White Mughals (36 page)

In the context of his dismissal and disgrace, Mir Alam’s claims that James’s crossing of cultures was regarded as ‘ridiculous’ can be taken with a fair pinch of salt, especially as we know from a note by Kirkpatrick—on the back of the only surviving miniature which shows him in Hyderabadi dress—that the clothes he is depicted wearing were actually given to him by Mir Alam so that he could wear them at the marriage of Mir Alam’s son Mir Dauran in November 1799.
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But the remark nevertheless provides a fascinating counterpoint to the view of, for example, the historian Ghulam Imam Khan who in his
Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi
stresses on several occasions that James’s adoption of Hyderabadi manners had made him especially popular in the city. It would be fascinating to know whether Mir Alam’s remarks reflected a widespread view in Hyderabad, or merely the Mir’s own anger and bitterness at losing his job.
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The remark does certainly highlight the contradictions and limitations to James’s transculturation: he might wear Indian dress, have an Indian lover and embrace Indian customs; but he remained—at least in the eyes of his political enemies—a
firangi
interloper and the official representative of an alien power.

Mir Alam concluded his tirade by asking Arthur Wellesley to ‘represent his case to the Governor General in order that Kirkpatrick might be removed’ and that he ‘be allowed to return to his house and family’. He also warned that Kirkpatrick was now ‘so completely under the influence of the Minister that it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam’s court than those of his own government’.
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As Wellesley noted in his memo to his brother, ‘if it were true that the Minister had told a falsehood to screen Kirkpatrick from disgrace, he must be a very convenient Resident to the Nizam’s Government’.

The day after the nautch, Arthur Wellesley wrote to his friend Colonel Barry Close: ‘It will be impossible in my opinion to do anything for Mir Alam. The strong desire of Aristoojah to get rid of him is the cause of his removal … [and] Hushmut Jung’s passions have thrown him into the hands of Aristoojah and he could do nothing … ’ He added, in a tone of characteristic understatement, ‘It is a curious story altogether.’
¹²⁴

In the months which followed, Mir Alam, now unprotected by the British, underwent a series of further misfortunes.

Aristu Jah’s spies had confirmed the rumours that the Mir had secretly acquired a set of spectacular gems at the sack of Seringapatam. Now that the Mir was under arrest, the Minister was determined to find where he had hidden them all. He questioned Mir Alam’s son, Mir Dauran, and his brother-in-law, Mustaqim ud-Daula. Both denied all knowledge of the stones. So Aristu Jah sent in a force of soldiers to Mir Alam’s mansion and ransacked it. They also tortured his
khansaman
or steward. When none of these measures had any effect, they burned the steward’s house down.
¹²⁵

Khair un-Nissa’s grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan had, meanwhile, become deeply unpopular with all his kinsmen, who regarded him as indirectly responsible for Mir Alam’s disgrace. As the story of James’s affair spread, Bâqar Ali was jeered ‘in the streets [and accused of ] having prostituted his grand daughter to the Resident’. At one point ‘abusive papers’ were stuck up around the Char Minar insulting him.
¹²⁶

Sometime in June, Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, now the most senior British soldier in Hyderabad, was out on a hunting expedition with Lieutenant Colonel Bowser a day’s journey from the city, when a message ‘was delivered by a servant of Bauker Aly, requesting us as his oldest and best friends to pay him a visit the next morning in order that he might consult with us on an affair of importance’. Dalrymple loved his
shikar
(hunting)—his will is full of detailed instructions for the disposal of his beloved ‘Arab horse, the little horse called Mamoola, and all my hounds’—but realised something important was up and immediately turned back to the city.
¹²⁷

James Dalrymple had been a close friend of Bâqar Ali for at least five years, and the two had fought side by side at the capture of Raichur during the rebellion of the Nizam’s son-in-law Dara Jah in 1796.
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Now, so it seemed to Dalrymple, Bâqar Ali Khan’s friendliness and hospitality had been badly abused, causing his old friend to be almost outcast from his clan. Dalrymple went to see Bâqar Ali first thing the following morning, and found the old man to be in a state of considerable agitation.

Four months earlier, in March, Bâqar Ali had helped Kirkpatrick out of his troubles by writing a signed statement to Wellesley declaring that the claims in the scandalous
akhbars
were nonsense: that James had neither raped his granddaughter nor murdered his son, that the charges were ‘an absolute falsehood & a mere calumny’, and that towards James he felt nothing but ‘gratitude and obligation’.
¹²⁹
Since then, however, the old man had clearly heard many more of the rumours linking Kirkpatrick with his granddaughter, and he needed Dalrymple to help him put a stop to it all.
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Moreover, Khair un-Nissa was still firmly refusing to marry the son of Ahmed Ali Khan, to whom she continued ‘to testify an unequivocal aversion’.
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Bâqar Ali—so it seems—had been the last to discover about his granddaughter’s ‘partiality’ for Kirkpatrick, and apparently still did not know quite how far the relationship had gone; but he was—albeit belatedly—well aware that there was a great deal of gossip linking the two, as the insults and bill-posters had made plain. Khair un-Nissa’s engagement to the son of Ahmed Ali Khan had still not been formally broken off, but Bâqar realised it was likely to be if there were any more scandals associated with her. Bâqar said he wanted Dalrymple to talk to Kirkpatrick, and tell him firmly to keep away from Khair un-Nissa. His granddaughter, he told Dalrymple,

This was looking very bad indeed. Hyderabad was a vital ally and a crucial strategic asset for the British. There was still a French army at large in Egypt, and there was still, in the Marathas, an Indian army on the borders of Hyderabad that was quite capable of joining a disaffected Hyderabad and together turning the British out of India once and for all. Now, so it seemed, Kirkpatrick’s libido was endangering everything, and causing a major anti-British uprising in the Deccan. Faced with this potentially catastrophic turn of events, Dalrymple read the riot act to James: ‘Colonel [Dalrymple] represented to the Resident the fatal consequences not only to his own personal safety but to the public interests which must result in persevering in a conduct so improper.’
¹³³
He demanded, in short, that James stop seeing Khair un-Nissa.
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James was forced to agree to keep his distance from the girl—at least for the time being, at least until the scandal blew over. After all, his own position was far from secure. He had very nearly lost his job over the affair already, and realised that he simply could not afford to ignore the explicit wishes of both Bâqar Ali and Dalrymple. His failure to come completely clean to Lord Wellesley about Khair un-Nissa had left him very vulnerable to gossip, especially from the British military in Hyderabad, over whom he had limited authority; and there was every reason to believe that having excused him once, Wellesley would not take it very kindly if further complaints about James’s womanising were made; still less would he sit back if James’s adventures were to lead to an anti-British rebellion. So James really had no choice: he gave Dalrymple ‘a solemn promise … that he would refrain from all intercourse with Bauker’s family’.

By the mid-summer of 1800, therefore, it appeared that the brief affair between James and Khair un-Nissa, which had already caused so much havoc, was over; or so at least it must have seemed to Kirkpatrick, Dalrymple and Bâqar Ali Khan.

None of them could have guessed that the real trouble was in fact just beginning. For what none of these three men knew, and what the women in Bâqar Ali’s
zenana
must have been all too aware of, was that Khair un-Nissa was now three months pregnant with James Kirkpatrick’s child.

 

 

 

Towards the end of November 1800, James wrote to Calcutta to report that ‘The annual
’urs
[festival] to Mawlah Ali is close at hand, and I propose going there and staying in my tents in a few days, for the benefit of fresh air and recreation.’
¹

It was not just James who planned to leave the city for the
’urs.
Great swathes of the population of Hyderabad took the opportunity to break from their routine for ten days and to set off twenty miles to the north on a short pilgrimage whose attractions mixed the satisfaction of piety with the pleasures of novelty and a change of air. It was at once a pilgrimage and a pageant, a sacred festival and what James described in one letter as a ‘tenting holiday’.
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The festival commemorated a vision of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, granted two hundred years earlier to a senior eunuch in the Qutb Shahi court named Yaqut (‘Ruby’). One night Ruby the Eunuch was asleep when a man in green came to him in a dream, and told him he was being called by Maula Ali,
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the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, and the most revered figure in Shi’a devotion. Ruby followed the mysterious figure in green and was led to a place where Maula Ali was seated on the summit of a hill, with his right hand resting upon a rock. Ruby fell down before the figure, but before he could say anything, he awoke. The following morning, Ruby set off from Golconda in his palanquin and went up the hill, where he found the mark of Maula Ali’s hand branded on the stone where it had rested during the night. Ruby ordered the handmark to be hewn out of the stone and placed in a great arch he built on the site.

The rock soon became a popular centre of devotion for Sufis, mystics and ascetics, and after one of the Golconda princesses renounced the world and became a hermit on the hill, the Shi’a Qutb Shahi sultans began leading an annual pilgrimage to the site on the anniversary of Ruby’s vision. After the conquest of Hyderabad by the Sunni Mughals in 1687 the festival went into temporary decline, and it was only after the Nizam’s family began to patronise the
’urs
from the 1780s onwards that the pilgrimage again grew to become one of the two great national festivals of Asaf Jahi Hyderabad. The women of the Nizam’s
zenana
seem to have particularly welcomed the opportunity to escape from the city for a few days, and one of the Nizam’s two most influential wives, Tînat un-Nissa Begum, gave her blessing to the
’urs
by building a garden complex not far from the shrine which she named Tînat Nagar; here she and the Nizam stayed for the festival as well as for occasional winter hunting expeditions.
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Word spread among the townspeople that Maula Ali himself could be seen wandering around the shrine on his birthday, and such was the popularity of the
’urs
that rather than being celebrated on a single day as in Qutb Shahi times, the festival gradually became extended: ‘The coming and going of visitors increased constantly, the ’Urs grew accordingly, and all the distinguished citizens of the town came out for rest and recreation and stayed to enjoy the long nights of revelry.’
⁴

A line of lamps was lit on either side of the road all the way from the Char Minar to Koh e-Sharif, the shrine of Maula Ali. Haloed in dust, much of the population of the city, and indeed of the surrounding towns and villages, of whatever faith, would set off on foot, on bullock cart, in palanquins and on elephant-back to a lush green stretch of country enclosed in a bend in the Musi, and bounded by a group of three smooth volcanic hills, one large, two slightly smaller. By 1800 the festival lasted from Ali’s birthday, on the thirteenth of Rajab,
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to the anniversary of the vision on the seventeenth, and many of the people, from stallholders to great
omrahs,
stayed in the area for as long as ten days.
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Amid the smell of sweat and spices, elephant dung and the wafts of hot cooking from the roadside stalls, the highest officials of the Deccan rubbed shoulders with trinket-sellers and stable boys, soldiers and sepoys, diamond merchants, senior courtiers and, in particular, the courtesans.