White Mughals (23 page)

Mrs Ure, the wife of the Dr George Ure who had been besieged with William Kirkpatrick at Khardla, was less poisonous than these two—James thought she was ‘perfectly unassuming and more devoid of affectation than almost any woman I ever met with’; but her drawback was her vast and apparently unquenchable appetite.
³³
Together with her portly husband, she ate up as much as the rest of the Residency staff altogether: ‘The young couple’s consumption of tea and sugar alone is at least double mine,’ wrote Kirkpatrick soon after their marriage, when Mrs Ure first became a regular at the Residency dining table. ‘The
khansaman
^bh
tells me a couple of grilled chickens were regularly served up by their direction at their breakfast table. And two fowls boiled down into Mollygotauny soup for their tiffin!! The consequence of which is, as might well have been expected, that the lady was seized with a fever which according to Greene’s and Ure’s account absolutely endangered her life. It has now however left her, and though extremely weak, the
khansaman
has received directions to provide daily calves’ feet jelly’s until further orders. You may recollect from experience what a costly dish these calves’ feet jelly’s are at Hyderabad … ’ Later Kirkpatrick reported that during her illness, Mrs Ure complained of a lack of appetite but still managed to put away every day ‘poultry, rice, milk, butter, vegetables &c, &c, &c, &c’ as well as ‘two plum cakes, a goose, a turkey and ducks innumerable besides fowls and mutton’.
³⁴

Judging by this list, it would seem that the cooking at the Residency was overwhelmingly European in character; however, the Nizam knew that James personally preferred Indian food, and took to regularly sending him a Hyderabadi speciality made from
brinjauls
(aubergines), for which he had expressed a particular liking.
³⁵
Moreover, despite the European cuisine, the Residency kitchens were run so as not to break any Indian notions of purity, with strict caste rules in operation, presumably so as not to put off Indian guests. Years later, when Henry Russell was made Resident, he wrote to his brother that he planned to bring back the regulations that James had put in place: ‘Among other improvements,’ he wrote, ‘pray take great pains to purify every place in the Residency from the pollution of
dhains, chamars
[i.e. sweepers and untouchables] and other vagabonds of that type. Upon that subject I intend to be quite as particular as Colonel Kirkpatrick was. Your cooks are all that they ought to be; but Rakeem Khan tells me that
dhains
are still allowed to go where they ought not to go, and to touch what they ought not to touch.’
³⁶

The pastimes of the Residency staff also intriguingly mixed the customs of Georgian England with those of late Mughal India. There was a great deal of obsessive card-playing and gambling, as if the Residency were a gentlemen’s club in St James’s: whist, dunby and ‘Pope Joan’ alternatedwith backgammon and billiards as a way of transferring winnings and debts from one member of the Residency to another, and so filling the long, hot Indian nights. But Georgian pursuits often dovetailed with Mughal ones: after a Saturday morning spent shooting sand grouse (‘The Resident is a capital shot,’ reported Elphinstone
³⁷
), Kirkpatrick would go hunting the black buck with his tame cheetahs: ‘The cheetahs are kept hood winked on a cord,’ wrote Edward Strachey,

In the evenings after returning from the hunt, Kirkpatrick would invite troops of Hyderabad’s famous nautch girls to the camp to perform. In matters of Deccani dance and music, many members of the Hyderabad Residency became connoisseurs—so much so that Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, Hyderabad’s most celebrated dancer and courtesan as well as the first major woman poet in Urdu, dedicated her
divan
to one of Kirkpatrick’s Assistants, Captain John Malcolm. This was a matter of some political delicacy: Mah Laqa Bai was the lover of Mir Alam, and may also have been, at different times, the inamorata of Nizam Ali Khan and possibly Aristu Jah too. How Mir Alam felt about Mah Laqa giving her
divan
to Malcolm—the dedication took place at a private nautch at Mir Alam’s house—is not recorded.
^39
bi

An alternative to nautches were the
bhands
(buffoons or mummers), whom Elphinstone was particularly taken with when they performed after one of James’s hunting expeditions: ‘They played many parts such as a woman trying to force her way into a zenana, a profligate nephew and his uncle, a foolish horseman wheedled out of his money and clothes by singers.’
⁴⁰
Such entertainments alternated with more conventional Georgian fare such as ‘reading Dryden out loud’ and ‘Mrs. Hewitt singing after dinner aires’.

Kirkpatrick—and no doubt many others on the Residency staff—spent other evenings visiting friends in the old city, though it was necessary to get the express permission of the Minister for members of the Residency to enter the city after sunset. James was especially fond of visiting his friend Tajalli Ali Shah, the Nizam’s court painter, poet and historian, whose grand courtyard house—or
deorhi
as they are known in Hyderabad—was ‘the coffee house of Hyderabad’ according to James, and the place where everyone came to exchange political gossip.
⁴¹
With Shah’s help, he collected Hyderabadi miniatures, and attended
mehfils
and
mushairas
—poetic symposia. He also regularly attended the Tuesday cockfights at Aristu Jah’s mansion, and visited the Minister at other times to play chess and fly pigeons.

Under James the Residency also participated in the life and yearly cycle of seasons and festivals of Hyderabad to an extent that it was never to do again. James saw to it that the Residency gave regular donations to the Sufi shrines of the city. He also took parties to join in the festivals: to break the Ramadan fast by eating ’
iftar
with the Nizam or the Minister, to travel with the durbar up to the Shi’a shrine of Maula Ali during its annual ’
urs
(festival day), and to present himself, head covered, at the city’s
ashur khana
during Muharram.

If, under James Kirkpatrick, the Residency’s participation in the social and cultural life of Hyderabad led to much cross-fertilisation of ideas and the growth of a number of deep friendships between the Residency and the
omrahs
(nobles) of the court, it also led to some very real political benefits. European ignorance of the complex codes of Mughal etiquette often caused unexpected and diplomatically disastrous offence at Indian courts: in 1750 for example the Hyderabad durbar completely broke off relations with the French after the Nizam received an inadequately deferential letter from the Governor of Pondicherry. The Hyderabad Prime Minister of the time wrote a curt note to the Governor, returning the offending letter and noting: ‘Your letter was not politely written. Even the Sultan of Rum
^bj
writes respectfully [to the Nizam]. How great the difference between you, the master of one seaport and [the Nizam], the Governor of the entire Deccan! Should you not therefore treat him with due deference?’
⁴²
James’s increasing absorption into Mughal society meant that he would never make such basic errors of etiquette.

Likewise his personal knowledge of harem life meant that he avoided the crucial mistake made by many of his contemporaries: of regarding Muslim harems merely as places of pleasure, and so underestimating the power of the Nizam’s women in the Hyderabad political process. In his very first report for Wellesley, James wrote not only about the Nizam and his advisers, but also devoted many pages to analysing the distribution of power within Nizam Ali Khan’s harem:

James’s writings show that he correctly understood the very precise and intricate hierarchy in the Nizam’s harem, where elderly postmenopausal women, particularly those with adult male princely children, had considerable influence—much more so, perhaps surprisingly, than their younger, more sexually active rivals.
⁴⁴
This knowledge enabled him successfully to predict the outcome of power struggles and succession disputes.
^bl

Kirkpatrick’s intimate knowledge of Mughal society also allowed him to participate in Hyderabadi court ritual in a way that earlier Residents had been unqualified to do, and later generations would find impossible. So when the Nizam recovered from an illness, James did not just go and congratulate him as other diplomats of the period might have done. Instead, as he reported to Calcutta:

It was a small gesture, but clearly one that was appreciated. By wearing Islamic dress, using Mughal styles of address, larding his speeches with the Persian aphorisms of ‘the wise Shaikh Sady’, and accepting and using Persian titles, James Kirkpatrick made himself intelligible in the political
lingua franca
of the wider Mughal world. Equally important was his willingness to submit to the ritual subordination of Mughal court procedure—the giving of
nazrs
(symbolic gifts) and the accepting of
khilats
(symbolic court dress supposedly taken from the Nizam’s own wardrobe) all had profound political significance in Mughal court ritual.

By mastering the finer points of etiquette of the court and submitting to procedures that some other Residents refused to bow to, James quickly gained a greater degree of trust than any other British Resident of the period, and so was able to reap the diplomatic rewards.

In the crucial period immediately after William Kirkpatrick left for the Cape, and General Raymond’s rise at court seemed irresistible, these small diplomatic advantages were much needed.

By 1797 Raymond’s personal income was vast—his estates on their own yielded fifty thousand rupees a year—and according to one observer, ‘in the style of his domestic life he collected around him every luxury and elegance within the reach of a European in India’.
⁴⁶
Indeed Raymond’s corps was so well financed that he was able to outbid the British not only for the services of their best sepoys, but was even able to bribe several senior British officers to defect from the two British battalions stationed in Hyderabad to take up service with the French corps for increased wages. These defections were a great blow to both British morale and British prestige in the city. In August 1797 James reported that three more Englishmen had deserted and that something must quickly be done to stop ‘the growing power and influence of the French here which if not speedily overthrown will be productive of the most serious mischief for us … Surely no one in his senses can doubt that the French will now bend the whole of their own exertions and those of their allies to shake our power in India to the very foundations.’
⁴⁷