White Mughals (22 page)

In his conversations with Wellesley at the Cape, James’s brother William Kirkpatrick painted a straightforward picture of Anglo-French rivalry in Hyderabad, where the beleaguered Union flag of the Residency fluttered bravely against a rising tide of French Revolutionary tricolore. The reality on the ground was a little different.

It is clear from a variety of sources that by the late 1790s both the French officers of the Corps de Raymond and their counterparts in the British detachments stationed in Hyderabad, as well as the staff of the British Residency, had all, to different extents, begun acclimatising themselves to their Hyderabadi environment and to Hyderabadi ways of living.

By 1797, when William left Hyderabad, his brother James had already begun wearing what Arthur Wellesley described as ‘a Mussulman’s dress of the finest texture’ for all occasions ‘excepting when he was obliged to receive the officers of the [British military] detachment, or upon certain great occasions when the etiquette of the Nizam’s durbar required that the English Resident should appear there in the dress of an Englishman’.
¹⁵
He smoked a hookah, wore Indian-style ‘mustachios [and] has his hair cropped very short & his fingers dyed with henna’, as one surprised visitor recorded in his diaries. Moreover, James had taken on the Eastern habit of belching appreciatively after meals, which sometimes took visitors to the Residency aback, as did his tendency to ‘make all sorts of other odd noises’, possibly a reference to him clearing his throat (or even nostrils) in the enthusiastic and voluble Indian manner.
¹⁶
According to the contemporary Hyderabadi historian Ghulam Imam Khan in his
Tarikh i-Khurshid Jahi
:

Over at the French cantonments on the other side of the Musi, there was a similar situation. Raymond was believed to be a practising Muslim by many of his sepoys, though a few took him to be a Hindu; his deputy Jean-Pierre Piron was also reported to be ‘wanting to turn mussulman’, though it is unclear if he ever did so.
¹⁸
The doctor of the French corps, Captain Bernard Fanthôme, seems to have specialised in ayurvedic and yunani cures, and had seven Indian
bibis,
the most senior of whom was a daughter of the Mughal Prince Feroz Shah. Fanthôme, who was known at court as Fulutan Sahib due to his wisdom—‘Fulutan’ is the Persian name for Plato—later became a doctor in the service of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah II, and fathered a dynasty of notable Urdu and Persian poets, including ‘Jargis’, ‘Shaiq’ and ‘Sufi’, most of whom were pious Muslims and whose
masnavi
were treasured in the royal libraries at Lucknow and Rampur.
¹⁹
Like Fanthôme, most of the French, and a great many of the British, had married or lived with Hyderabadi women, by whom they had large families and through whom they gained Hyderabadi roots.
²⁰
The image conveyed by William Kirkpatrick’s official despatches of two fiercely opposed national camps soon fractures on examination into a more nuanced reality of a pair of isolated European outposts slowly assimilating themselves with their surroundings, while retaining their national rivalries and a few other features of their European origins.

In the British Residency this unlikely amalgam of Mughal and European cultures was particularly striking: one visitor in 1801 wrote that ‘Major Kirkpatrick’s grounds are laid out partly in the taste of Islington & partly in that of Hindostan.’
²¹
The Hindustani part of the compound was defined by the remains of the ancient pleasure garden in which the Residency was built. In its centre was a large Mughal-style
baradari
^bc
pavilion which the British had turned into ‘a dining hall and place of public entertainment’, while nearby stood a Mughal-style
mahal
or sleeping apartment from which led a pair of mature cypress avenues. From this axis ran various runnels, fountains, pools and flowerbeds, all of which had survived from the garden’s earlier incarnation as a pleasure retreat.
²²

During the sixteenth century, under the rule of Hyderabad’s founders, the Qutb Shahi sultans, the entire bank of the River Musi at this point had been decorated with long lines of elegant Mughal-style gardens and country houses, cascades and
chattris.
^bd
The remains of this crumbling Arcadia stretched northwards as far as the eye could see, though during the chaos of the early eighteenth century a number of the gardens had been encroached upon by villagers and turned into paddy fields. The whole area was dominated by the vast skeleton of Tana Shah’s pleasure palace. According to Edward Strachey:

If the remains of ruined Qutb Shahi Gardens gave the British Residency the ‘Hindustani’ part of its character, a scattering of elegant neo-classical bungalows and stable blocks provided the other, Islington, part of its identity. The most prominent of these buildings was a two-storey house intended for the personal use of the Resident. William Kirkpatrick had had it made during his absence on the Khardla campaign; but, unsupervised, it had been quickly and cheaply built, and though barely four years old was already in a semi-ruinous condition. Within a year James was writing to William seeking his help to get the funds out of Calcutta to renovate it:

Although the bungalows provided for the Residency staff were Western in design, they had one very Eastern feature which would perhaps have surprised Lord Wellesley, or at least his masters in London: all had separate
zenana
wings for the Indian wives and mistresses attached to the staff. James complained to one friend that these were much smaller than necessary for the accommodation of the full
zenana
apparatus—the enormous entourage of
aseels,
^be
eunuchs, handmaids,
ayahs
and wetnurses which seems to have been the norm at this period: one of Kirkpatrick’s English visitors, for example, turned up to stay with ‘at least a dozen females’, although how many of these were
bibis,
and how many the
bibis
’ families and attendants, is unclear.
²⁵

These
bibis
came from across the Indian social spectrum, and the relationships they formed with the Residency staff varied accordingly. At the most basic level, there was a mechanism in place for procuring common bazaar prostitutes—or possibly the city’s famously refined courtesans—from the city for passing British travellers: when Mountstuart Elphinstone stopped in at the Residency in August 1801 on his way to Pune he wrote in his diary that the ‘whore whom I am going to keep was to have come to be looked at but did not’. (This, incidentally, was probably just as well for the woman in question as Elphinstone was then suffering from a bad attack of clap and spent much of his time rubbing sulphur and mercury into the affected area, though he remarked in his diary that ‘I ereqtate comfortably enough considering.’
^26
bf
)

Other British officials and soldiers in Hyderabad, however, had more serious monogamous relationships with educated women from the upper reaches of Indian society. Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, the commander of the British troops in Hyderabad (and a cousin of Anne Barnard, Lord Wellesley’s host at the Cape), was married to Mooti Begum, the daughter of the Nawab of Masulipatam. It seems to have been a measure of the equality of their marriage that the two agreed to split the upbringing of their five children according to sex: the boys were sent to Madras to be brought up as Christians, eventually to be sent back to East Lothian to join the ranks of the Lowland Scottish gentry, while the only girl from the marriage, Noor Jah Begum, was brought up as a Hyderabadi Muslim and remained in India where she eventually married one of her father’s sepoys, a ‘Cabulee havildar
^bg
named Sadue Beig’.
²⁷

Likewise, William Linnaeus Gardner, who began his freelance career in the Nizam’s army in 1798, was married to Begum Mah Munzel ul-Nissa, the daughter of the Nawab of Cambay, and Gardner seems to have converted to Islam to marry her. The two had met in Surat a year earlier, where the fourteen-year-old Begum had fled to with her mother from a palace coup. Gardner had glimpsed the Princess while he was sitting through the interminable negotiations of a treaty:

It was a happy and long-lasting marriage. Years later, living with his Anglo-Indian family on his wife’s estates at Khassgunge near Agra, with his son James married to a niece of the Mughal Emperor, Gardner wrote to his cousin Edward:

He added: ‘Few [men] have more occasion to congratulate themselves on their domestic comfort.’
³⁰
Eight years later he was able to joke how ‘my having been married some thirty years and never having taken another wife surprises the Musselmans very much, and the ladies all look upon me as a pattern: they do not admire a system of having three or four rivals, however well pleased the gentlemen may be with the custom’.
³¹

If there appears to have been no shortage of beautiful Muslim Begums in Hyderabad, their European counterparts seem to have been in shorter supply—and to have been something of a mixed blessing. Hyderabad at this period was no place for a demanding, or fashionable, or socially ambitious European woman. Unlike Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, there were no milliners or portrait painters, no dancing or riding masters, no balls, no concerts, no masquerades. Boredom and loneliness led to depression, or dissipation, or that sour, embittered
ennui
that Kipling depicted in his Mrs Hauksbees and Mrs Reivers a hundred years later: ‘Among the nations of the world, the charms of our fair countrywomen are unrivalled,’ wrote the young Henry Russell, one of James’s Assistants at the Residency, on his arrival at Hyderabad. ‘Unfortunately for us [in this city] we possess but the very dregs … Mrs S____ contaminates the atmosphere which she breathes and pollutes the very earth on which she treads.’
³²
Her friend Margaret Dalrymple, wife of James Dalrymple’s cousin Samuel, seems to have been little better, and struck Elphinstone as ‘an affected, sour, supercilious woman’.