White Mughals (54 page)

Even so, it would be intriguing to know if James would have been confident enough to hold such large and public non-Christian ceremonies as the
chatthi
for his wife and babies in the Residency compound, within view of his less open-minded colleagues. If not, might he have held them in Bâqar Ali Khan’s mansion in the old city? It is clear that Khair and Sharaf un-Nissa kept their
deorhi
townhouse in use, frequently visiting Sharaf’s mother Durdanah Begum who was still residing there, while living principally at the Residency
mahal.
We also know, intriguingly, that James used to keep ‘three or four [spare] setts’ of his Mughal robes, cummerbunds and turbans there, including some of the especially fine quality normally used by nobles at the durbar.
⁸⁸
This then was perhaps the most likely place for him to have held the
chatthi,
in a venue that Khair’s relations could have more easily reached and felt at ease within—though even so the ceremonies would have doubtless appeared a little strange to Hyderabadis, as James had no female family relations on his side to host the
zenana
celebrations as in a normal Mughal family.

In the weeks and months that followed the birth of James’s children, a further succession of rites and ceremonies would continue to mark the babies’ progress to health and toddlerhood. Most of these took place in the
zenana
wing with only women invited, and commemorated various significant mileposts in the child’s life: the
chillah
, marking the child’s fortieth day and the mother’s release from confinement;
^fv
the ceremony attendant on the first piercing of a girl’s ears by a barber to allow her to wear earrings;
^fw
or the moment when a little girl’s hair was plaited for the first time,
^‡
all of which were followed by a small celebration and a general distribution of sweets.

The final ceremony of early childhood was the
bismillah
, when a child’s education would begin, usually at the age of three or (more usually) four.
^fx
A girl was dressed as a bride and a special scented powder was rubbed over her body; boys were dressed as grooms. They were then presented to their tutor in the presence of guests, after which they recited, following the tutor’s instruction, the whole of the ninety-sixth chapter of the Koran, the Surah Iqra. After this their study of the Arabic alphabet would begin.

Throughout her children’s childhood, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Khair un-Nissa.

Though she was the central figure in the life of James’s family, and clearly a quietly forceful personality, the loss of her letters means that today we can see her only obliquely, reflected through the eyes of her lover, her husband, her mother and her children. Only rarely—and then indirectly—are her own words recorded. Nevertheless, through the impressions of her family and her own actions, a coherent mosaic does emerge.

Khair was clearly a pious, impulsive and emotional woman, as well as being a remarkably brave and determined figure when the need arose, and few people—certainly not her mother, grandmother or husband—seemed willing or able to stand in her way once she had made up her mind about something.
^fy
She was educated and literate and wrote frequent letters. She was also very generous—constantly loading her friends with presents of clothes and jewellery—and had the gift of friendship: she is frequently recorded as being surrounded by her friends.
⁸⁹
Her children remembered her as a gentle and loving mother, and a much milder figure than James, whom Sahib Allum recalled, surprisingly perhaps, as a slightly stern father—at least initially: many years later he wrote to his sister that he had discovered some copies of James’s old letters to the Handsome Colonel in which it was clear that ‘you [Sahib Begum] were allowed to be over indulged in consequence of my father having found the ill-effect of over-severity to me, and the terror of which severity he says all his subsequent kindness could hardly soothe me out of’.
⁹⁰

We do catch the occasional glimpse of Khair un-Nissa’s hobbies and pastimes. The evidence of the pigeon pots in her
mahal
would seem to indicate that she liked flying pigeons, as did many other Hyderabadi Begums, judging by the frequency with which it appears as a motif of Hyderabadi painting at this time. She was also creative, amusing herself making (or at least designing) jewellery and bangles, and together she and James developed an interest in precious stones. In a postscript to one of his letters to William, James lets slip that he and Khair ‘have discovered here by mere accident that the opal which turns opaque in the hot winds completely recovers its clearness and colour by immersion in water, for a greater or less time according to their size and degree of opacity. The opal must therefore be classed among the Hydrophanous gems.’
⁹¹
It is a lovely image: Khair un-Nissa busily creating her jewellery; James looking on, the amateur Georgian gemmologist scratching his head as the opals change colour and trying to work out his geological classifications.

One set of her jewel creations Khair sent as a present for her nieces, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters. Many years later a necklace from this consignment found its way back to Sahib Begum, who treasured it as a rare memento of her long-dead mother. In a letter to Sharaf un-Nissa she wrote: ‘I possess a necklace & bracelets of beads interweaved with small pearls made by my mother & sent by my mother to one of my cousins—as it has passed through my mother’s fingers, it is the possession I treasure the most.’
⁹²
Khair also made (or, again, at least designed) clothes, which she sent as presents to her family and friends, embroidery being one of the traditional pursuits of Mughal Begums, and a skill in which Nur Jehan (and many other imperial princesses such as Aurangzeb’s daughter Zeb un-Nissa) was especially accomplished. As an adult, one of Sahib Begum’s strongest memories of her Hyderabadi childhood was ‘the place [presumably just outside the mahal] where the tailors worked’.
⁹³

As to the games and the toys with which Khair played with her children, Sahib Begum later remembered some sort of slide on the flat roof of the
mahal
, while we know that James asked his agent to send out from England ‘a few Europe dolls in high Court Dress’ for the children to play with—possibly as a way of familiarising them with European dress and complexions.

As a home for the dolls, James built a four-foot-high model of his planned new Residency mansion. The model still lies (albeit now in a ruinous state) immediately behind the remains of Khair un-Nissa’s
mahal
and within its old enclosure wall. Later tradition in the Residency has it that it was built for Khair, who was locked so deep in purdah that she could not go around the front of the house to see what it looked like—but this story (still current in the town) clearly has no basis in reality, as there is ample evidence that Khair frequently and freely travelled around Hyderabad to visit her friends and family. It would also have been normal for aristocratic Mughal women in purdah to travel out from their mansions for picnics, pilgrimages, visits to shrines and hunting expeditions.
⁹⁴
The model is much more likely to be a dolls’ house which James constructed, possibly as a birthday present, for one or both of his beloved children.
^fz

It was some time before a reply was received from Calcutta in response to James’s request for money to repair and rebuild his collapsing Residency. Funds were sanctioned, but they fell far short of what James wanted or needed: a ceiling of twenty-five thousand rupees
^ga
was put on the expenditure.

This far from generous offer was particularly mean coming from Wellesley, who had just earmarked the most colossal sum for building himself a vast new Government House in Calcutta, in order, so he said, to protect him from the ‘stupidity and ill-bred familiarity’ of Calcutta society; at the end of four years, the house, modelled on Keddlestone Hall in Derbyshire, had cost a colossal £63,291.
^gb
Visitors certainly admired the new building, designed by Lieutenant Charles Wyatt of the Bengal Engineers, and Lord Valentia famously observed that it was better that ‘India be ruled from a palace than a counting house’; but it was this spendthrift use of Company funds that more than anything gradually eroded Wellesley’s support among the Company Directors, and put in train a series of decisions in London that ended with his recall in 1805.
⁹⁵

Already, by early 1803, the Directors of the Company were sending shots across Wellesley’s bows, fiercely attacking Lord Clive’s far less grand constructions in Madras, and making it quite clear that ‘it by no means appears to us essential to the well-being of our Government in India that the pomp, magnificence and ostentation of the Native Governments should be adopted by the former; the expense that such a system would naturally lead to must prove highly injurious to our commercial interests. ’
⁹⁶
But no one in London, it seems, had the slightest idea of the scale of the building Wellesley was engaged in constructing, and when the bill arrived at the Company headquarters in Leadenhall Street, the Directors were appalled by ‘this work of unexampled extent and magnificence … undertaken without any previous or regular communication with us’.
⁹⁷

It is not clear whether James hinted about the Residency’s financial straits to Aristu Jah, or whether the Minister came to learn of the state of the Residency buildings by direct observation. Whatever the truth, sometime in 1802 he suggested to James that in the absence of Company funds he might apply to the Nizam for money, an offer which James immediately took up. According to the story which James later told John Malcolm, he

In his youth Nizam Ali Khan had won himself the throne by a combination of ruthlessness and charisma; he was also a notable orator.
^gc
But by 1802 this once formidable warrior was a toothless sixty-eight-year-old, and after a lifetime of energetic activity had recently suffered not one but two debilitating strokes, which had left him weak, listless and partly paralysed. He now spent his days sipping camels’ milk (the cure his
unani
doctors had recommended for his paralysed right arm and leg) and fishing for tame carp in the pools of the palace, a diversion in which he sometimes invited James to join him. His other great passions were flying pigeons, evenings of music and poetry, and disembowelling European clocks.

Over his years in Hyderabad James had grown very fond of the Nizam, and not only indulged all his whims, but went out of his way to please ‘the old gentleman’ (as he usually called him in his letters). James had been present at the late-night music party when the Nizam had had his first stroke after becoming over-excited by the dancing of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. Subsequently he had gone out of his way to find him a pair of ‘prodigious’ spice island doves, ‘each as large as a goose’, as ornaments for his pigeon collection, and a young lioness for his menagerie. These presents were not just a function of James’s undoubted generosity; they were useful policy, and James privately believed that he might never have pulled off the Subsidiary Treaty of 1800 had he not found the Nizam three items for which he had especially asked: a particularly intricate piece of clockwork ‘with cascades and fountains represented by glass set in motion’, ‘an artificial singing bird … an automaton, set with jewels … representing the plumage [and] thirdly a fur cloak … from Nepaul … a most acceptable present to the old gentleman, who even in this hot weather is always wrapped up in a fur dress or shawls’.
¹⁰⁰

James also did his best to protect the Nizam from the host of dubious magicians, faith-healers and Dervish quacks who, at Aristu Jah’s bidding, tended to collect around his sickbed (Aristu Jah being, according to James, ‘besotted with astrology and necromancy’
¹⁰¹
). He was able to arrest English quacks who had manoeuvred their way into the Nizam’s presence—in May 1802 he expelled from Hyderabad ‘an imposter who had passed himself off with the Nizam and the Minister as a famous alchemist’
¹⁰²
—but he had less influence with local Hyderabadi faith-healers and medicine men, and was particularly worried by one ‘wizard’ who began feeding the ‘old gentleman’ large quantities of mercury. As James told William: