably wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said.

  ‘Well, where shall I start?’ said Mir Moazam. He paused while he cast around for a suitable place to begin his tale.

  ‘You see, although my grandfather was Deputy Prime Minister in the Nizam’s government, his real passion was building.’

  ‘Building?’

  ‘Building. It was like an addiction for him. He just had to build. Over the course of his life he built this great series of vast, rambling palaces, one after the other. But he was never satisfied. As soon as he had finished one, he immediately began to build another. Sometimes he would just give an entire palace away. Once he heard that the Nizam had privately said that he envied him owning a palace looking on to the Fateh Maidan, where all the tentpegging and polo matches took place on the ruler’s birthday. At the first opportunity he just gave the Asad Bagh to the Nizam, even though it was his principal residence and all nine of his children had been born there. But that was absolutely typical of him and his buildings. He never lived in half of them, yet even when he was seventy-five he was still at it. Of course, he built up enormous debts in the process.’

  ‘Was he a trained architect?’

  ‘Well, that was precisely the problem. No, he wasn’t. But every evening he would go out for a walk, and with him he would take his walking stick and this great entourage of his staff, which always included his secretary, his master mason, his builders, a couple of his household poets and the paymaster general of his estates – some thirty or forty people in all.

  ‘Anyway, on these walks, when the inspiration came, he would begin to draw in the sand with his walking stick: maybe a new cottage, or a new stable block, or possibly a new palace, or whatever it was, according to how the fancy took him. The draughtsmen he had brought with him would jot it down on paper and then draw it up when they got back. The next day he would be shown the pictures after breakfast. He would say, “No, enlarge that tower, and let’s put two cupolas on top.” Or maybe: “That’s good, but it has to be triple the size.” His buildings were always something of a hotchpotch, as he would change the style according to his mood. Some have a classical ground floor, a tropical Gothic first storey, and then change to art deco or even Scotch Baronial halfway up.

  ‘Finally the plan would be approved, the masons would get to work, and – hey presto! – the Hyderabad skyline had a new palace. Except that then he would go and visit it and say, “This door is not wide enough. I can’t possibly fit through this with the Resident’s wife on my arm.” So the whole thing would be torn down and work would restart. Even as an old man he was still adding new wings and towers and porticoes to his palaces, and despite his debts, none of his sons ever had the guts to argue with him.’

  ‘Did he have a favourite palace?’

  ‘I don’t know about a favourite, but the one he lived in for longest was Iram Manzil, just around the corner from here. It wasn’t the largest of his palaces, but one of the reasons he loved it was the stuffed tiger.’

  ‘The stuffed tiger?’

  ‘You see, after building, my grandfather’s other great love was tiger sho
oting, and the season for tiger shooting was only a few months each year. So on the hill outside Iram Manzil he built this miniature railway track, and on the track he placed a stuffed tiger on wheels. It would be let loose from the top of the hill and we would all line up and fire away with our double barrels: bang! bang! bang! all of us aiming at this wretched tiger as it careered down the hill, shooting in and out of the rocks, down the gradient, getting faster and faster as it went down. By the time it reached the end of the track it was completely peppered: blown to bits, poor thing. So the men who were employed to look after the tiger would patch it up and pull it back, and off we’d go again.’

  ‘I can see why your grandchildren might find all this a little … fantastic.’

  ‘But I think what they find most difficult to believe is not this sort of thing, but the simple business of my grandfather’s eating habits.’

  ‘Eating habits?’

  ‘Well, Fakrool Mulk was a most fastidious man, but he did like his food.’

  ‘He ate a lot?’

  ‘He would always work it off with long walks, horseback rides and by swinging Indian clubs, but yes, he did get through a bit of khana [food].’

  ‘So,’ I ventured, ‘on any given day what might be on your grandfather’s table?’

  ‘I’ll never forget Fakrool Mulk’s dinners,’ said Mir Moazam. His face lit up at the memory: ‘He would sit in the middle of this huge table, with the doctor, the butler and the assistant butler looking on, while his secretary read to him from the Hyderabad Bulletin. First they would bring a tankard of wonderfully thick, creamy chicken broth, then came the pomfret from Bombay – two pieces. He would finish that, then followed the whole chicken, so tender it would fall apart at the touch. Only when he had single-handedly demolished this fowl would the next course be brought in: a selection of spectacular Mughlai dishes, eight curries or so in silver bowls, and a great plate of the finest ground Hyderabadi kebabs. They would just melt in the mouth: I’ve never tasted anything like them anywhere else. Of course there was always a mountain of soft white pillau rice, and everything was served on the most beautiful monogrammed porcelain. When he had finished he would pass the plate to me, and I would transfer what was left to my plate: in our tradition that was considered a great privilege, and I would salaam profoundly as I did so. There was very strict protocol: we wouldn’t sit until asked to, and wouldn’t dream of talking until talked to. He did the talking, we responded.’

  ‘And that was the end of dinner?’

  ‘No, no. There was still pudding. After the curries had been carried away, then in came the sweets: two different kinds of English pudding – hot and cold – followed by a silver platter of Mughlai sweets, all of which were served with a great big bowl of clotted cream. When that was finished he would take his hubble bubble and puff away at that, until he was ready to go downstairs and play billiards, after which it was off to bed. A story-teller would be brought in to an alcove covered with a curtain, and from there he would tell stories from the Shahnama about Sohrab and Rustam, or perhaps tales from the Mahabharat, or Deccani tales about the deeds of the Qu’tb Shahi kings. Those old story-tellers could talk for days without stopping. Only when they heard snoring from the other side of the curtain would they stop.’

  Mir Moazam looked up, and again slowly shook his head: ‘Now, of course, almost everything has gone,’ he said, ‘and I suppose I’m one of the last who can remember that way of life. We’re going pretty fast, and after us there will just be the same monotonous uniformity. All that will be left of that world is what is recorded in books and memoirs.

  ‘But like my grandchildren,’ he added, looking me in the eyes, ‘you probably find it difficult to even conceive the life I’m describing. And why shouldn’t you? This entire world was almost completely destroyed and uprooted years before you were born.’

  But I did believe Mir Moazam, for I had long heard equally fantastical stories about the State of Hyderabad. Years ago, Iris Portal, an old friend of my grandmother, had told me a story I had never forgotten: how one day in the late 1930s she had been taken to see some of the Nizam’s treasure which was kept in open-fronted sheds in the grounds of one of the palaces. This was at a time when Iris’s husband ran the staff of the Nizam’s younger son, and Iris had befriended his wife, Princess Niloufer.

  Niloufer had led Iris past the Bedouin Arab guards all lolling about in a state of déshabille, and there at the back of the sheds were lines of trucks and haulage lorries. The trucks were dusty and neglected, their tyres rotting and flat and sinking into the ground, but when the two ladies pulled back a tarpaulin, they found that the trucks were laden with gems and precious stones and pearls and gold coins. The Nizam apparently lived in fear of either a revolution or an Indian takeover of his state, and had equipped the lorries so that he could get some of his wealth out of the country at short notice if the need came. But then he lost interest in his plan, and left the lorries to rot, quite incapable of going anywhere, but still full of their consignment of jewels. The guards did little to protect the riches in the lorries: what really protected them, thought Iris, was the aura of the ruler.

  Other stories of Iris confirmed this picture of Hyderabad as a sort of fantastical Indian Ruritania, where an unreconstructed feudal aristocracy preserved extravagantly rococo rules of etiquette, and where life revolved around fabulously intricate and elaborate orders of precedence.

  The Nizam, said to be the richest man in the world, had no fewer than eleven thousand servants: thirty-eight dusted the chandeliers, others were employed only to prepare betel nut. In addition, he had three official wives, forty-two concubines and nearly twenty children.

  ‘He was as mad as a coot, and his [chief] wife was raving,’ Iris told me. ‘It was like living in France on the eve of the Revolution. All the power was in the hands of the Muslim nobility. They spent money like water and were terrible, irresponsible landlords, but they could be very charming and sophisticated as well. Many had English nannies, and had been to English schools or universities. They would take us shooting – snipe and partridges – talking all the while about their trips to England or to Cannes and Paris, although in many ways Hyderabad was still living in the Moghul Middle Ages and the villages we would pass through were often desperately poor. You couldn’t help feeling that the whole great baroque structure could come crashing down at any minute.’

  For all the fairy-tale quality of Iris’s tales, they were confirmed in every detail by the most sober history books. The Nizam, Major-General Sir Osman Ali Khan, did indeed possess the largest fortune in the world: according to one contemporary estimate it amounted to at least £100 million in gold and silver bullion and £400 million in jewels, many of which came from his own Golconda mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor and the legendary (though now lost) Great Moghul Diamond which, at 787 carats, is thought to have been the largest ever discovered.

  The Nizam was also the most senior Prince in India, the only one to merit the title ‘His Exalted Highness’, and for most of the first half of the twentieth century he ruled a state the size of Italy – 82,700 square miles of the Deccan plateau – as absolute monarch, answerable (in internal matters at least) to no one but himself. Within this vast area he could claim the allegiance of fifteen million subjects. The grandest members of the Hyderabad aristocracy – known as the Paigah nobles – were richer than most Maharajahs, and each maintained his own court, his own extraordinary palace – or palaces – and his own three or four thousand strong private army. Nor, despite all the dreadful inequalities of wealth, was Hyderabad a poor country: in its final year of existence, 1947–48, the state’s income and expenditure rivalled those of Belgium and exceeded those of twenty member states of the United Nations.

  Moreover, from what I could gather from my reading, the Nizam appeared to be every bit as eccentric as Iris had indicated. While most Indian Maharajahs dressed in magnificent costumes and bedecked themselves with jewels the size of ostrich eggs, according to one British
resident the Nizam resembled ‘a snuffly clerk too old to be sacked’. All his life he wore the same dirty old fez, a grubby pair of pyjamas, and an ancient sherwani; towards the end he even took to knitting his own socks. When he died in 1967 The Times described the Nizam as ‘a shabby old man shuffling through his dream world’, and described his hobbies as ‘taking opium, writing Persian poetry and’ – a wonderful detail – ‘watching surgical operations’.

  Yet for all this, under the Nizam Hyderabad grew to be an important centre of learning and the arts. After the fall of Lucknow to the British in 1856, Hyderabad remained the last redoubt of Indo-Islamic culture and the flagship of Deccani civilisation, with its long heritage of composite Qu’tb Shahi, Vijayanagaran, Moghul, Kakatiyan, Central Asian and Iranian influences. Its Osmania university was the first in India to teach in an indigenous Indian language, and it was far ahead of most regions of India in the spread of education. In the early twentieth century it was the most important area for the production of Urdu literature in the subcontinent, and the people of Hyderabad had evolved their own distinctive – and often very sophisticated – manners, habits, language, music, literature, food and dress. Moreover their capital was famous as a city of palaces, rivalling in grandeur and magnificence anything in South Asia.

  It is often hard to believe this as you drive through Hyderabad today. For while the city is still fairly prosperous – certainly a far cry from the urban death rattle that is modern Lucknow – fifty years on it is a pretty unprepossessing place, ugly, polluted and undistinguished, all seventies office blocks and bustling new shopping centres: ‘Darshan Automobiles’ and ‘Dervish Home Needs’, the ‘Jai Hind Cycle Store’ and ‘Posh Tailors: Ladies and Gents a Speciality’. The trees have all been cut down and attempts at urban planning utterly abandoned. New buildings are mushrooming everywhere, often built over the old Indo-Islamic bazaars and colonial townhouses, so that only piles of discarded pillars remain to hint at what once occupied the site of the new concrete jeans emporium or pizza restaurant.