White Mughals (25 page)

From the moment Aristu Jah arrived back in Hyderabad, events began to move quickly. Only the tortuous weeks it took to get letters and drafts of the new treaty to and from Calcutta, and the need for extreme secrecy, slowed the frenetic pace of negotiations, as James worked to replace Raymond as the centre of influence in the Hyderabad durbar.

Lord Wellesley, by May 1798 installed in Calcutta and anxious to get on with what he saw as his principal task of reducing French influence in the subcontinent, sent James a series of lengthy despatches minutely laying down the exact boundaries within which James was to work. He did not approve when James allowed himself the slightest discretion to verge even marginally from these guidelines, and at one point wrote to General William Palmer, the new Resident at Pune: ‘I find that Captain Kirkpatrick has departed very widely both from the spirit and letter of my instructions to him.’
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But as the treaty neared the moment of signing, and as the Nizam agreed one by one to almost all of Wellesley’s terms, James gradually returned to favour with his irascible new master. By the end, the Nizam was holding out on only one of Calcutta’s demands: that the French corps be immediately dismissed. Raymond was personally well liked by the old man, and he was determined not to lose him, despite the urgings of his Minister. He seemed oblivious to the fact that destroying Raymond was the Company’s principal aim.

As the negotiations gathered pace, both Wellesley and James remained worried that events on the ground might overtake their schemes. The main worry remained a French coup, possibly combined with an attempt to assassinate the elderly Nizam and replace him with one of his more pliable sons. One son, Ali Jah, had revolted in October 1795; another senior family member, Dara Jah, had come out in rebellion the following March, raising the flag of revolt from the reputedly impregnable hill fort of Raichur until dislodged and captured by Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple on 20 April.
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Then in September a plot was uncovered in the palace aiming to do away with the Nizam with the aid of black magic. This was taken every bit as seriously as the two rebellions. To the great alarm of the Minister and the Nizam’s
zenana,
it was found that (as James reported to Calcutta)

However much the British might dismiss the sorcery as hocus pocus, it added to the growing perception in Hyderabad that the Nizam’s days might well be numbered.

Hyderabad in 1798 had something of the feel of post-war Berlin or Vienna: a city alive with intrigue and conspiracy, where no one could trust anyone else. At the centre of the city, like the spider at the heart of his web, lay the Nizam himself, assisted by a very efficient intelligence network.
^bm
Nizam Ali Khan kept a secret ‘intelligencer’ known as a
khufia navis
in every fort, village and city in his dominions, as well as in the palaces of the more important nobles; like his father he probably also received information from the
pirs
(holy men) of the Sufi shrines across his territory.
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From outside his lands, from the Mughal capital of Delhi and the Maratha court in Pune, he was sent a daily newsletter from a professional Hyderabadi
akhbar navis,
or ‘newswriter’.
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This intelligence department had a considerable budget. One of Aristu Jah’s successors as Prime Minister, Rajah Chandu Lal, was to spend at least ‘seven lakhs of rupees annually’ getting sensitive information from Calcutta alone.
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Nor was it just a question of information: abductions, assassinations and poisonings were regularly used by the spies of Indian rulers at this period to accomplish their aims. Poisoning in particular has a long history in India, being recommended as a vital instrument of statecraft by ancient India’s Machiavelli, the great political philosopher Chanakya
^bn
(c.300 BC), who in his
Artha Shastra
suggested that courtesans were particularly useful for administering slow-acting toxins to selected clients when they were asleep.
⁶²
Certainly there is evidence that Aristu Jah was prepared to consider more dramatic forms of intelligence work than simply spying. At one point two prominent figures from Hyderabad escaped from the Nizam’s territories to Pune, from where Aristu Jah discovered that they were plotting to have him assassinated. He responded by proposing the sort of operation more usually associated with modern intelligence agencies, ordering that ‘the motions of both these intriguers [should be] most strictly watched for the purpose of having them carried off if a fair opportunity should offer, and conducted on horses or camels with all expedition to Hyderabad’.
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The Nizam was not the only one who employed informers in Hyderabad: several different groups kept networks of spies at work. Raymond, for example, had successfully placed a spy in the English military camp, who had yet to be apprehended although the fact of his existence was acknowledged—through Kirkpatrick’s own agents in the French camp. Moreover, quite unknown to James, Tipu Sultan had succeeded in placing a paid informer within the Residency staff who throughout this period was busily copying sensitive documents from the Residency
daftar
or chancellery, and despatching them to Seringapatam via ‘the Fakir’, a nephew of the Nizam named Imtiaz ul-Omrah who was the head of the pro-Tipu faction at court.
^bo
In his more facetious moments, James referred to ‘the Fakir’ as ‘the Doctor of Divinity’,
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but he did not underestimate Imtiaz, recognising him as his most formidable enemy within the durbar.
⁶⁵

James was aware that intelligence leaks were occurring somewhere between Calcutta and Hyderabad, though he did not yet realise his own office was responsible for them. For this reason he took the precaution of writing almost all of his politically sensitive letters in cipher.
^bp

Perhaps James might have done well to employ such precautions, for he continued to discover evidence of the lack of security surrounding the Residency’s affairs. He was horrified when Mir Alam’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari, told him of a letter James was about to receive from Calcutta before it actually arrived. More worrying still, William Gardner, then a new recruit in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, managed to discover some of Wellesley’s decisions on details of the new treaty before James did.
⁶⁶
James thought the leaks were occurring in Madras, and wrote angrily to his brother William about the lack of security there, especially when the details of his plans to take on Raymond came quickly to be an open secret in Hyderabad.
^bq
It was not for another year that James realised he had a mole at work in his own staff.
^67
br

Kirkpatrick was however no innocent in the game of espionage. One of his first jobs in Hyderabad had been to set up his own network of informers. Within the Nizam’s
mahal
he had spies, probaby
burarun
: ‘female domestics or slaves of the seraglio who collect a daily budget of [often scandalous] tittle tattle not always of a description to be given to the world’, as another British intelligence officer of the period described them.
⁶⁸
He also bribed the palace sweepers to pass on information and documents from the Nizam’s inner apartments, and his letters are full of references to ‘my information from the interior of the palace’.
^bs

But it seems unlikely, judging by his letters, that James would have been prepared to contemplate more devious and Machiavellian methods of conducting his business. So when, on the morning of 25 March 1798, General Raymond was found dead aged only forty-three, in highly suspicious circumstances, all the evidence pointing to the use of some agonising slow-acting toxin or poison, there is every reason to believe that James was as surprised as everyone else.

Everyone else, that is, except perhaps Aristu Jah, who without blinking announced the confiscation of Raymond’s extensive estates that same evening.

Raymond was buried in a perfect classical Greek tomb on a hilltop at Malakpet, just outside the city of Hyderabad. It lay immediately above the French cantonments he had founded and supervised. Beside it was raised an obelisk. Both tomb and obelisk were left free of the iconography of any religion; only the same simple monogram which can be found on Raymond’s hookah—a looped and italicised ‘JR’—breaks the purity of its line.
^bt

Raymond was succeeded by his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron, a rougher and less sophisticated man than his former commander. Piron lacked Raymond’s great charm, and was less clever at concealing both his feelings and his ambitions. His first action on succeeding Raymond was to send his counterpart in Scindia’s service a republican silver tree and a Cap of Liberty. This, once reported back to Calcutta by British spies in Pune, fed Wellesley’s increasingly paranoiac belief that a worldwide republican conspiracy was afoot, encouraging him to speed up his plans to topple the French party at Hyderabad.
⁶⁹

Reporting the death of Raymond to Calcutta, James wrote that the French corps remained formidable despite its founder’s death:

In fact the French corps was later discovered to have in store enough equipment to arm twelve thousand more troops—a measure of Raymond’s hopes and ambitions.
⁷¹
Yet James soon realised that Raymond’s death was going to make his job much easier. He first detected signs of laziness creeping into the routine of the French camp in the middle of the summer. Reviewing his intelligence on the French cantonments six months later, just after the text of his new treaty had finally been agreed by Calcutta, he wrote to William: ‘Things in Piron’s lines go on as usual, and the daily detail of duty continues without any alteration since Piron succeeded to the Command of the Party. During Raymond’s time, however, there was more vigilance for he always kept spies abroad to advise him what was doing, but Piron has not a single Harkarrah [runner or spy] employed.’

This, wrote James, was just as well, as the news from outside Hyderabad was far from heartening: ‘The report of the day is that the French are triumphant in Europe, have entirely humbled the English, and that Tippoo is prepared for war, having been joined by 12,000 Frenchmen who landed at one of his ports.’

The reports turned out to be exaggerated; but some French soldiers and sailors had indeed turned up, and Tipu quickly wrote to the French commander in Mauritius asking for more.