Last Nizam (9781742626109) (6 page)

The signing of the treaty did little to allay the fears of the Bombay Government as to the Nizam's intentions. There were ‘evident signs of an intention to keep the late peace as ill as he did the former', the Records of Fort William noted. ‘Notwithstanding the most scrupulous exactness on our part in observing the treaty . . . Nizam Ally will pay little or no regard to his engagement if any opportunity offers to give us trouble.'
²⁶

If there was a strategy behind the signing of this treaty and other moves the East India Company was making in southern India at the time, it can be found in the East India Board minutes of 17 November 1867:

The grand point we ought to aim at is to have the Carnatic, Mysore country and the Deccan so much under our influence that no disputes or jealousies may arise between the several governing powers, and that we may be able by this system to lay the foundation of internal tranquillity in these countries by which means alone the Marathas can be kept in bounds.
²⁷

Although their aims were clearly spelled out, the British lacked a coherent strategy to achieve them. They were challenged by the shifting alliances of the sub-continent, they felt vulnerable to attack and were constantly looking over their shoulder to try to ascertain the views of the French. They were also prey to political machinations in London between the Directors of the East India Company and the British Government, as well as events overseas such as France's intervention on the side of the colonists in the American War of Independence.

The Nizam, meanwhile, was planning his revenge. In 1778 he opened secret correspondence with Nana Phadnavis, the ‘Maratha Machiavelli' Prime Minister, on creating a grand alliance against the British. ‘We shall manage the English by means of the French whose Vackeel is with us, with who we have entered into a Treaty,' Nana wrote to the Nizam in August 1778. ‘After the present Disturbances are quelled we shall call in his Troops, act in the most vigorous manner, to be a future example to others.'
²⁸
Unfortunately for both men the letter was intercepted by the British, as was the Nizam's reply a few months later. ‘I will repair in person to you, and rouse that bad race from their Dream of Security, and overthrow all their ambitious designs.'
²⁹

The contents of the letters and other intelligence that the Governor-General Warren Hastings collected made for disturbing reading. The ‘Vackeel' Nana was referring to was the French agent Chevalier de St Lubin who had been favourably received in Pune in 1777. The French, Hastings believed, had ‘seized on the only means by which they can ever be formidable to us in India'. He immediately began to consider plans to ‘avert the dreadful consequences' of their designs.
³⁰

Those designs were complicated by the formation in 1780 of a powerful confederacy comprising the Nizam, the Marathas and Haider Ali. All three held strong grudges against the British and now they conspired to attack all three presidencies – Bombay,
Madras and Bengal – simultaneously. Nana Phadnavis and Maratha military chieftain Madhaji Sindia were to attack Bombay, the Nizam and Haider Ali would march on Madras, while Bhonsle, the Maratha ruler of Nagpur, would take on Bengal. The depth of the Nizam's hatred towards the British at this time was apparent in a letter he wrote to the Mughal Emir Najaf Khan in September 1780:

The World is now involved in calamities through the turbulence of the English; the deceits of this wicked nation are spread over the whole Empire . . . A handful of people without a head of foundation have possessed themselves of the three richest Provinces in the Empire, every one of which is equal to a Kingdom, a set of merchants without a name and scarcely known have engrossed and disposed of as they please.
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Such ‘extorted and palliated confessions'
³²
were enough to convince Hastings that the Nizam was behind the formation of the confederacy, but he also knew the dangers of alienating Hyderabad's ruler. Nizam Ali Khan was now at the height of his power, successfully playing off the British against the French. Through the confederacy he was threatening the very future of the East India Company's presence on the sub-continent. With Haider Ali's troops now marching once again towards the Carnatic and the Nizam threatening to join them, Hastings had to act fast. Through the skilful mix of military force, diplomacy and a little bribery, Hastings managed to avert disaster. Pune was brought to heel by the unexpected arrival of six sepoy battalions that had been marched all the way from Bengal, and Nagpur's leader was bought off. Hastings also sacked the controversial Governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Rumbold, and reappointed the British Resident John Holland in Hyderabad,
who had been suspended by the Madras Government. Impressed by Hastings' evident good faith, the Nizam abandoned his hostile intentions.

Hastings was replaced as Governor-General in 1786 by Lord Cornwallis, who arrived in India fresh from his surrender to George Washington at Yorktown during the American War of Independence. Although Hastings had restored the East India Company's fortunes in India, he left some unfinished business. Cornwallis's intention from the moment of his arrival was to go to war against Tipu Sultan, but first he needed to build up alliances with Hyderabad and the Marathas. Then he needed a pretext.

The trigger for the Third Maratha War was what Cornwallis described as an attack on Travancore in December 1789. Tipu Sultan denied there had been an attack, describing it as a skirmish, but instead of backing off, he followed the skirmish up with a full-scale invasion. Cornwallis reacted by instructing his Residents in Pune and Hyderabad to bring the Marathas and the Nizam into a tripartite alliance against Mysore and assemble the strongest possible armies to press an attack.

Appointed Resident of Hyderabad in 1788, John Kennaway was considered to be ‘a gentleman well acquainted with the country, languages and customs'.
³³
An ex-grammar-school boy, he arrived in India in 1772 and rose quickly through the Company's ranks. Under the terms of the treaty concluded with the Nizam in July 1790, which was almost identical to one signed with the
Peshwa
of Pune, it was agreed that Hyderabad would wage war separately against Tipu Sultan. Both treaties contained clauses that bound the
peshwa
and the Nizam to each send on demand 10,000 cavalry to operate with the British. In return the British would supply them with two detachments of battalion strength. Each party would receive a third of the share of any territory captured during the campaign.

This time the Nizam kept to his side of the bargain, but his forces moved so slowly that it was April before they finally joined Cornwallis's at Kottapalli, some 140 kilometres north of Bangalore. According to the nineteenth-century historian Mark Wilks, the Nizam's cavalry, numbering 10,000 to 15,000 men, was one of the most bizarre forces ever assembled on the sub continent. ‘It is probable that no national or private collection of ancient armour in Europe contains any weapon or article of personal equipment which might not be traced in this motley crowd,' wrote Wilks. ‘The Parthian bow and arrow, the iron club of Scythia, sabres of every age and nation, lances of every length and description, metallic helmets of every pattern, simple defences of the head, a steel bar descending diagonally as a protection to the face; defences of bars, scales of chain work descending behind or on the shoulders, cuirasses, suits of armour . . . quilted jackets, sabre proof.' Wilks was also struck by ‘the total absence of order, or obedience, or command, excepting groups collected around their respective flags; every individual an independent warrior, self impelled, affecting to be the champion whose single aim was to achieve victory; scampering among each other in wild confusion'.
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When Cornwallis selected 3000 of the most capable soldiers to join one of his brigades, hardly any turned up. ‘The only alacrity they showed was in devouring forage and grain and in setting fire to villages.'
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The Nizam's forces never fully recovered from their ‘wild confusion'. Their horsemen stumbled between an English battalion and Tipu's forces during the attack on Seringapatam, allowing the latter to regroup. They were successful in the siege of Koppal, but instead of taking the remaining Mysore forces head-on they swung into the district of Cuddapah, where they became bogged down in another time-consuming attack on the hill-fortress of Gurramkonda. The war itself culminated in the year-long siege of Seringapatam, where a heavily outgunned and
outnumbered Tipu finally called for a negotiated settlement in February 1793. The settlement which Kennaway negotiated on behalf of Cornwallis was severe. Tipu was to pay an indemnity of 33 million rupees, surrender half his territories and hand over to the British custody of two of his children, both aged eight, as surety.

All that was left was for the victors to share the spoils. Although his forces had played a minor role, the Nizam walked away with a large swathe of territory along his southern border running from Cuddapah in the east to the Tungabhadra River in the west. The Marathas received Koppal and the British the spice-bearing Malabar coast, the district of Coorg and territories adjacent to the Carnatic.

No sooner had the booty been dispersed, however, than the triple alliance Cornwallis hoped would become permanent began falling apart. This time it was the Marathas and the Nizam who would come to blows while Tipu and the British watched from the sidelines.

For more than a hundred years the Marathas had been a source of constant trouble for the various players competing for control of peninsular India. The Marathas were essentially predators whose main source of income was their practice of demanding
chauth
(one-fourth of all revenue) from their conquered subjects. One historian described the Maratha army as being ‘more indefatigable and destructive than myriads of locusts'. ‘The [Marathas] are total strangers to charity, and possess an insensibility of heart with which other nations are unacquainted.'
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In 1794 the Nizam decided to throw caution to the wind and attack the Marathas at Pune to eradicate the menace once and for all. The ‘motley crowd' that had fought in the Mysore War was now a more polished war machine thanks to the Gascon adventurer and former French regular officer Michel Joachim
Marie Raymond. A deserter from the Second Mysore War, Raymond arrived in Hyderabad in 1792 with just 300 men and armed with hired guns from a French merchant at the rate of a shilling a month. Promising the Nizam that under his command Hyderabad's army could defeat any force, European or Indian, he steadily increased his troop numbers. By 1795 he had under his command 11,000 infantry and artillery officered by Frenchmen. Dressed in red jackets, black tricorn hats, white shirts and short shin-length boots, Raymond's brigade was impressive to look at, but had yet to prove itself on the battlefield.

As his forces massed at Bidar, dancing girls sang the Nizam's expected victory. His
Diwan
, Aristu Jah, predicted that the
peshwa
would be sent with a ‘brass pot in his hand' and a ‘cloth round his loins' to mutter mantras on the bank of the Ganges at Benares.
³⁷
The Nizam then sent Aristu Jah to ask the new British Resident, William Kirkpatrick, to enlist the support of the East India Company's armies. But his appeals to the British for help were turned down on the grounds that the treaty of 1768 required them to remain neutral. John Shore, an equivocating evangelical Christian, who had succeeded Cornwallis as Governor-General, was reluctant to question the letter of the treaties. To him the Nizam was a defaulter trying to evade his obligations. ‘His record towards the company had long been one of duplicity,' Shore later explained. Moreover he did not deserve to be helped as he was ‘incorrigibly depraved, devoid of energy . . . [and] consequently liable to sink into vassalage'.
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The more important reason was the perceived need to stay on good terms with the Marathas and isolate Tipu Sultan.

Fluent in Persian and possessing a knowledge of the workings of the native courts that was ‘unrivalled in the Company's civil or military service', Kirkpatrick as Resident of Hyderabad had unprecedented access to the Nizam and his coterie.
³⁹
He could also see that the Nizam's army was not strong enough to take on
the Marathas. Their leader, Nana Phadnavis, had a far larger pool of mercenaries to train his soldiers in the latest military techniques. Altogether the Marathas had four brigades of European-led troops under the command of Benoit de Boigne, a French soldier of fortune who had begun his military career with the King of Sardinia and went on to become one of the most important military figures in eighteenth-century India.

Kirkpatrick's warnings were ignored, and in December the Nizam's 110,000-strong army began its slow march towards Pune from where 130,000 Maratha soldiers had been dispatched. The two sides met on 14 March 1795 near the half-ruined fort of Khardla. Kirkpatrick, who accompanied the forces, was so meticulous about observing Britain's neutrality that he refused to even comment on the strategy and tactics of the Nizam's forces. On the side of the Marathas, Charles Malet, the Resident at the court of Pune, maintained a similar treaty-bound discretion.

The first day of battle was an extraordinary sight as Raymond's corps, flying the tricolour, swept down on de Boigne's forces, under the white cross of royalist Savoy. At the end of the first day of fighting, the Nizam's forces had advanced several kilometres despite continuous firing from the Marathas. But whatever advantage the Nizam gained in this bewildering battle was short-lived. With what the late nineteenth-century historian Herbert Compton called ‘the imbecile infatuation of an Oriental Potentate',
⁴⁰
the Nizam had brought with him his new favourite wife, Bakshi Begum, and the rest of his oversized
zenana
. According to one eyewitness, Bakshi Begum became so frightened by ‘the booming of the cannon and at the sight of men falling down dead' that she blackmailed the Nizam by threatening to ‘expose herself to public gaze' unless he took her and the rest of the
zenana
to shelter inside the fort.
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