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  On Aziz Ullah’s advice, James tried buttering up Aristu Jah by sending to Madras for ‘a curious piece or two of mechanism in the clock work way’ which he believed ‘will go a great way to clinching the treaty now brought on the carpet.’30 The Nizam was likewise deluged with presents, including a new set of winter woollies to keep him from the worst of the December cold.31 James also spent huge sums bribing both Aristu Jah and the women in the Nizam’s zenana, writing to William in code that he had promised Aristu Jah a pension of one thousand rupees a month if he could get the Nizam to agree to the treaty, and remarking that the ‘citadel of negotiation’ might yet be taken ‘by a well directed fire of gold shot’.32

  Later, when William asked for details, James wrote—again in code—revealing exactly how he went about the difficult art of bribing the Prime Minister:The affair of the bribe … only occurred to me when every other means seemed to fail, but I should probably not have had recourse to it if you had not repeatedly called my attention to this mode of accomplishing difficult points, or at least not to the extent I did … Bribery effected the objects, viz removing Solomon’s and the Nizam’s objections to certain points [in the treaty]. The number of persons bribed is of no consequence at a court like this and will seldom if ever do any harm even if it reaches the ears of the Principal, except in cases very different from the present one. The principal channel of my bribes in Nizam’s mahl [zenana] was Fihem Bhye, a woman of the most inordinate avarice … 33

  The Subsidiary Treaty of 1800, dubbed ‘The Perpetual Alliance’, was finally signed on 12 October after nearly a year of negotiations. The Company agreed to increase the British forces in Hyderabad by an additional two thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry, in return for which the Nizam handed over to the British the Mysore provinces he had won after the fall of Seringapatam eighteen months earlier—provinces that were of course worth a huge multiple of the actual cost of maintaining a few thousand sepoys.

  Diplomatically, it was another triumph, and Wellesley wrote to congratulate James in fulsome terms; indeed when the Governor General had his portrait painted by Robert Home the following year he asked to have himself depicted with his hand resting on the Subsidiary Treaty, as if he regarded it as his greatest achievement to date in India.34 The Nizam also seemed pleased, and gave James the title ‘Beloved Son’ as well as an enormous gem attached to a gold ring. ‘Solomon [Aristu Jah] for some time past had dropped obscure hints to Munshi Uzeez Oollah of having something in store for me,’ wrote James on the day the treaty was signed,which he thought would be highly acceptable, but could not be brought to tell him plainly what that something was … The day before yesterday however I was partly enabled to form a guess as to what was intended, by His Highness requesting me to send him a ring as the measurement of my finger; and this morning on my arrival at Durbar, Solomon signified to me His Highness’s intention of distinguishing me by the appellation of his Son!!! an honour never hitherto conferred on anyone whatsoever but himself [Aristu Jah]. It was in vain for me to protest so high an honour utterly exceeded my merits, pretensions, or most sanguine expectations … The ring is a very shewy one, and the diamond a pretty large one. Young Sydenham [one of the junior Residency staff ] thinks it may be worth from fifteen hundred to two thousand pagodas. Were I to guess, I should say a thousand pounds … 35

  Nevertheless, the whole affair left a nasty taste in Kirkpatrick’s mouth. He was particularly disgusted by the degree to which he had had to bully and bribe the durbar to get his way, and he had more than a sneaking suspicion that the treaty was not at all in the best interests of Hyderabad. To his friend General William Palmer in Pune he wrote in full agreement with the latter’s view that the Company was becoming dangerously grasping and over-confident.36 When he finally wrote to his brother to tell him of the imminently successful result, the letter contained no hint of triumph. Instead he revealed his growing unease at the ruthlessness with which Wellesley had pursued his objects, telling William that Aristu Jah had told Munshi Aziz Ullah ‘that our avidity had no bounds, that we required everything while we would concede nothing and that we seemed determined in short, to have everything our own way’. He added as a P.S.: ‘My mind is just now in too perturbed a state to answer the private matter contained in your letter, even if I had time to do so.’ Instead he simply asked his brother ‘whether I ought not in justice to myself and to the public to request permission to resign the station’.37

  This ‘private matter’ over which he was considering resignation was, of course, Khair un-Nissa.

  The affair was now a continual source of pain and worry to James. In May, the growing unrest in Hyderabad over rumours about his seduction of a Sayyida had surfaced dramatically when, on his usual early-morning ride along the banks of the River Musi, James was ambushed: ‘I had a narrow escape from being shot, having been twice fired at by two sepoys of the old French Party, within twenty yards,’ he reported to William the following day. ‘One of the balls passed very near to my head. I had some difficulty suppressing the indignation of the troopers who attend me; but the offenders were sent bound to me soon after by Solomon, with a request that I would hang them up. I contented myself however (after asking if they had been sent by anyone, which they positively denied) with cautioning them against ball firing in future, except against enemies of the state.’38 Hyderabad gossip, of course, immediately linked the shooting to the growing disquiet caused by James’s affair.

  But it was not the gossip and signs of anger in the old city that really worried James. He knew now that Khair un-Nissa was pregnant. He also knew that her family were trying to force her into aborting their child.

  Little is known about abortion in India and the Islamic world at this time, but the practice was clearly widespread. Islamic jurists had ruled early on that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy was not haraam (forbidden); indeed they laid down that it was permissible, in exceptional medical circumstances connected with the health of the mother, up to the fourth month, at which point the foetus was deemed to have become fully ‘ensouled’, and so a human being. Niccolao Manucci, who attended Aurangzeb’s Imperial Mughal harem in Delhi, asserts that abortions were common there, and medieval Islamic texts are full of unusual suggestions for herbs and medicines that either prevented conception or aborted any foetus that might accidentally be conceived.

  Birth-control methods varied widely around the Islamic world, and there are a great number of texts suggesting a variety of techniques, ranging from coitus interruptus to more bizarre solutions such as suppositories containing rennet of rabbit, ‘broth of wall flower and honey’ and ‘leaves of weeping willow in a flock of wool’ (a popular option in early medieval Persia). But birth control was not just the woman’s business: male contraceptive techniques included ‘drinking juice of watermint at coitus’, rubbing the juice of an onion or a solution of rock salt onto the end of the penis, or, more alarmingly, smearing the entire penis with tar.do Other mysterious solutions to the problems of Islamic family planning included ‘fumigation with elephant’s dung’ and, stranger still, ‘jumping backwards’.dp

  Much less is known about the always sensitive subject of abortion, but the great medical authority Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), writing in early-eleventh-century Bokhara, suggested the following methods in his Canon of Medicine, all of which sound fairly unpleasant, as well as being (one would have thought) notably risky for the mother’s health:

  Abortion may be performed by movements or by medicine. Medicines work by killing the foetus and causing the menses to flow … Movements include phlebotomy [blood-letting], starvation, [bodily] exercise, frequent jumping, carrying of heavy loads and loud sneezing.

  A good procedure is to insert in the os uteri, a rolled piece of paper, a feather, or a stick cut to the size of a feather made of salwort, rue, cyclamen, or male fern. This will definitely work, especially if it is smeared with abortifacient medicine such as tar, the water of colocynth pulp, or some other abortifacient.


  Other widely-used abortifacients in the medieval Islamic world included drinking potions of ‘myrrh in lupine water, pepper, laurel seeds, cinnamon, madder, juice of absinthe, cardomum, water mint, roots of sweet basil, candy carrot and luffa seeds in vinegar’, which methods could be combined with rubbing the navel with the gallbladder of a cow, fumigation with roots of cyclamen and the use of suppositories containing roots of wild carrot and ‘the juice of squirting cucumber’.

  It is not known what methods late-Mughal midwives favoured, still less what were those common in Hyderabad, but the midwives concerned, the family and Kirkpatrick all clearly regarded the act as well within their competence. Just as Indian women were regarded throughout the Middle East as being especially sophisticated in the arts of love, so they were believed to be especially skilled in the art of preventing pregnancy, and if all else failed, in assisting at births.39

  Abortion was nevertheless a dangerous operation, and apart from wishing to keep the child, Khair un-Nissa must have been alarmed at the sheer risk involved in undergoing a termination: after all, her half-sister had died only a few months before, in March 1800, after going through a presumably much less dangerous operation to help her conceive.40

  Not surprisingly, this unpleasant saga was not something James felt able to confide to his brother. Indeed he always tried to tell William as little as possible about his Hyderabadi lover, and even avoided revealing to him that she was pregnant—but a brief reference was made to the abortion attempt in the Clive Report, when Colonel Bowser testified that Kirkpatrick had personally told him that

  in consequence of this intercourse the young lady became pregnant, and to conceal her disgrace they [her family] wished to marry her to the Mussulman formerly alluded to [the son of Ahmed Ali Khan], but the lady herself had positively refused, had threatened if compelled to put an end to her existence, and declared that she would marry no person but Hushmut Jung (Major Kirkpatrick). Finding that they could not prevail upon her, they wished to give her medicine to procure an abortion, but that he (the Resident) had sent for the principal midwives of the city and deterred them from an attempt of that nature. He concluded with declaring that whatever might be the ultimate result of these investigations he was determined never to desert the lady or her offspring.41

  Yet while James may have been determined not to abandon Khair un-Nissa in the long term, in the short term he was unable to meet her or even regularly answer her letters, due to the vigilance of her grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan and, more importantly for his own security, his recent promise to James Dalrymple. Instead he was forced to sit impotently in the Residency gazing over the Musi to the old city where Khair un-Nissa lived, forbidden to contact her or reply to her letters. To William he wrote in cipher: ‘I have long since desisted from all intercourse with the females of B[âqar] A[li]’s family … [But] it is generally reported that the young girl is pining miserably, and that her parents have by way of soothing her distress of mind come to a determination not to marry her to any one.’42

  He then, for the first time, hinted to his brother that he was a lot more serious about the affair than he had previously made out. Up to now he had grudgingly admitted to William that he had slept with Khair un-Nissa but denied that he was planning to marry her, or indeed that he regarded his connection with her as anything more than a regrettable lapse of self-control. Now however he made it clear that in fact he was far, far more deeply involved than this. He wrapped up the revelation in the language of honour and duty so as to make it seem less objectionable to his brother, and still pretended that the connection was forced upon him; but the import was exactly the same: that he was prepared to resign from his job and abandon his entire East India Company career before he gave up the girl: ‘I should not be astonished,’ he wrote on 17 August,if they [Khair un-Nissa’s family] were sooner or later to implore me to renew a connexion with her in my own terms. I will tell you however with the same un-reserve I have hitherto practised, how I should in all probability act in such a predicament. I would first endeavour by every means in my power to decline the offer, but if I found that this could not be done without danger of more than one kind, I would feel the pulse of the Nizam and Solomon, and if they proved not averse to the business, I would, as in duty bound, have the matter submitted to Lord W who from my public statement of the case is well acquainted with the young girl’s sentiments respecting me.

  [But] if his Lordship should from reasons of political expediency or from any other consideration prove decidedly hostile to any arrangement whatever, my feelings will in all probability compel me to request permission to resign my situation in order that I may be more at liberty to consult them and my inclinations, than I can do as a public man. Various considerations no doubt will make this alternative a most painful one indeed, but it will be the only one left me, to extricate myself with honour from as cruel a dilemma as perhaps any man was ever placed in … 43

  If James had hoped to escape from the shadow of the affair during his trip to Maula Ali, he was mistaken.

  He set off north on 1 December, and took with him Leith’s replacement as Residency Assistant, a talented, vain and cocky young Oriental scholar named Henry Russell. Russell was a fluent Hindustani speaker, though his Persian was not up to scratch, and he probably got the job as much from his connections as his skills. His father, Sir Henry Russell senior, was the Chief Justice of Bengal, an honest, clever but coarse man whose nouveau riche manners appalled the profoundly snobbish Lord Wellesley: ‘I know not where you picked up Sir Henry Russell,’ Wellesley wrote to the Company Board of Control’s President Henry Dundas in London when he first heard hints about Sir Henry’s appointment. ‘He is a vulgar, ill-bred, violent and arrogant brute; he gives universal disgust. I hope you will never allow him to be Chief Justice … at all events do not place that brute in a station which his manners and conduct will disgrace.’44

  But while abhorring the father, Wellesley admired Russell’s son, whom he regarded as ‘the most promising young man’ he knew.45 James agreed, and wrote to William that Russell ‘cannot, I think, fail to be an acquisition to me in every point of view. As yet, he has not, I perceive, made much progress in the Persian but he is a very tolerable Hindwy [i.e. Hindustani /Urdu] scholar through the medium of which he will make himself useful to me in the translating turn, and thus by degrees gain himself a knowledge of the language.’46 He also personally liked the boy, whom he found lively, intelligent and companionable, and a welcome relief after the dour and heavy presence of the self-pitying Leith.

  By the time Russell, Kirkpatrick and the Residency party arrived at Koh e-Sharif the crowds were already immense. Lines of huge silken shamiana tents had been erected amid the palm trees at the base of the hill. The pilgrims milled around, shopping in the temporary bazaars and eating the food and drinking the sherbet provided to everyone free of charge in the huge kitchen erected by Mah Laqa Bai and maintained at her own expense.47 Hindus came with coconuts to bring as offerings to the shrine; Muslims brought sheep to slaughter; beggars lined up for alms. According to Ghulam Husain Khan:All of God’s people go, from the Nizam and his Ministers to the poor, the soldiers and the entertainers—even old women, of 90 or 100 years old, who hardly have the strength to walk, yet still drag themselves to the festivities. About 5 lakhs of people—Muslims and Hindus, followers of Vishnu and Shiva, Brahmins and sadhus and Marwaris, as well as foreigners from Iran, Central Asia and Turkestan, Ottoman Turkey and Syria, Arabs and non-Arabs, and even the English—all of them come to this ’urs which none will willingly miss. They erect countless tents, and those that have built lodgings decorate them with carpets and candles … Each of the major nobles endows mansions that are named after them.dq

  Some 3,000 elephants, as well as some 50,000 horses and load-bearing camels, with stalls selling fresh and dried fruit, clothes and fine woollen pashmina shawls: as far as the eye can see, immense crowds appear, of buyers and sellers, riders and dancers, glorious tents and moun
tainous elephants, and with tall buildings erected continuously on either side from the Musi river to the foot of Koh-e Sharif, hung with silk and adorned with chandeliers …

  Beautiful dancers with variously painted faces and rich jewels and bright coloured dresses entertain joyful gatherings where they astonish listeners with their ravishing music; there are fireworks, various delicious dishes of food and drinks beyond counting. When His Highness the Nizam enters, the celebrations and illuminations begin … 48

  The centrepiece of the festivities—in a syncretic Hindu touch to a nominally Shi’a Muslim ceremony—was the moment at midnight on the sixteenth of Rajab when the tray of holy sandalwood was carried with great pomp on the back of a camel from the graveyard of Takia Rang Ali Shah; after this a second piece of sandal was sent to Koh e-Sharif from Punja Shah, and a third from Malajgiri. The pilgrims surged up to the top of the hill and, according to Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘the crowds are such, that it is difficult to reach the shrine, unless, pushed by the repeated shoving of the strong young men behind you, drenched in sweat, you finallycome into the shrine chamber’. Here they bowed or prostrated themselves before the holy handprint found by Ruby the Eunuch more than two hundred years earlier.

  Yet James found that even here, in the middle of the vast anonymous crowds that thronged to the festival, he still could not escape the scandal that was rapidly enveloping him. Wherever he went—up to the shrine, on a hunting trip, or to one of the dance displays—he found himself being shadowed by Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari and his cousin Mir Dauran, the plump, spoilt and deeply unattractive teenage son of Mir Alam.dr Both were intent on trying to persuade James to intercede for their disgraced and exiled kinsman, who was now approaching Hyderabad on his way from Rudroor to his chosen place of internal exile, his estates in Berar, a hundred miles north-east of the city; both men refused to believe James’s protestations that he was unable to exert any influence on Mir Alam’s behalf. James was particularly irritated when the two suggested a deal: that if they got Khair un-Nissa for him, could he agree to get permission for Mir Alam to return home? As James reported to William,Abdul Lateef is frequently with me, and to all appearances very candid and vastly communicative. His complaisance indeed knows no bounds, for like Meer Dowraun he has not hesitated to offer his services to me very unreservedly in a certain quarter where he assured me there would be no difficulty in effecting in my own terms all my wishes—whatever they might be. You may easily suppose how I received and answered such meanness and impertinence … I suspect he [Mir Dauran] has been tampering with old Bauker [Khair’s grandfather, Bâqar Ali Khan], and that he has been pumping him, as the old man has unreservedly declared to me.49ds