White Mughals (75 page)
Authors: William Dalrymple
Help on this did, however, come from the rather unexpected quarter of Sir Henry Russell. He had heard of Kitty’s worries and the pain they gave her, and feeling that he was one of the last people alive who knew the truth, he finally decided to put the record straight. On a trip to the West Country, he went to see Kitty in Torquay, but finding himself alone with her, and overcome with embarrassment, could not bring himself to broach the subject. Just as before with Kitty’s mother, he fell back on his younger brother Charles. Charles was now the rather grand Chairman of Great Western Railways and the MP for Reading,
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and Henry wrote to him to ask if he would talk to Kitty. He explained that on his visit he had
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and Henry wrote to him to ask if he would talk to Kitty. He explained that on his visit he had
hesitated, and was restrained by delicacy from seeming to meddle with a matter which might be said not to belong to me … Mrs. Phillipps has always passed for an illegitimate child; and is so designated in her father’s will; though her birth was as legitimate as yours or mine. Col Kirkpatrick ascribed to her that relation which he supposed her to stand. He knew that he had been married; but he did not think that his marriage was [legally] valid. He supposed, as I did until my father set me right, that a Mahometan marriage was to a Christian null and void; and I conclude he was afraid of invalidating his bequest to his daughter if he designated her in his will by a term which he thought the law would not accord to her.
When, or from whom, I first heard of the marriage, I do not now remember, I think it was soon after Col Kirkpatrick’s death in 1805, and that it was told me by his Moonshee Uzeez Oollah, who accompanied me to Calcutta, went on soon after to Benares and I believe the family until the 1960s when, after 120 years in Britain, it sailed east again. It now hangs in the boardroom of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. finally died there. Certainly I did not hear it from Col Kirkpatrick himself. It was not a subject I ever heard him speak of; nor did I hear in the first instance from Mrs Phillipps’ mother, Khyr oon Nifsa Begum, nor from her grandmother, Shurf oon Nifsa, though they both of them often confirmed it to me; and I have and still have such complicit reliance on their word that I am as firmly satisfied that the ceremony which they described did take place, as if I had witnessed it myself.
In 1843, Kitty told her grandmother that William George’s eldest daughter was about to go to India and that she planned to visit Sharaf un-Nissa when she got there. This produced an immediate and excited reply:
My heart cannot contain the joy it feels in hearing that the daughter of Sahib Allum is about to visit Hindostan with her husband, and I will without fail cherish that child as the apple of my eye … May the pure and exalted God speedily lift up the veil of separation from between us, and bringing us all together in person make us happy and gladden us with a meeting.
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It is unclear whether Sharaf un-Nissa ever got to see her great-granddaughter; but she certainly never saw her granddaughter Kitty again. Four years later, Henry Russell received another letter from William Palmer. It was dated 27 July 1847:
My dear Sir,
I fear the intelligence I have to communicate will distress you. For Shurf oon Nissa Begum died on the 21st Inst [of this month] of dropsy. She was not attended by an English doctor but at her age (over eighty) it would have availed little to arrest the termination common to all. I do not know whether you recollect a relation of hers, Mahmood Ali Khan. He resided with her. There was a mutual confidence & good understanding between them which made him appear (he was her relation) as the son of her adoption. Mahmood Ali Khan married his daughter to Soliman Jah
jc
and the connection so formed has given to Soliman Jah a pretence to put guards on her property, preparatory to its sequestration. Mahmud Ali Khan writes to me that he is distasteful to his son in law & apprehends he will suffer ill usage at his hands. There is no remedy for this. The Govt is too much disordered to give any protection to individuals...
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jc
and the connection so formed has given to Soliman Jah a pretence to put guards on her property, preparatory to its sequestration. Mahmud Ali Khan writes to me that he is distasteful to his son in law & apprehends he will suffer ill usage at his hands. There is no remedy for this. The Govt is too much disordered to give any protection to individuals...
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Almost exactly ten years later, on 10 May 1857, the great Indian Mutiny broke out in Meerut, north of Delhi.
By that time, the world that gave birth to Kitty Kirkpatrick had disappeared; indeed it had been dead for the best part of two decades. All the white Mughals had long been in their graves: Sir David Ochterlony had died (in Meerut, as it happened) in 1825, heartbroken at a humiliating rebuke from his masters in Calcutta; his friend and protégé William Fraser (whom Lady Nugent had castigated as ‘being as much Hindoo as Christian’) was assassinated ten years after that in 1835.
The last survivor of the world of James Achilles Kirkpatrick was probably William Linnaeus Gardner, who as a young man had married his Cambay Begum, converted to Islam, and been present as a Hyderabad mercenary in the Nizam’s forces at the surrender of the Corps de Raymond in 1798. After years of fighting for different Indian princes, Gardner had finally entered British service in 1803, founding his own regiment of irregular cavalry, Gardner’s Horse. His final posting, bizarrely enough, was as deputy to Hindoo Stuart who, despite his many eccentricities, had been given command of the largest cavalry cantonment in central India, at Saugor. It must have been a rather unusual outpost of the East India Company military establishment, commanded as it was by a pair of European converts to India’s two rival religions.
Here, throughout the early 1820s, Stuart continued to fight his losing battle to allow his sepoys to wear their caste-marks and their own choice of facial hair on parade, being again reprimanded by the commander-in-chief. His retort that ‘A stronger instance than this of European prejudice with relation to this country has never come under my observations’ had no effect on his superiors.
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Stuart’s military career thus ended under something of a cloud. As his deputy Gardner put it, ‘Poor General Pundit! He is in hot water with almost everyone.’
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The last glimpse of Stuart in Gardner’s correspondence is of him setting off to Calcutta, his Indian
bibi
beside him, his buggy followed by a cavalcade of children’s carriages ‘and a palkee load of little babes’, already a figure who seemed to have survived from a different, more tolerant and open-minded world.
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Stuart’s military career thus ended under something of a cloud. As his deputy Gardner put it, ‘Poor General Pundit! He is in hot water with almost everyone.’
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The last glimpse of Stuart in Gardner’s correspondence is of him setting off to Calcutta, his Indian
bibi
beside him, his buggy followed by a cavalcade of children’s carriages ‘and a palkee load of little babes’, already a figure who seemed to have survived from a different, more tolerant and open-minded world.
In his last years of retirement, Gardner settled down on his wife’s
jagir
at Khasgunge near Agra. His son James had married Mukhta Begum, who was the niece of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah as well as being the sister-in-law of the Nawab of Avadh, and together they fathered a noble Anglo-Indian dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed some of them, such as James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time. Even those Gardners who were straightforwardly Christian had alternative Muslim names: thus the Rev. Bartholomew Gardner could also be addressed as Sabr, under which name he became a notable Urdu and Persian poet, shedding his clerical dress in favour of Avadhi pyjamas to declaim his love poems at Lucknavi
mushairas
.
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jagir
at Khasgunge near Agra. His son James had married Mukhta Begum, who was the niece of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah as well as being the sister-in-law of the Nawab of Avadh, and together they fathered a noble Anglo-Indian dynasty, half of whose members were Muslim and half Christian; indeed some of them, such as James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner, seem to have been both at the same time. Even those Gardners who were straightforwardly Christian had alternative Muslim names: thus the Rev. Bartholomew Gardner could also be addressed as Sabr, under which name he became a notable Urdu and Persian poet, shedding his clerical dress in favour of Avadhi pyjamas to declaim his love poems at Lucknavi
mushairas
.
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Already a museum-piece by the 1830s and the subject of occasional wide-eyed articles in the north Indian press, William Gardner died on his Khasgunge estate on 29 July 1835, at the age of sixty-five. His Begum, whose dark eyes he had first glimpsed through the gap between two curtains in Surat thirty-eight years earlier, could not live without him. As Fanny Parkes wrote,
my beloved friend Colonel Gardner … was buried, according to his desire, near the [domed Mughal] tomb of his son Allan. From the time of his death the poor Begum pined and sank daily; just as he said she complained not, but she took his death to heart; she died one month and two days after his decease. Native ladies have a number of titles; her death, names and titles were thus announced in the papers: —‘On the 31st August, at her Residence at Khasgunge. Her Highness Furzund Azeza Azubdeh-tool Arrakeen Umdehtool Assateen Nuwab Mah Munzil ool Nissa Begum Dehlmi, relict of the late Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner. The sound of
Nakaras
and
Dumanas
[kettle drums and trumpets]
jd
have ceased.’
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Nakaras
and
Dumanas
[kettle drums and trumpets]
jd
have ceased.’
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During the Mutiny, Gardner’s Anglo-Indian descendants, like those of all the other white Mughals, were forced to make a final choice between one or other of the two sides—though for many the choice was made for them. Some families, such as the Rottens in Lucknow, and Mubarak Begum, Ochterlony’s widow in Delhi, chose the rebels (or, if you like, the freedom fighters). After an attack on their property, the Gardners were forced to take refuge first in Aligarh then in the fort of Agra, and so ended up on the side of the British—though given a free hand they might just as easily have lined up behind their Mughal cousins in Delhi and Lucknow.
je
je
The Mutiny led to massive and vicious bloodshed, with great numbers of lives lost on either side. Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was before; the trust and mutual admiration that the white Mughals had tried to cultivate was destroyed for ever. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed it, the entire top rank of the Mughal aristocracy was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India; at the same time the wholesale arrival of the memsahibs, the rise of Evangelical Christianity and the moral certainties it brought with it ended all open sexual contact between the two nations.
In Hyderabad there had been less fighting than in the war-torn north—though there was a half-hearted attack on the Residency by a party of Rohilla horsemen; but the same bitterness and polarisation occurred. William Palmer, one of the last figures to attempt to bridge both worlds, ended up opting for the British. Though he had initially been brought up a Muslim, had married a variety of Muslim wives, and had lovingly cared for his Muslim mother, Fyze Baksh Begum, he ended his days consciously and defiantly a Christian. A year before his death, disillusioned and bankrupt, he wrote a sad letter to an old friend and former comrade-in-arms, Major Francis Gresley, who had retired to England. ‘My old age,’ he wrote,
eighty-six years old, has left me destitute of friends. I am so infirm that I cannot walk from one apartment to another without some support, and have been almost blind for the last ten or twelve years … I continue to take an interest in the persons and events around me … [but] the arrogance and superciliousness of the Mohammedans, and their almost avowed hatred of us have made them detestable to me. There is not a man among them who would not cut our throats, and Briggs [one of the Residency staff] has quaintly expressed himself to
the effect that he never sees a Musselman without fancying he sees his assassin. The Residency staff, I understand, now carry loaded pocket pistols about with them.
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It was as different a world as could be imagined from that of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, with his family parties in the old-city townhouse and merry nights with Tajalli Ali Shah and the poets of Hyderabad; his evenings spent fishing with the old Nizam for the tame carp in the palace ponds, and afternoons flying pigeons with the Minister in his garden.
William Palmer died on Monday, 25 November 1867. The British Resident, Sir Richard Temple, was one of the few to attend the funeral. But he left early, anxious not to miss the beginning of the Chaddarghat races.
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Kitty’s husband, Major Phillipps, died in 1864; Kitty survived him. Before she too died, she paid a last visit to Carlyle in his Cheyne Row house, about which visit he quoted from Virgil the lines ‘
Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae
’ (I feel the traces of an ancient flame). Shortly afterwards he wrote to her:
Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae
’ (I feel the traces of an ancient flame). Shortly afterwards he wrote to her:
Your little visit did me a great deal of good; so interesting, so strange to see her who we used to call ‘Kitty’ emerging on me from the dusk of an evening like a dream become real. It sets me thinking for many hours upon times long gone, and persons and events that can never cease to be important and affecting to me … All round me is the sound as of evening bells, which are not sad only, or ought not to be, but beautiful also and blessed and quiet. No more today, dear lady: my best wishes and affectionate regards will abide with you to the end.
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Kitty lived on quietly in Torquay, finally passing away in 1889 in her house, the Villa Sorrento. Four years afterwards, her cousin Sir Edward Strachey wrote up the first account of James’s marriage to Khair, and of Carlyle’s fascination with Kitty, for the July 1893 edition of
Blackwood’s Magazine
, ending the piece with Kitty’s death: ‘She was ten years my elder,’ he wrote, ‘but I remember her from girlhood to old age as the most fascinating of women.’
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Blackwood’s Magazine
, ending the piece with Kitty’s death: ‘She was ten years my elder,’ he wrote, ‘but I remember her from girlhood to old age as the most fascinating of women.’
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With the deaths of William Palmer in 1867 and Kitty Kirkpatrick in 1889, an era can truly be said to have come to an end. Although one died in Hyderabad and the other in Torquay, both were buried in Christian cemeteries, with unambiguously Christian inscriptions commemorating them. There was no longer any room for crossover or ambiguity. The day for that had passed.
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