Last Nizam (9781742626109) (36 page)

The Indian Government was even slower in finding out that a part of its national heritage was on the block. It was only after the
Sunday Times
contacted the Indian High Commission in London that New Delhi swung into action. On the morning of the auction, Habsburg Feldman received a telex from the Indian Embassy in Berne asking for the postponement of the coins' auction to allow time for investigations into their origin. Habsburg Feldman's lawyers replied that they had verified the origin of the coins and that the Indian Government could incur heavy expenses if the auction was postponed. The government even considered putting in a bid until it was told that bids were expected in the range of US$12 to $25 million.
³⁴
Though it failed to stop the auction, India's attempted intervention had succeeded in dampening the enthusiasm of potential buyers. The highest bid for the 1000-mohur coin was US$8 million, well short of its $10 million reserve. Bidding for its smaller cousin reached $2.8 million compared with the reserve of $4 million.

On 13 November 1987 a First Information Report was registered with the New Delhi Police stating that: ‘Reliable information has been received that the Giant Mughal Gold Mohurs belonging to the former Nizam of Hyderabad have
been stolen from the Nizam's Trust, and through a network having International ramifications in several countries including Switzerland were removed from India in a clandestine manner.'
³⁵
The police, however, had little hard evidence to go on. Records from the court of Jehangir mentioned two such coins, but said they had been presented to visiting Persian ambassadors. The list of movable property furnished by the Seventh Nizam to the Indian Government in 1950 made no mention of them. Police enquiries, however, revealed that Jah's legal advisor Habeeb Ansari and the then chairman of the Nizam's Private Estate, Sayeed Hussain, had been in Geneva when the auction took place. Had they probed deeper they would have found that Jah had sold millions of dollars' worth of jewellery through Habsburg Feldman in the past four years. Police also interviewed Nadir Ali Mirza, the son-in-law of Jah's late uncle, Moazzam Jah. Mirza claimed that the coins had been in the possession of the Seventh Nizam.

In late 1989, Jah was visited by Australian Federal Police and Interpol at Murchison House Station to discuss the whereabouts of the coins. A year later Jah told India's Central Bureau of Investigation that he had received the two coins after the death of his aunt, Princess Niloufer, who had settled in France after divorcing Moazzam. He also told the police that he had given the coins to his Geneva-based advisor, Jean-Paul Crozier, to arrange for their sale by auction.
³⁶
Subsequent investigations conducted by the National Museum in New Delhi revealed references to the two coins being presented by Aurangzeb to Firuz Jung, the father of Nizam ul-Mulk, the First Nizam. But there was still nothing to link Jah with having smuggled the coins out of India after 1947, when exporting such items became an offence.

Jah's failure to auction the coins, however, had other more immediate ramifications. The coins had been used as collateral against a US$6 million loan from the Banque Indosuez in
Geneva. In September 1989, lawyers acting on behalf of the bank filed a writ in the Hyderabad civil court demanding 10 million Swiss francs plus interest. The bank also issued a writ to freeze Jah's assets in Switzerland and India.
³⁷

Jah's stoush with Banque Indosuez was just one of the disputes he had to deal with. Shortly afterwards Jah found himself embroiled in a failed property deal over the sale of a hectare of land adjoining Nazari Bagh. Jah received A$400,000 as a deposit for the sale of the land from a Hyderabad businessman, Mohan Reddy, but the sale fell through after it was discovered that his aunt, Fatima Fauzia, had a caveat on the property. Jah was also being sued in a Perth court by his own lawyer, Rajapalan Balasubramanian, for non-payment of expenses and professional fees associated with the failed land deal. Jah admitted spending the $400,000 in two weeks to pay outstanding bills, but promised to return it with interest as soon as possible.
³⁸

Not all such property deals were being done with Jah's approval. His Indian advisors were standing by and watching as land-grabbers bulldozed their way onto palace grounds, taking possession of land by force or paying a pittance of its value to the Nizam's private estate. Slums were closing in on the Falaknuma palace. The Chowmahalla complex had shrunk in size from 45 acres to just 12 acres. An investigation by
India Today
magazine revealed that 1800 square metres of the palace's land had been handed over to a local thug on the basis of fake documents stating it had been a gift from Osman Ali Khan. In 1981 Jah's staff had signed an agreement with the government to sell off 250 acres of the Chiraan palace grounds. Several hundred acres of property in Mahabaleshwar, Ootacamund and Aurangabad had been taken over illegally or without proper compensation. ‘Jah's staff cashed in on his trust and virtually locked up his major properties in development deals which have not been put through,' the magazine concluded.
³⁹

An Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly inquiry into the encroachment instituted in 1991 confirmed
India Today
's findings. Committee chairman, Congress Party MLA Gade Venkat Reddy, found that land with a market value of four to five billion rupees had been encroached on ‘without a single
paisa
being paid either to the Government or the Nizam'. The committee's interim report, recommending that the encroachments be regularised to enable the government to start charging rates and other taxes, was never implemented. The committee was disbanded in 1995 following a change of government.
⁴⁰

Jah was also losing ground on another front. Lying just beyond his reach in an account in London's Westminster Bank was £20 million. In September 1948, only days before the Indian Army invaded Hyderabad, Osman Ali Khan had deposited £1,007,940, nine shillings and one pence at the bank ‘for the purchase of machinery'. Sensing that Hyderabad was about to fall, the Nizam's finance minister, Moin Nawaz Jung, took matters into his own hands and signed over the money to Pakistan's High Commissioner in London, Habib Ibrahim Rahimatoola. The Indian Government saw the transfer as ‘a carefully thoughtout plan [that] had been laid to make Hyderabad a financial dependent of Pakistan to be followed by other kinds of vassalage'.
⁴¹
Under pressure from India, the Nizam asked the British Government to freeze the account. It complied. In 1953 the Pakistan Government asked for the money to be transferred to its High Commission in London. The bank refused and the matter had sat with the courts ever since. Jah found himself up against both the Indian and Pakistani governments over money he considered to be his. In the meantime, the original deposit had multiplied twenty-fold.

‘Life's not supposed to be easy, even for the Nizam of Hyderabad, but I'm not used to having financial problems,' he admitted to Hugh Schmitt of
The West Australian
in February
1990. ‘I'm supposed to have good advisers. But even my late grandfather had his financial hiccups through not being advised properly.'
⁴²

Jah's off-the-cuff remark was a gross understatement. He was being hounded by creditors in Australia and India. Swiss bankers had frozen his assets. Indian police were trying to nail him on smuggling charges. For the first time in his life he was running out of ready cash. He was, however, still the Nizam, and his grandfather had made contingency plans for the day when his heir might need to draw on the trust funds in order to maintain the ‘dignity of the House of Asaf Jah'. The only problem was that the funds were in the form of jewellery the trustees had tried unsuccessfully to sell abroad and then to the Indian Government. The A$50 to A$100 million Jah thought he stood to gain once the government acquired the jewels would not only pay off his debts, but maintain his current lifestyle for years to come. After 18 years of negotiation and litigation, a resolution appeared to be imminent. In fact, the saga of the Nizam's jewels had just passed the halfway mark.

I
N THE CENTRE OF
Hyderabad's old city is a short laneway known as Peshab Gali. The Street of Urine, to give the potholed stretch of road its literal translation, is lined with a mix of grandlooking showrooms and small open-fronted shops selling pearls, gemstones and gold ornaments. It is several centuries since the mines around Golconda produced a seemingly endless supply of diamonds, but the city has retained its position as the most important jewellery centre in India. When the Qutb Shahi Sultan, Muhammad Quli, laid out his plans for his new capital in 1590 he ordered 14,000 shops as well as schools, mosques, caravanserais and baths to be built on both sides of the old city's main street Patthargatti. Today the number of shops selling diamonds from Antwerp and cultured pearls from China and Japan has probably tripled and the market is set by traders monitoring international price movements by email and SMS rather than word of mouth.

In Vithaldas's showroom at the end of Peshab Gali, however, little has changed. Hyderabad's nobility still comes here to buy jewellery for dowries and wedding trousseaus as it has for the past 200 years. Many of the pieces are antiques. For particularly choosy customers there are master craftsmen who can copy a
hansli
(necklace) with foiled diamonds set in gold and surrounded by gemstones, or a gold
dastband
(bracelet) set with emeralds and diamonds, or any other piece of jewellery once worn by the most favoured wives and concubines of the Nizams.

Behind the showroom in the Vithaldas family mansion Ghahshyam Das sits cross-legged on a large
gaddi
(raised platform), while half a dozen dairy cows tethered in a small stable munch on freshly cut hay. Now too old to work behind the counter, Das is sorting through a small box of cat's-eyes that a customer has brought in to sell. In the monsoon-soaked shadows of the late afternoon, the pale grey-green gemstones are luminous against the white cloth-covered mattress. Four hundred years ago, the Vithaldas family fled the Sunni-led Mughal invasion of Gujarat and came as diamond merchants to Golconda, whose Shia rulers were tolerant of other religious communities and connoisseurs of precious stones. Das, who gives his age as ‘80 running' has appraised millions of rupees' worth of diamonds and pearls, sapphires and rubies, coral and peridot. But the patriarch of the Vithaldas family says he has never seen anything approaching the quality of pieces in the Nizam's private collection. ‘People say that there are even better pieces than in the Nizams' jewels that have been smuggled out of the country, but we have no proof. But undoubtedly the emeralds were the best I have ever seen, and of course the Jacob diamond.'
¹

Hyderabad's top jewellery houses, among them the Vithaldas, Mukandas and Tibarumal families, served the Nizams of Hyderabad as dealers, manufacturers and appraisers. In the early years of his rule, Osman Ali Khan often bought several million rupees' worth of jewels in one purchase and would take delight in being told that his were the best and most valuable gems in the world. On becoming the Eighth Nizam, Jah called Das and other jewellers to appraise a collection so valuable it was said to be worth more than all the jewels of India's other princely
states put together. ‘I used to suggest to Mukarram Jah that he should call some foreign firms such as Christie's to auction the jewellery,' says Das. ‘They would give him a fantastic price, but he did not believe my words. It was very costly jewellery. He could have got ten times what he was paid.'
²

When Jah returned to India to check on his affairs in 1990, Das's words would haunt him. Many of his most precious pieces of jewellery had been peddled for a song because he needed cash and wasn't prepared to wait for a better price. Other pieces had been sold from under his nose by unscrupulous advisors who pocketed a large share of the proceeds and passed the remainder on to him. It was getting harder to find people he could trust to conduct his business affairs in India and abroad. His cash-flow problems were mounting.

Until now, Jah could have been forgiven for thinking that the treasuries his ancestors built up would never be exhausted. Osman Ali Khan's biographer, D. F. Karaka, wrote that the gems belonging to the Seventh Nizam were so valuable that ‘if they were put on the market all at once, they would wreck it'.
³
Jayant Chowlera, the Bombay-based jeweller who valued the 173 pieces in the Nizam's jewellery trusts, equated putting a price on them with trying to determine what the Taj Mahal would sell for on the real-estate market.
⁴

The jewels that Jah inherited included pieces once flaunted by Mughal emperors, Persian kings, Ottoman sultans, French royals and Russian czars. Some had come from the mines of Mogok in Burma, others from Muzo in Colombia. But by far the greatest number had been unearthed in the Nizam's own Dominions. The Deccan had attracted treasure seekers since the days of the Roman Empire. The thirteenth-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo wrote of sinister snakes and vicious eagles guarding giant gems that lay in riverbeds and on mountainsides. In Vedic myth, pearls were thought to grow in cloudbanks, cobra hoods,
fish mouths, elephant temples, boar tusks, conch shells and the nodes of bamboo stalks. Only those that grew in oyster shells were visible to humans.
⁵

Describing the treasures seized during Sultan Alauddin Khalji's conquest of the Deccan in 1310, court poet Amir Khusrau wrote:

If a description of the boxes of jewels were attempted there is no breast in which it could be contained, nor any heart that could appreciate its value. There were five hundred
mans
of precious stones, and every piece was equal in size to the disc of the setting sun. The diamonds were of such a colour that the sun will have to stare hard for ages before the life of them is made in the factories of the rocks. The pearls glistened so brightly that the brow of the clouds will have to perspire for years before such pearls again reach the treasury of the sea. For generations the mines will have to drink blood in the stream of the sun before rubies such as these are produced. The emeralds were so fine, that if the blue sky itself broke into fragments, none of its fragments would equal them.
⁶

When the French traveller Jean de Thévenot visited the legendary diamond mines in 1666 he wrote that the King of Golconda ‘hath six thousand men continually at work there, who daily find near three pound weight, and nobody digs there but the King. The Prince wears on the crown of his head a jewel almost a foot long, which is said to be of inestimable value, it is a rose of great diamonds three or four inches in diameter; fashioned like a palm-tree branch but is round . . . In short, that King hath many other considerable pieces of great value in his treasury, and it is not to be doubted but that he surpassed all the Kings of the Indies in precious stones.'
⁷

In 1641 another Frenchman, the Parisian jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, visited the legendary diamond market at Golconda fort. Tavernier watched as the sons of merchants, some as young as 10, conducted the trade while seated under the large trees in the middle of the marketplace:

Each has his diamond weights in a little pouch hanging at one side, and at the other side a purse attached to his girdle, and containing, in some cases, as many as six hundred gold
pagodas
. There they sit and wait until someone comes to sell them diamonds, it may be from the vicinity, or from some other mine. When anyone comes with something for them he places it in the hands of the eldest of the boys, who is, as it were, the chief of the band. He looks at it, and hands it to the one next him, and so it passes from hand to hand till it returns to the first, not a word being spoken by any of them; the eldest boy then asks the price, in order to make a bargain, if possible, and if he happens to buy it too dear he has to take it on his own account.
⁸

Tavernier also left vivid accounts of the techniques used to mine the diamonds. Before every new dig at Kollur, the miners would prostrate themselves three times over a statue of a Hindu god, take a ritual bath and partake of a feast prepared by their employer ‘in order to give them courage and induce them to acquit themselves faithfully'. After excavating to a depth of ‘10, 12 or 14 feet' the earth would be washed two or three times and then left in the sun to dry. After winnowing the fine earth, the coarse matter left behind would be spread out on the ground and then pummelled with huge pestles made of wood. The earth would be winnowed again and then examined for traces of diamonds. Any stone weighing over 10 to 13 carats became the
property of the ruler and anyone found stealing a stone would be severely punished.
⁹

Though crude, the techniques produced a steady stream of diamonds and other precious stones that laid the basis for the wealth of the Qutb Shahi and Asaf Jahi dynasties. Augmented by spoils of war and the gifts bestowed on them by the Mughal Emperor, the treasuries handed down from one Nizam to the next grew to become the most valuable depository of jewellery in the world. As the Nizams eclipsed the Mughals in terms of buying power, gem merchants from as far away as Europe swarmed into Hyderabad to offer its rulers South African diamonds, Burmese rubies, Basra pearls and emeralds that were said to have belonged to Czar Nicholas of Russia. The Mughal tradition of expressing loyalty to a ruler by the giving of
nazars
, which ranged from a few gold coins up to entire palaces, boosted their coffers even further. The practice was perfected by the Sixth Nizam, Mahboob Ali Khan, who merely had to express a liking for a particular woman or piece of property for it to become his. The Falaknuma and King Kothi palaces now in Jah's possession were ‘gifted' by their owners to Mahboob Ali Khan without any form of reimbursement.

In the early 1990s the halcyon days of dressing up in silk robes with ropes of pearls and buttons made of diamonds while peasants toiled on feudal estates were long gone. With Murchison House Station running at a loss and Jah flatly refusing every plan put forward by his financial advisors to invest money in such things as shares or bonds, offloading his movable assets was his only source of income. Hyderabad's heritage was being sold to Saudi sheikhs, Hollywood actresses and Bond Street jewellers, or consigned in lots to Swiss auction houses to pay the wages of his roustabouts in Kalbarri and penthouse suites at the Metropole in Geneva. The old nawabs at the Nizam Club's teak-lined bar swapped stories of plane-loads of jewellery leaving from
Begumpet Airport. Staff at the Falaknuma reported seeing trucks being loaded with antiques in the dead of night. Hundreds of empty silk-lined trays once containing necklaces, bracelets, turban ornaments and rings cluttered the long corridors of Chowmahalla.

By the mid-1990s the only significant collection of Nizam jewellery that Jah had yet to lay his hands on was stored in a safe-deposit box at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Bombay's Fort district. Thrown haphazardly together in cheap cardboard containers was perhaps the most valuable single collection of jewellery in the world. Acquired over the course of three centuries and seven generations, the collection included 25,000 diamonds, 2000 emeralds and Basra pearls the size of quail eggs. The single most valuable piece was the 184-carat Jacob diamond. The fifth-largest in the world, it had not been seen in public for 80 years after the Sixth Nizam, Mahboob Ali Pasha, stuffed it into a drawer believing it had brought him bad luck. A set of 22 Colombian emeralds weighing in at 413 carats was so flawless and unmatched that no jeweller had the courage to set them. One necklace comprised no fewer than 226 diamonds weighing more than 150 carats. Osman Ali Khan used to handle his baubles as if they were marbles, wrote Karaka. Most of the 173 items in the Bombay bank vault were in a state of disrepair. Before the jewels were finally put on display in 2001 it would take a team of jewellers a week to restring just one pearl necklace.

Acting out of what he said was ‘the natural love and affection which the Settler bears towards his relatives', Osman Ali Khan had set aside the best pieces in his treasury and divided them among three separate trusts: the H. E. H. The Nizam's Jewellery Trust, the H. E. H. The Nizam's Supplemental Jewellery Trust and the H. E. H. Jewellery for Family Trust.
¹⁰
He also laid down complicated instructions for what could be done with the jewels,
setting some aside for ceremonial purposes while others were to be given to Mukarram Jah and his brother Muffakham Jah at the time of their marriages. Mukarram Jah, as ‘the person who shall have last held the title of the Nizam of Hyderabad' was also entitled to 22 items set aside as state regalia for ‘any special ceremonial or festive occasion'. The remaining pieces of jewellery could only be sold after the death of Azam Jah.
¹¹

In attempting to cover any fate that might befall the ‘successor-in-title', ‘remaining sons', ‘remaining daughters', ‘remaining grandchildren', their ‘issues' and their ‘remoter issues', etc., the Trust Deed documents were incredibly detailed. But their complexity and the sheer number of living and potential beneficiaries became the source of a legal nightmare that would take more than 30 years of litigation to sort out, leaving Jah poorer and contributing to the loss of his Australian assets.

The trustees' biggest mistake was their decision, following Azam Jah's death in 1970, to give the Government of India the first option to purchase the jewellery left in the trusts. ‘Once the government got into the transaction, the inevitable happened,' says Hyderabadi historian Omar Khalidi. ‘It did what governments do best: delay and procrastinate.'
¹²

The trustees initially offered the government 89 pieces from the Jewellery Trust, 84 pieces from the Supplemental Jewellery Trust and 161 items from the Jewellery for Family Trust. Committee after government-appointed committee looked into whether or not to buy the pieces. The Archaeological Survey of India was brought in to determine which pieces were considered antiquities and therefore had to remain in India and which could be sold and taken abroad. Eventually, in early 1978, 37 pieces were selected for sale.