White Mughals Read online

  From the old city, I drove out to see the craggy citadel of Golconda. For six hundred years Golconda was the storehouse of the apparently ceaseless stream of diamonds that emerged from the mines of the region, the only known source of these most precious of stones until the discovery of the New World mines in the eighteenth century. Inside the walls you passed a succession of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens. When the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited Golconda in 1642 he found a society every bit as wealthy and effete as this architecture might suggest. He wrote that the town possessed more than twenty thousand registered courtesans, who took it in turns to dance for the Sultan every Friday.

  This richly romantic and courtly atmosphere had, I soon discovered, infected even the sober British when they arrived in Hyderabad at the end of the eighteenth century. The old British Residency, now the Osmania University College for Women, was a vast Palladian villa, in plan not unlike its exact contemporary, the White House in Washington. It was one of the most perfect buildings ever erected by the East India Company, and lay in a massive fortified garden just over the River Musi from the old city.

  The complex, I was told, was built by Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident—effectively Ambassador—at the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805. Kirkpatrick had apparently adopted Hyderabadi clothes and Hyderabadi ways of living. Shortly after arriving in the town, so the story went, he fell in love with the great-niece of the diwan (Prime Minister) of Hyderabad. He married Khair un-Nissa—which means ‘Most Excellent Among Women’—in 1800, according to Muslim law.

  Inside the old Residency building, I found plaster falling in chunks the size of palanquins from the ceiling of the former ballroom and durbar hall. Upstairs the old bedrooms were badly decayed. They were now empty and deserted, frequented only by bats and the occasional pair of amorous pigeons; downstairs the elegant oval saloons were partitioned by hardboard divides into tatty cubicles for the college administrators. As the central block of the house was deemed too dangerous for the students, most of the classes now took place in the old elephant stables at the back.

  Even in this state of semi-ruination it was easy to see how magnificent the Residency had once been. It had a grand, domed semi-circular bay on the south front, reached through a great triumphal arch facing the bridge over the Musi. On the north front a pair of British lions lay, paws extended, below a huge pedimented and colonnaded front. They looked out over a wide expanse of eucalyptus, mulsarry and casuarina trees, every inch the East India Company at its grandest and most formal. Yet surprises lurked in the undergrowth at the rear of the compound.

  Here I was shown a battered token of Kirkpatrick’s love for his wife in the garden at the back of the Residency. The tale—apocryphal, I presumed, but charming nonetheless—went as follows: that as Khair un-Nissa remained all her life in strict purdah, living in a separate bibi-ghar (literally ‘women’s house’) at the end of Kirkpatrick’s garden, she was unable to walk around the side of her husband’s great creation to admire its wonderful portico. Eventually the Resident hit upon a solution and built a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace for her so that she could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with her own eyes. Whatever the truth of the story, the model had survived intact until the 1980s when a tree fell on it, smashing the right wing. The remains of the left wing and central block lay under a piece of corrugated iron, near the ruins of the Mughal bibi-ghar, buried deep beneath a jungle of vines and creepers in the area still known as the Begum’s Garden. I thought it was the most lovely story, and by the time I left the garden I was captivated, and wanted to know more. The whole tale simply seemed so different from—and so much more romantic than—what one expected of the British in India, and I spent the rest of my time in Hyderabad pursuing anyone who could tell me more about Kirkpatrick.

  I did not have to look far. Dr Zeb un-Nissa Haidar was an elderly Persian scholar who taught her veiled women students in one of the less ruinous wings of the old Residency. Dr Zeb explained that she was a descendant of Rukn ud-Daula, a Hyderabadi Prime Minister of the period. She said she was familiar not only with the outlines of the story but with many of the contemporary Persian and Urdu sources which mentioned it.

  According to Dr Zeb, these Hyderabadi sources were explicit about the fact that Kirkpatrick had converted to Islam to marry his bride. They also mentioned that despite the scandal Kirkpatrick had been very popular in Hyderabad, mixing freely with the people, and taking on the manners of the city. Dr Zeb remembered one sentence in particular from a history called the Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi: ‘by an excess of the company of the ladies of the country he was very familiar with the style and behaviour of Hyderabad and adopted it himself’. Several of the Persian sources also hinted that, by the end, Kirkpatrick’s political allegiances had lain as much with the Nizam, or ruler, of Hyderabad as with the British. None of these sources had ever been translated into English, and so were virgin territory for those unfamiliar with either nineteenth-century Deccani Urdu or the heavily Indianised Persian that the manuscripts were written in—which meant virtually everyone bar a handful of elderly Hyderabadi Islamic scholars.

  One night I visited the tomb of Kirkpatrick’s great rival, General Michel Joachim Raymond. Raymond was a Republican French mercenary in the service of the Nizam who had, like Kirkpatrick, adopted the ways of Hyderabad. Just as Kirkpatrick’s job was to try to ease the Hyderabadis towards the British, Raymond had tried to persuade the Nizam to ally with the French. After his death, he was buried next to an obelisk, under a small classical Greek temple on the hilltop above the French cantonments beyond the city, at Malakhpet.

  While Raymond had definitely abandoned Christianity—something that seemed to be confirmed by the absence of any Christian references or imagery on his tomb—his Hyderabadi admirers were uncertain whether he had turned Hindu or Muslim. His Hindu sepoys Sanskritised the name Monsieur Raymond to Musa Ram, while his Muslims knew him as Musa Rahim, Rahim being the personification of the merciful aspect of Allah. The Nizam, who was as uncertain as everyone else, decided to mark the anniversary of Raymond’s death on 25 March in a religiously neutral way by sending to his monument a box of cheroots and a bottle of beer. The custom had apparently survived until the last Nizam left for Australia after Independence; but as I happened to be in Hyderabad on the date of his anniversary I was intrigued to see if any memory of Raymond had survived.

  Raymond’s monument was originally built on a deserted mountaintop several miles outside the walls of Hyderabad. But the recent rapid growth that has turned Hyderabad into India’s fourth-largest city has encroached all around the site, so that only the very top of the hill around the monument is now empty of new bungalows and housing estates. I left my taxi at the roadhead and climbed up towards the temple. It was clearly silhouetted against the sulphur-red of the city’s night sky. As I walked I saw shadows flitting between the pillars, vague shapes which resolved themselves as I drew closer into the figures of devotees lighting clay lamps at the shrine at the back of the temple. Maybe the figures saw me coming; whatever the reason, they had vanished by the time I reached the monument, leaving their offerings behind on the tomb: a few coconuts, some incense sticks, some strings of garlands and a few small pyramids of sweet white prasad.

  Back in London, I searched around for more about Kirkpatrick. A couple of books on Raj architecture contained a passing reference to his Residency and the existence of his Begum, but there was little detail, and what there was seemed to derive from an 1893 article in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, written by Kirkpatrick’s kinsman Edward Strachey.2

  My first real break came when I found that Kirkpatrick’s correspondence with his brother William, preserved by the latter’s descendants the Strachey family, had recently been bought by the India Office Library.a There were piles of letter books inscribed ‘From my brother James Achilles
Kirkpatrick’ (the paper within all polished and frail with age), great gilt leather-bound volumes of official correspondence with the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, bundles of Persian manuscripts, some boxes of receipts and, in a big buff envelope, a will—exactly the sort of random yet detailed detritus of everyday lives that biographers dream of turning up.

  At first, however, many of the letters seemed disappointingly mundane: gossip about court politics, requests for information from Calcutta, the occasional plea for a crate of Madeira or the sort of vegetables Kirkpatrick found unavailable in the Hyderabad bazaars, such as—surprisingly—potatoes and peas. This was interesting enough, but initially seemed relatively unremarkable, and I found maddeningly few references either to Kirkpatrick’s religious feelings or to his personal affairs. Moreover, much of the more interesting material was in cipher. No sooner did Kirkpatrick begin to talk about his amorous adventures, or the espionage network he was involved in setting up, than the clear and steady penmanship would dissolve into long lines of incomprehensible numbers.

  It was only after several weeks of reading that I finally came to the files that contained the Khair un-Nissa letters, and some of these, it turned out, were not encoded. One day, as I opened yet another India Office cardboard folder, my eyes fell on the following paragraph written in a small, firm, sloping hand:By way of Prelude it may not be amiss to observe that I did once safely pass the firey ordeal of a long nocturnal interview with the charming subject of the present letter—It was this interview which I alluded to as the one when I had full and close survey of her lovely Person—it lasted during the greatest part of the night and was evidently contrived by the Grandmother and mother whose very existence hang on hers to indulge her uncontrollable wishes. At this meeting, which was under my roof, I contrived to command myself so far as to abstain from the tempting feast I was manifestly invited to, and though God knows I was but ill qualified for the task, I attempted to argue the Romantic Young Creature out of a passion which I could not, I confess, help feeling myself something more than pity for. She declared to me again and again that her affections had been irrevocably fixed on me for a series of time, that her fate was linked to mine and that she should be content to pass her days with me as the humblest of handmaids …

  Soon after this I found some pages of cipher which had been overwritten with a ‘translation’, and the code turned out to be a simple one-letter/one-number correspondence. Once this was solved, the whole story quickly began to come together.

  I had one more major break when I stumbled across a secret East India Company Enquiry into the affair, with sworn testimony taken from witnesses and detailed, explicit questions getting astonishingly frank and uninhibited answers; as I held the Enquiry in my hands any lingering doubts I had disappeared: there was wonderful material here for a book.

  For four years I beavered away in the India Office Library, returning to Delhi and Hyderabad occasionally to examine the archives there. Inevitably, in India there were problems. In Delhi, in the vaults of the Indian National Archives, someone installing a new air-conditioning system had absent-mindedly left out in the open all six hundred volumes of the Hyderabad Residency Records. It was the monsoon. By the time I came back for a second look at the records the following year, most were irretrievably wrecked, and those that were not waterlogged were covered with thick green mould. After a couple of days a decision was taken that the mould was dangerous, and all six hundred volumes were sent off ‘for fumigation’. I never saw them again.

  That same monsoon, the River Musi flooded in Hyderabad and the BBC showed scenes of archivists in the old city hanging up to dry on washing lines what remained of their fine collection of manuscripts.

  Gradually, despite such setbacks, the love story began to take shape. It was like watching a Polaroid develop, as the outlines slowly established themselves and the colour began to fill in the remaining white spaces.

  There were some moments of pure revelation too. On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. It was a Sunday, and the Chowk was half-closed. But I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours’ time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad’s great speciality: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where he promised I would find ‘booxies booxies’.

  The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies’, as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom-cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick’s letters. The book turned out to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner, and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources. Their contents completely transformed what follows.b

  By 2001, four years into the research, I thought I knew Kirkpatrick so well I imagined that I heard his voice in my head as I read and reread his letters. Yet there still remained important gaps. In particular, the documents in the India Office gave no more hint than the original article in the 1893 Blackwood’s Magazine as to what had happened to Khair un-Nissa after Kirkpatrick’s death. It took another nine months of searching before I stumbled across the heartbreaking answer to that, in the Henry Russell papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The tale—which had never been told, and seemed to be unknown even to Kirkpatrick’s contemporaries—bore a striking resemblance to Madame Butterfly. Day after day, under the armorial shields and dark oak bookcases of the Duke Humfrey’s Library, I tore as quickly as I could through the faded pages of Russell’s often illegible copperplate correspondence, the tragic love story slowly unfolding fully-formed before me.

  Finally, only a few months before I began writing, family papers belonging to the great-great-great-grandson of Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa turned up a couple of miles from my home in West London. This extended the story through to the no less remarkable tale of Khair un-Nissa’s daughter, Kitty Kirkpatrick. She had initially been brought up as Sahib Begum, a Muslim noblewoman in Hyderabad, before being shipped off to England at four years old, baptised on her arrival in London and thenceforth completely cut off from her maternal relations. Instead she had been absorbed into the upper echelons of Victorian literary society, where she had fascinated her cousins’ tutor, the young Thomas Carlyle, and formed the basis for the heroine Blumine, ‘a many tinted radiant Aurora … the fairest of Oriental light-bringers’, in Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus.

  This last set of family papers told the story of the series of remarkable coincidences which brought Kitty, as an adult, back into contact with her Hyderabadi grandmother, and the emotional correspondence which reunited the two women after a gap of nearly forty years. They were letters of great beauty and intense sadness as the story emerged of lives divided by prejudice and misunderstanding, politics and fate. One wrote in English from a seaside villa in Torquay; the other replied from a Hyderabadi harem, dictat
ing in Persian to a scribe who wrote on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed the letter in a Mughal kharita, a sealed gold brocade bag. Her grandmother’s letters revealed to Kitty the secret of how her parents had met and fallen in love, and led to her discovering for herself the sad truth of Khair un-Nissa’s fate.

  The story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salvars, Mughal Hyderabad and Regency London, seemed to raise huge questions: about Britishness and the nature of Empire, about faith, and about personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these mattered, and were fixed and immutable—or how far they were in fact flexible, tractable, negotiable. For once it seemed that the normal steely dualism of Empire—between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and the colonised—had broken down. The easy labels of religion and ethnicity and nationalism, slapped on by generations of historians, turned out, at the very least, to be surprisingly unstable. Yet clearly—and this was what really fascinated me—while the documentation surrounding Kirkpatrick’s story was uniquely well-preserved, giving a window into a world that few realise ever existed, the situation itself was far from unusual, something the participants were themselves well aware of.

  The deeper I went in my research the more I became convinced that the picture of the British of the East India Company as a small alien minority locked away in their Presidency towns, forts and cantonments needed to be revised. The tone of this early period of British life in India seemed instead to be about intermixing and impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas.