White Mughals Page 32
William’s health continued to fluctuate, but he remained far too ill to proceed in the direction of Pune, and as the omens grew less and less encouraging, James began encouraging him to think seriously about retiring to England, though he was only forty-six: ‘you must now consult your own preservation, my dearest Will, and the well-being of your family in preference to every other consideration’, he wrote at the end of April. ‘These, in my opinion, loudly call for your early return to your native country.’55 He also made it clear that he would consider it his duty to support his elder brother in his retirement: ‘My purse, as you well know, and as I have so often told you, is most entirely at your service, and must be considered in fact as your own.’56
In early May, when William’s health suddenly dipped again, Ure despatched some new ‘electuary’, while James scoured the Deccan to find some ‘very fine fresh figs and prunes’ in order that Ure could ‘compose an electuary that you will approve of both for its taste and its effects. Ure is however decidedly of the opinion that you ought on no account allow of any further operation being performed upon you until you have completely recovered your strength.’57
This never happened; instead William’s health complications became more and more serious, and the pain almost unbearable.en By the beginning of June, he was forced to accept that his career in India was over, at least for the time being. He wrote to Calcutta for permission to leave India on account of his health, and at the end of the month received the brief chit from Wellesley allowing him to head ‘for the Cape, and eventually to Europe on Furlough should the state of your health render a voyage to Europe necessary’.58eo
All that remained now was for William to find a ship to take him home. James wrote: ‘I must still insist on your embarking on none but an Indiaman with a good surgeon on board: these you know, are sine qua nons to my hearty acquiescence in the step, and if you cannot get such a passage at Madras you should go to Bengal in search of one.’59
While William lingered prostrate in the Thackerays’ house in Madras, the two young Assistants who had accompanied him from Calcutta were told to proceed on their way to Pune, via Mysore and Hyderabad, where they would in due course be joined by a Resident, once one had been appointed to replace William.
Edward Strachey and Mountstuart Elphinstone were, James thought, ‘two very superior young men’;60 and the double entendre of this phrase was entirely deliberate. Strachey was twenty-six, Elphinstone barely twenty-one. Both were highly intelligent and capable; but they made little effort to hide the fact that they knew it, or that they clearly believed they were destined for great things.
As there was no need for them to rush to their new appointment in Pune, they took their time about it, zigzagging across almost the whole of India and spending nearly a year en route. They travelled in great state with a sawaree of eight elephants, eleven camels, four horses and ten bullocks, not to mention the horses and ponies of their servants, of whom there were between 150 and 200, together with an escort of twenty sepoys and, later, what Elphinstone described as ‘a Mahratta condottiere of 30 to 40 men’. One elephant was reserved entirely for carrying their books, including a history of the Bengal Mutiny by Edward’s father, Henry Strachey, as well as volumes of the Persian poets, and editions of Homer, Horace, Hesiod, Herodotus, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato, Beowulf, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Dryden, Bacon, Boswell and Thomas Jefferson. As they ambled across India at the Company’s expense, they read aloud to each other, sketched, practised their Persian and Marathi grammar, went shooting and played the flute by the light of the moon. They also kept diaries.61
Diaries—and especially travel diaries—often reveal as much about the writer as the place or person written about. In his trip to Hyderabad, the French jeweller Tavernier noticed mainly the gold and diamonds in the bazaars, while the anonymous French soldier-gourmet who wrote an account of Hyderabad in 1750 was transfixed by the city’s celebrated cooking, especially the famous Hyderabad biryani. Edward Strachey, brought up at the height of the fashion for the Picturesque, saw instead a City of Ruins. Elphinstone, meanwhile, raised his nose at so extreme an angle he missed much that was of interest; but what he did record, he noted down with a waspish wit.
The two young Englishmen arrived at the outskirts of Hyderabad on the evening of 22 August 1801. As Strachey noted:Near the city the grounds are more bare, rugged and rocky than before … Hyderabad is surrounded by a stone wall the extent of which is I am told nearly seven miles. This defence would be sufficient to keep off predatory incursions of horse, but would not stand an hour against our artillery. From a distance [you can see over the walls] … a great many white buildings much hid among trees with some lofty buildings and minarets rising above them … Wretched and ruinous as the scene is now where the walls are cracked and decayed, the cornices broke and different parts of the building overgrown with grass and weeds, I can easily conceive that in better times it must have been in a high degree splendid and magnificent … 62
The two diaries, with their detailed record of five months in Hyderabad, form one of the most graphic and immediate sources for the city in the early nineteenth century. From the comments they make, both Strachey and Elphinstone clearly thought they were making a record of a timeless India that had not changed for centuries; but in actual fact the diaries are important and observant records of Hyderabad at a time of massive and rapid change: the ruins Strachey so lovingly describes were irrigated pleasure gardens when Tavernier passed through the city shortly before the Mughal invasion, while a few years later they would be swallowed up in the bustling commercial quarter that quickly grew up around Kirkpatrick’s Residency.
Likewise the picture of their visit to the Hyderabad durbar given by Elphinstone a month after his arrival is a record not of medieval continuity or the timeless customs of ‘Oriental Despotism’, as he and Strachey thought, but an interesting snapshot of ceremonial in a period of transformation, when the old ways copied from the Mughal emperors of the Delhi Red Fort were slowly becoming mixed with new forms imported from Europe: ‘Major K[irkpatrick] goes [to the durbar] in great state and has several elephants, a state palankeen, led horses, flags, long poles with tassels &ca and is attended by ten companies of infantry & a troop of cavalry,’ recorded Elphinstone.
… We passed through several courts in going to His Highness’s presence, the gates surrounded by armed men some of them with beards one or two with steel caps [i.e. helmets] and gauntlets, some of them very picturesque … At the last courtyard, the minister Azim ul Omrah [Aristu Jah] met us & embraced us. He led us though a court to a diwan khaneh where the Nizam was sitting. I went up to him and presented my nuzzar [ceremonial gift]. Major K’s munshi [Aziz Ullah] showed me how to hold it and a man prest me down to the proper stoop; His Highness took my nuzzar smiling. I retired and made a low salaam.
The Nizam was drest in brocade. He kept his right arm, which is palsied, within his gown; he wore a cap with a shawl twisted round it. The whole headress was shaped like a cone. He is a good looking old man [and … ] wore many splendid jewels. There were many other people some sitting & some standing. Among the latter were several female women sentries, dressed something like Madras seypoys. More were on guard before the doors & about 20 or 30 more women were drawn out before [the] guardroom in sight. Many women sat in the back part of the room where we were.
The Nizam showed us many clocks & curious pieces of mechanism some of them very obscene … I did not hear him say a word—he was most of the time amusing himself with laughing at the little machinery of the watches etc … Major K behaved like a native & with great propriety. The Nizam gave [us] sirpèches [turban jewels] for each donation [nuzzar]. Eventually we made a low bow then we withdrew into a room on one side of a passage.
[Here] we stopt to talk with the Minister [Aristu Jah] … He looks much younger than the Nizam & was plainly dressed. His only ornaments were a gold belt & dagger with a diamond buckle. He talked familiarly with a favourite old a
seel, Mama Barun … 63
[Afterwards] the Resident told us of an event which had just happened, and which shows strongly the nature of the Nizam’s Govt. There had been many robberies committed in the city within a short time and the Nizam declared that if there were any more he would make an example of some of the offenders. One morning the Kotwal brought three men to the Nizam declaring that he had seized them drunk in the street late at night. The Nizam simply ordered them to be blown from a gun. The sentence had just been put in execution when one of the chief Omrahs of the court came in and said that the men were honest men servants of his, returning from a merry meeting where they had been drinking. The Minister [Aristu Jah] took advantage of the Kotwals having occasioned, by his careless report, the execution of the three innocent men, and fined him 30,000 rupees … 64
It is a fascinating moment: the old Mughal ceremonial—the giving and receiving of nuzzars—and the tradition of instant ‘justice’ has survived, despite the intrusion of growing Company power and a profusion of new European knick-knacks such as the ‘very obscene’ clocks (a matter in which the Nizams seem to have pre-empted the tastes of the later Victorian maharajahs). The description is also interesting for what it shows of the sudden and unexpected power and prominence of women in the Hyderabad durbar at this period, and the degree to which Mama Barun, one of the two senior aseels—former wetnurses of the royal family who had also been commanders of the Zuffur Plutun women’s battalion at Khardla five years earlier—now acted as the principal master of ceremonies, while their women sepoys acted as the Nizam’s bodyguards.ep
But perhaps the biggest and most significant change recorded by Strachey and Elphinstone in their accounts of Hyderabad, and something which no previous traveller had described, is the picture they give of the new British cantonments, ten miles to the north of the old city, just over the Banjara Hills.
These cantonments were vast tent cities which housed the now very substantial British military contingent that had arrived in the area following the two treaties James had signed with the Nizam. Strachey talks of the cantonments as ‘already extending near 2 miles (I guess) and there is a considerable town formed by the huts of the troops and camp followers. The situation is very high and airy commanding a fine view of the Hoosn Sagoor [the huge man-made lake north of the old city].’65 Elphinstone adds that the tent city was ‘very neat’; he also implies that, in a way the Residency had never been—located as it was in an old Qutb Shahi baradari pavilion within a walled pleasure garden—the cantonments were intrusions of unadulterated Englishness in the utterly Indian landscape. Here the two youths went shopping in a ‘Europe Shop’—an emporium which sold only imported luxury goods from Europe—consulted a European doctor (about Elphinstone’s severe clap) and went to see an English farce at a makeshift open-air regimental theatre. They went shooting (though apparently only hit an owl), attended regimental balls, gambled and played whist, billiards and backgammon in the officers’ mess.66 It was not much yet, but these cantonments were the embryo that would soon grow to become Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s twin city and a conurbation that is today as large as Hyderabad itself. Moreover, their growth was rapid: only eighteen months later, by the autumn of 1804, the cantonments were already ‘like a large regular town reckoned equal in extent to [the large north Indian station of ] Cawnpore’.67
The cantonment was a rival centre of power not only to the Nizam and his durbar, but also to James and the Residency, whose writ ran uncertainly in the army lines. James certainly believed—with reason—that he was head of the British community in Hyderabad; but his authority was tacitly resisted by his former army colleagues. After all, James was still a humble major, while the commander of the Subsidiary Force was a lieutenant colonel. Moreover, among the troops in the force were a number of James’s former colleagues who resented his rapid promotion to a senior position in the Company’s diplomatic corps, when they remembered him only eight years earlier as a fairly undistinguished junior lieutenant. His swift rise from commander of an obscure tribal fort to one of the most lucrative positions in the Company’s service was attributed less to his own merits than to the influence of his powerful half-brother William. Moreover, James’s adoption of Muslim clothes, and the stories circulating about his partiality to Hyderabadi customs, did not go down well with his former army colleagues either, especially as some of them—like the late Colonel James Dalrymple—had been prisoners of Tipu, and had seen a number of their colleagues convert to Islam and adopt Decanni Muslim clothes, turbans and moustaches in return for easier conditions. A few of the prisoners had even agreed to help drill Tipu’s troops in modern European military techniques, in exchange for Mysorean wives and positions as officers and drill sergeants in Tipu’s army.68 The soldiers in the cantonments therefore tended to look on all converts and Islamophiles as turncoats, and regarded the thoroughly assimilated James with the deepest suspicion.
This dislike and distrust of James was something that Strachey and Elphinstone had picked up when they stayed with Arthur Wellesley and his garrison at Seringapatam on their way to Hyderabad. According to their diaries, Wellesley had ‘rowed Hushmut Jung’ [i.e. joked about Kirkpatrick], and Elphinstone certainly arrived in Hyderabad thoroughly prejudiced against James. When a messenger from him came out to meet them on their way to Hyderabad, generously offering them accommodation at the Residency, his initial reaction to his diary was: ‘Bore! Who would like to live with Hushmut Jung?’69 On arrival he was clearly surprised to be received ‘very civilly’, and to discover that ‘in most respects’ James was ‘like an Englishman’.70 It was only after James had lavished his hospitality on the pair for several weeks that Elphinstone began to write warmly about his host, although what seemed to impress the twenty-one-year-old most was James’s shooting skills: ‘Major K is a capital shot,’ he wrote admiringly after an expedition looking for sand grouse in the Banjara Hills.71
In August 1801, when Strachey and Elphinstone arrived in Hyderabad, the nascent tensions between the Subsidiary Force and the Residency were evident, if still unspoken. But even before the pair had left the city three months later, it was out of these innocent-looking lines of regimental tents that the next great storm to shake Kirkpatrick was to emerge.
The rumblings of discontent with James were brought out into the open by events during the Muharram festivities in the old city in September; and in many ways it was James who brought the storm down upon himself.
‘As soon as the crescent new moon of the sacred month of Muharram is sighted over the city, the Standard of Hussain, the Blessed Horseshoe, and innumerable flower-garlands are sent by the Minister to the Palace to ensure the good fortune of the Nizam’s thousand-year rule,’ wrote Ghulam Husain Khan in his history of Hyderabad, the Gulzar i-Asafiya.
It is an ancient custom that when the garlands arrive, at the second watch of the night, with the Nizam’s guards all present, the Nizam—duly bathed and perfumed, dressed in green with a multitude of gems, and hair anointed—reverently takes the garland container on his head and carries it step by step, bare-foot, among crowds of people, along with goblets of sherbet and cauldrons of food offerings, into the place where the standards are erected in the great Husaini ’Alam shrine. There he ties the garlands [to the standards] while reciting the Fatiha [the opening chapter of the Koran].72
So, every year, began the great ten-day-long festival of Muharram. If the festival of Maula Ali was one of the two great celebrations of the Hyderabadi year, then Muharram was the other. Despite both being ostensibly Shi’a celebrations, the two were very different events. For if Maula Ali was essentially a pleasurable holiday, an escape from the teeming lanes and alleys of the old city of Hyderabad, then Muharram was a celebration of the city itself, and especially of its internal divisions and diversity.
The festivities were organised—like the Palio of Siena, or the mystery plays of medieval York—by the rival quarters (or mohallas) of the city, who all competed with each other over the size an
d splendour of their devotional processions. The Sufis, the fakirs and the ascetics in particular tended to take a factional attitude to the celebrations, and ‘massed under the sun banners distinct to each mohalla’, ready to defend its honour and prestige against that of its neighbours: ‘Thus they all come from their own quarter and according to custom rank by rank, they join the processions. But if they try to get into any position other than that sanctified by custom, there will be quarrels and feuds, and the troublemakers will be arrested. In the past many were killed in this way until the Nizam issued strict orders against the wearing of weapons and the shedding of blood.’73
Muharram was supposedly a time of mourning. It marked the anniversary of the defeat and death of Imam Hussain, the son of Maula Ali and the Prophet’s grandson, at the Battle of Karbala on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, AD 680. The standards—or alams as they were called—were stylised representations of the standards carried by Hussain at Karbala.eq The beautiful elegies—or marsiyas—that were sung evoked the thirst of Hussain and his entourage of women and children, and their sufferings at the hands of the Ummayad Caliph al-Yazid, an event considered by Shi’as as the most tragic martyrdom in history.