White Mughals (51 page)

William Palmer had been baptised a Christian, but Fyze had kept her cultural and religious identity as a Muslim, and it was to Indian Muslim women, not to British ones, that William naturally looked for love and companionship. At home in both worlds, he found the perfect arena for his talents where he could straddle Mughal and British society, in the shadow of James Kirkpatrick’s Hyderabad Residency.

Like the rest of his family, William clearly felt a marked kinship to and warmth for James, whose domestic arrangements so closely resembled his own; he also felt intense gratitude to a man who had helped him get started both as a soldier and as a businessman.
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The exact relationship between James and William Palmer at this period is unclear, but James had certainly aided the younger man in a variety of ways, and by 1805, if not before, had allowed him the use of some of the Residency buildings as an office for his new business; this not only provided a useful base but also lent William’s business operations the appearance of having the East India Company’s
imprimatur
, something it did not in reality in any way possess.
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In return William had done errands and ‘confidential work’ for James, including finding out the details of the arms and corruption scandal going on in the cantonments.

For all these reasons William leapt to James’s defence when he saw that his patron was under attack from his enemies; but he could not have done it in a more damaging manner had he tried. His letter written under the pseudonym of ‘Philothetes’ was an extraordinary production: a fifteen-page rant in fantastically overblown prose, packed full of inappropriate classical references, passionately defending not just James, but the general right of English officials to marry and cohabit with Indian women, and remarking at the climax of its invective that its author could not ‘recollect any institution by which Residents are denied the Enjoyment of female society in the courts of eastern princes: nor a precedent by whose establishment such an Indulgence may be deemed criminal’.
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For all its extravagant phrasing, the letter is fascinating for the light it sheds on the way James was then regarded in the cantonments: ‘In the Camp at Hyderabad,’ maintains ‘Philothetes’, ‘there is a factious party, whose very counsels are the Springs of Mischief.’ This party, he asserts, is eaten up with jealousy of James’s rapid rise: ‘On the elevation of Captain Kirkpatrick to the Representation of your Lordship at the Court of the Deccan, the companions of his youthful days offered their congratulations at the Mansion of the Resident. But, my Lord, their congratulations were chilled by Envy and their offerings disquieted by prejudice.’ So envious were Kirkpatrick’s former companions that when ‘Philothetes’ first came to Hyderabad, ‘my Ears were frequently regaled with anecdotes of the personal Eccentricities of Hushmut Jang’. Yet when he actually met him, ‘Gracious God! Affability, Politeness, and Hospitality smiled on his every countenance. The film dropped from my eyes.’

Nor, claimed ‘Philothetes’, was he alone in being impressed by James’s ‘engaging address and captivating manners’. James, he says, was exceptionally popular at the Hyderabadi durbar, and even Khair un-Nissa’s cousin Abdul Lateef Shushtari (’a respectable mussulman, to whose Name and Circumstances, your Lordship is not a stranger’) believed him to be entirely innocent in the matter of his relationship with Khair:

He adds that the only reason the soldiers in the Subsidiary Force were unaware of this was that ‘throughout the Camp at Hyderabad there is not one man who possesses a sufficient knowledge of the Deckanee or Persian to open and support a conversation to whose result the stamp of precision can be legally applied’. Only James could properly speak the languages, and Wellesley should realise, says ‘Philothetes’, that ‘to the Resident of Hyderabad there is due from your Lordship the most Unlimited Confidence’. He then suggests that Wellesley seek confirmation of all this from ‘the late Resident of Poonah [i.e. the General, William’s father]’, who he says ‘will give you every Information. In a few days he will be at Calcutta.’

All this, though strangely and sometimes tactlessly expressed, would in itself have done James no harm. But where ‘Philothetes’ went badly wrong was to ask, in a manner that was deemed threatening and indeed containing hints of blackmail by Wellesley, whether the Governor General was himself entitled to criticise such amorous adventures: ‘To such an Imputation is the Character of your Lordship invulnerable? Has the daring insolence of curiosity presumed to explore the Mysteries of your secret apartments? In the inmost Recesses of your mind, are the Motives of all your actions opened to public inspection and public censure?’

The answer to this was of course no. For all his evident indignation at James’s conduct, Wellesley was no puritan. Indeed he was notoriously highly sexed, telling his wife Hyacinthe in London that if she did not join him in Calcutta it was inconceivable that he would remain faithful, as ‘I assure you that this climate excites one sexually most terribly.’ Later he repeated the same belief, simultaneously confessing that he had been true to his threat and was indeed indulging in every sort of vice: ‘As for sex, one must have it in this climate …
je vais pralaquer dix fois au moins
!!!!!!’
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The Governor General tended to take grave offence at the mildest criticism. A letter such as that written by ‘Philothetes’—in Wellesley’s eyes impudent, ignorant and threatening—sent him into a towering rage; and his response, dictated the same day to his long-suffering secretary Neil Edmonstone, rings with outraged viceregal indignation. While admitting that James was in no way responsible for what his anonymous supporter had written, Wellesley quite unreasonably went on to use the letter as a pretext for savaging James’s diplomatic record, claiming that ‘so far from possessing any claim to that elevated and commanding situation which this letter arrogates for you in a tone of such ridiculous pomp, your conduct in the execution of orders has frequently and on the most important occasions, required the direct interposition’ of Calcutta. He also reminded James that ‘you owe your continuance in your present station and the credit which you possess in it, at least as much to his Excellency’s forbearance and to his desire of forgiving occasional indiscretions, as to his love of justice’.
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The only way James could regain the confidence of Lord Wellesley, concluded the tirade, was immediately to ‘employ your utmost endeavours for the discovery of the author of this anonymous Libel … His Excellency is confident that your zeal for the public service, together with your sense of your own character, will urge you to exert every degree of activity in discovering, and enabling His Excellency to bring to justice, a Criminal whose attempt requires the severe punishment of the Law.’

This, James realised immediately, he could never do. His response to Wellesley was measured and dignified, defending his exceptional record as Resident by mentioning merely that ‘the detail of my diplomatic services, and Lord Wellesley’s opinions on them, have long been upon record’. But he then wrote that, much as he regretted the upset the letter had caused and the insults it contained, he could in no way be expected to carry out a witch-hunt to discover the identity of ‘Philothetes’, or to be ‘instrumental in the disgrace and ruin of a person, who though he has undoubtedly merited his Lordship’s highest indignation, would be considered by the World at large as having incurred it by his zeal and attachment—however deplorable & mistaken—to my cause’.
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This politely defiant reply fell far short of promising the sort of action Wellesley demanded. By early May, less than a month after being cleared of the charges contained in the Clive Report, and having survived one of the most thorough investigations ever mounted by the East India Company into the private life of one of its servants, James found that he was again back in the doghouse.

This time, however, he was too weary and disgusted with it all to really care. Frustrated in his career and his public life, but confident that Wellesley could not sack him for refusing to track down the writer of an anonymous letter of support, James retreated into the happiness of domesticity and fatherhood. Mentally withdrawing from the political front line, and more or less ignoring Lord Wellesley’s hurt pride, he began to focus instead on his wife and children—‘my dear little ones’, as he described them repeatedly to his brother William.

Though he continued as Resident, James’s letters show how pleasing his masters in Calcutta gradually grew less and less central to his daily concerns. By conciliation and friendship with the Nizam and the Hyderabadi durbar, he had pulled off a series of mutually beneficial treaties which set the relationship between Hyderabad and the Company on a permanent and sustainable footing. If Wellesley wished to wreck all that for the sake of greed, pride and out-and-out belligerency, then that, believed James, was his problem.

As so many have done since in the same situation, James Kirkpatrick effectively drew back, ‘to spend more time with his family’; he even took up home improvements and gardening. He went about these endeavours, however, on a rather different scale to most of his modern successors, beginning work on building what John Malcolm would later describe as a dream palace that was ‘surpassed in splendour and magnitude only by the Government House at Calcutta … [The Governor’s House] at Madras cannot even be compared to it.’

As James realised at the time, the palatial Residency that he planned, a perfect fusion of British and Mughlai tastes, and financed by the Nizam, would be a monument not only to himself, but to the close relations between Britain and Hyderabad that he had worked so hard to build, and which were now in danger of being soured for ever.
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The British Residency in Hyderabad that James inherited from William was, as Mountstuart Elphinstone memorably pointed out in 1801, ‘laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan’.
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Ever since John Holland, the first British Resident, arrived in Hyderabad in 1779, the British had rented a beautiful but half-ruined Qutb Shahi riverside garden in which was situated ‘the house of a native gentleman, which was pleasant from being surrounded by small gardens and fountains’.
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This house—an open
baradari
pavilion lying at the centre of the rambling garden complex—had been turned into the principal dining hall and reception area of the Residency. Around it had grown up a spread of new neo-classical bungalows and mansions to house the Residency staff, many of which commanded views over the low garden wall to the waters of the Musi and the domes and minarets of the great city beyond.
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The Hyderabad Residency complex may have been a wonderful architectural expression of the cultural hybridity of its inhabitants; but in practical terms it was by 1800 a fairly ramshackle collection of buildings. James’s bungalow leaked, and attempts at patching it up had failed to stop the damp and decay. In August 1800, James had written to William that the upper half was ‘scarcely habitable’.
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Two wet monsoon months later, the building had nearly collapsed, and James was forced to write to Calcutta to apply for funds as several of the Residency buildings were ‘now perfectly uninhabitable. Their condition indeed is such that they have with difficulty been prevented from falling so that their being taken down altogether is a matter of absolute necessity.’

Nor was decay the only problem. With the growing size of the Residency staff and the vast number of British soldiers coming to live in Hyderabad, the old Qutb Shahi pavilion which formed the centrepiece of the garden was no longer remotely adequate for throwing parties. As James wrote to Calcutta,