White Mughals (57 page)

A month later, Henry takes his younger brother to task for failing to have mastered the art of flattering the women of Calcutta: ‘Flattery is only to be administered through the medium of a third person,’ he advises. ‘If you assure a woman that she is handsome she will doubtless believe you but she will not obtain a favourable impression of your sincerity (a virtue you
must
make a woman believe you possess whether you do or not). But if another man tells her that he has heard you deliver a favourable opinion both of her beauty and her understanding (the two weakest points of a female) she will be upon as good terms with you as she no doubt is with herself...’ This advice appears to have been of little use to Charles, as a month later Henry writes again in exasperation, ‘can it really be possible that a gentleman of your pretensions should not be able to discover a single person through whom to administer the flattery? ’
²²

Although now permanently based in Hyderabad, Russell had happened to be in Calcutta visiting his father and stepmother when the news of the death of Aristu Jah reached Bengal. He had been immediately summoned to Government House and consulted by Wellesley about who the British should recommend as a replacement. Unable to resist such red-carpet treatment, Russell had dashed off a short report for the Governor General in which he mentioned in passing that Mir Alam—whom he had never met—was probably the most pro-British of the nobles of the durbar. Wellesley had seized on the line and used it to overrule the various detailed recommendations made by James Kirkpatrick in his despatch on the subject. Mir Alam was the only Hyderabadi noble Wellesley had ever met, and he made his decision in an instant. In the margins of Russell’s report he wrote: ‘This Paper is extremely creditable to Mr Russell’s Judgement, Diligence, and Knowledge of the affairs of the Court of Hyderabad. Meer Allum is the only person qualified for the office or disposed (according to our best information) to exercise it in the Spirit of the Alliance. He must therefore be recommended.’
²³

Thereafter, supported by both the new Nizam and by Wellesley, Mir Alam’s appointment was assured. The decision was made even while the Mir was still under house arrest on his country estates, whence he had been banished by Aristu Jah and had yet to return to the city of Hyderabad.

There was however one major problem that no one had anticipated. Mir Alam had now been in internal exile for four years, and in that time had not once been seen in Hyderabad. What no one in the city (or in Calcutta) knew was that during that time the Mir had been very ill indeed. The leprosy which had first made its appearance in 1799 was now far advanced. On arrival in Hyderabad, the Mir turned out to be not only embittered, twisted and bent on revenge; he had also suffered a more or less complete physical collapse. On his first visit to greet the newly returned Mir, James was horrified, writing to William: ‘The man’s mental faculties appear to have nearly kept pace in decay with his Body, which with his fallen-in nose, is now the most hideous lump of corruption and deformity that was ever beheld.’
²⁴

Nor was James the only one to be alarmed at the sight of the Mir. According to the
Tarikh-i-Asaf Jahi
,

It was now, however, too late to do anything. Mir Alam was confirmed as the First Minister of Nizam Sikander Jah in a ceremony on 13 July 1804. It was not long before he demonstrated the degree to which he was willing to pursue his quest for vengeance on those who had, in his eyes, tricked and humiliated him four years earlier. On 20 October, James was horrified to hear that in the early morning the women soldiers of the Zuffur Plutun had surrounded the mansion of Aristu Jah’s senior widow, Sarwar Afza Begum, and then ransacked the place. As he reported to Calcutta:

Despite her pleas, the new Nizam did nothing to help Sarwar Afza Begum, who was his senior wife’s grandmother. Instead, to add to her sufferings, he publicly humiliated his wife, Jahan Pawar Begum, Aristu Jah’s beloved granddaughter, at whose wedding the old Minister had wept and who now, exposed and unprotected since the death of Aristu Jah, began to be subjected to the same indignities as Sikander Jah’s other women. He also remained silent as Mir Alam ransacked in turn the houses and personal properties of each of Aristu Jah’s closest political associates, starting with his deputy Rajah Ragotim Rai.
^gi

By the middle of 1804, James’s position must have seemed weaker than ever. Not only was he still effectively
persona non grata
in Calcutta, in the space of twelve months he had lost his two closest friends and allies in

Hyderabad. In their place was the paranoid, sadistic and intermittently insane Sikander Jah, and James’s sworn enemy, the embittered and malevolent Mir Alam. Yet James’s position was actually a lot stronger than he might have believed.

Unknown to him, the Company’s Court of Directors in London increasingly shared his feelings about the unnecessary and wasteful belligerency of Wellesley’s policies, though their concerns were motivated more by the crippling cost of the Governor General’s constant wars than by any ethical or moral considerations: while Wellesley’s conquests had annexed a wider swathe of territory than had the whole of Napoleon’s conquests at the same time in Europe, the effect was only to increase the Company’s deficits, which at this point were running at around £2 million a year.
^gj
Indeed the Company’s overall debt, which had stood at £17 million when Wellesley first arrived in India, was now rising towards £31.5 million.
^gk
The news of the cost of Lord Wellesley’s colossal new Government House in Calcutta was the final straw. Under Wellesley, the government of India, declared the Directors, had ‘simply been turned into a despotism’.

The pressure was building up, and by the autumn of 1804 the final decision had been taken: Wellesley was to be recalled, and Lord Cornwallis sent out to India for a second term, at the advanced age of sixty-seven.
²⁷
He left England towards the end of 1804, although it was not until May 1805 that Wellesley received the news from London that he had been dismissed from office.

One of the principal problems that had developed under Wellesley, as even his supporters acknowledged, was that no one now ever dared to cross the Governor General. As his brother Arthur put it to Henry Wellesley, the third of the brothers in India, ‘Who will speak his mind to the Governor-General? Since you and [John] Malcolm have left him, there is nobody about him who has the capacity to understand these subjects, who has nerves to discuss them with him, and to oppose his sentiments when he is wrong.’
²⁸

Of his senior officials only one man had dared to stand up to Wellesley, and even before Cornwallis had arrived in Calcutta, the new Governor General had been fully briefed about James Kirkpatrick’s principled stand against the worst excesses of Wellesley’s expansionist policies. Cornwallis instructed his assistants to arrange an interview with the brave and sensible Resident in Hyderabad as soon as possible. He also let it be known that he wished to see old General Palmer, whom he rememberedwell from his first term in India and whom he had reason to believe had also stood up to Wellesley on the Maratha business.
²⁹

After five years of investigations, hostility and isolation, James’s ideas of co-existence and his more conciliatory approach to British—Indian relations were suddenly being looked at with new eyes. True, Cornwallis was no liberal, and he had been responsible for beginning the erosion of the social and economic status of Indians and Anglo-Indians,
^gl
a process that had merely accelerated throughout Wellesley’s governor generalship. Nevertheless, the old Marquis did not believe in threats and belligerence as an instrument of policy, and saw no need for the sort of naked imperialism imposed by Wellesley; moreover he was appalled by the needless bloodshed and expenditure it had caused. His job, as he saw it, was to ‘avoid war [and] to establish perfect confidence [among Indian princes] in the Justice and Moderation’ of the British—the very policies James had pursued since becoming Resident at Hyderabad.
³⁰

Though he did not know it, James’s future, contrary to all the indications, had in fact never been brighter.

As the dolls’-house model of James’s new Residency building was being completed in the
mahal,
the real mansion was slowly beginning to rise from its groaning foundations a short distance to the north. Month by month throughout 1802, James had corresponded frantically with his friend James Brunton in Madras, making the final arrangements for the workmen he needed to build his new house. At the beginning of November there was still no sign of them, and James wrote to Brunton begging news of their progress, as he said he was ‘very anxious for the arrival of the architect & mechanics’.
³¹
By the end of the month the first of the builders had begun to appear up the road from the port of Masulipatam, but many of the more skilled craftsmen were still missing: ‘despatch hither immediately,’ he begged Brunton in one letter, ‘one Head Maistry Bricklayer, one ditto Carpenter and one ditto Smith … Their wages are certainly high, but then I conclude that they are each perfect masters of their respective professions, and the head Maistry bricklayer is a tolerable architect.’
³²

Steadily, one by one, the skilled
maistry
craftsmen arrived, and by the beginning of 1803 they had set to work building foundations. Over the course of the year, successive layers of stonework slowly begun to rise from the cat’s cradle of scaffolding and the piles of raw stonework which now lay about the bungalows of James’s garden. Amid the cries of the mynah birds and parakeets calling from the Residency
char bagh
came the more insistent tap-tap-tap of chisels on stone, the cries of the coolies and their wives swaying along narrow wooden walkways, and the yelling of the bellows boys and hammermen trying to be heard above the noise of the forge.

As the pillars of the Residency portico slowly rose above the runnels of the Mahal and the Mughal garden, and as in due course the sculptors began to carve the arms of the East India Company on the great triangular pediment overlooking the new deerpark, filled now with elk and black buck, James looked on with ever growing satisfaction. Judging from his letters, the new Residency was an achievement of which he was hugely proud, though he always recognised how much he owed to his departed mentors, Nizam Ali Khan and Aristu Jah. In one letter to his old patron Sir John Kennaway he wrote how, having been awarded the land by the old Nizam with the assistance of Aristu Jah,