White Mughals (46 page)

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.

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 and 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.

Black was worn, and meat, smoking, sex and
paan
-chewing were all strictly forbidden, while the usual half-hearted ban on alcohol was more seriously observed than usual. Men went through the streets barefoot. Women unloosed their tresses, removed their bangles and put on mourning clothes. Charpoys were removed from the
zenana
wings so that even the grandest begum would have to spend Muharram sitting on the floor like the servants. Day after day, processions of pious Shi’ite men beat their chests and flagellated themselves in sorrow at the sufferings of the man they regarded as the legitimate heir of the Prophet: ‘The spectatorsare roused to an unbearable pitch of grief and the women shriek and wail as if it were indeed the end of the world, crying, Lord save us! Lord save us!
Ma’adh Allah! Ma’adh Allah!’

Singers and reciters of the
marsiyas
would come in succession around those houses which had their own private
ashur khanas
(mourning halls), competing with each other to reduce their audiences to tears, or to raise them to such extremes of devotional hysteria that they would wail and beat their chests. In some houses the women would organise their own
majlis
(or assembly) in which women singers would sit on carpets in the illuminated
zenana
courtyards and sing devotional elegies; sometimes aristocratic women would even perform their own compositions.
⁷⁴