White Mughals (31 page)

Over and over again in his book, Shushtari emphasises the uniqueness of his clan of Sayyeds, the importance to them of endogamy, and the central duty of Sayyed men to look after their women and to guard their virtue. Yet here was a case of a good Shushtari Sayyed—his own first cousin, Bâqar Ali Khan—coming to India, intermarrying with an Indian Muslim family, and so in Shushtari’s eyes picking up immoral Indian ways. The result: Bâqar’s granddaughter throwing herself not just at a non-Sayyed, but at a non-Muslim, a
firangi.

The initiative, he implies, came from Khair un-Nissa’s side, and it was there that lay the shame.

In January 1799, about a month after the wedding of Nazir un-Nissa, serious disagreement broke out in the household of Bâqar Ali Khan about the match intended for the younger of his two granddaughters, Khair un-Nissa.

An engagement had been arranged by Bâqar Ali for the girl, who was then probably not much older than fourteen. The man in question is never named, but he was from the clan of one of the most powerful Hyderabadi nobles, Bahram ul-Mulk, and the son of a close friend and ally of Mir Alam, a prominent nobleman named Ahmed Ali Khan.
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It is not clear what the women of the family objected to in the match: maybe Ahmed Ali Khan’s son was violent, drunken or untrustworthy; maybe they just disliked him or thought him insufficiently grand for the girl; maybe it was simply that Bâqar Ali Khan had arranged the marriage without consulting the women when, as maternal grandfather, his legal right to matchmake was open to question: after the death of Khair un-Nissa’s father, Mehdi Yar Khan, legal responsibility for the girl’s marriage would normally have fallen first to Sharaf un-Nissa, her mother, then to Mehdi Yar Khan’s surviving brother, Mir Asadullah Khan and his close male relations.
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Bâqar Ali Khan would not normally have been expected to involve himself in such matters.

Possibly the disaffection of the women of the household was due to a mixture of all these reasons. But whatever the cause, it is quite clear that they strongly disagreed with the match; and it is also clear that in eighteenth-century Hyderabad there was an understanding that the women of an aristocratic family—and especially the bride herself—did have a real right to veto any marriage arranged for them: a decade earlier, for example, the women of Nizam Ali Khan’s
zenana
had joined together to reject a proposal from Tipu Sultan that his brother-in-law might marry one of the Nizam’s daughters. The women argued that Tipu and his clan were
parvenu
Indian-born commoners with no noble blood in their veins, that even Tipu himself was the son of an illiterate soldier of fortune, and that it would dishonour the blood of the Asafiya dynasty to mix it with such peasant Indian stock—after all, Tipu’s father had been a humble soldier in the Nizam’s army. Despite the political benefits that an alliance with Mysore might bring to Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan eventually agreed to the women’s demands, and Tipu’s ambassador was sent back to Seringapatam empty-handed.
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By the end of January 1799, the women of Bâqar Ali Khan’s household appear to have despaired of persuading the old man to cancel the engagement of his own volition. Some sort of public engagement ceremony
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had been performed ‘which rendered it impossible to break off the match without disgrace to the parties’, and Bâqar dug his heels in, saying that he refused to shame the family by withdrawing from the contract.
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But the women did not admit defeat, and in mid-February they seized an opportunityto take matters into their own hands when Bâqar and Mir Alam had to leave Hyderabad for several months to go off on campaign.

The cause of their departure was the Nizam’s decision to join the British in their new war against Tipu Sultan. This was the next stage in Lord Wellesley’s aggressive campaign to extinguish the last remnants of French influence in India and to establish the British not only in their place, but as the undisputed pre-eminent power in the subcontinent. From captured correspondence, Wellesley now had solid proof of what he had always suspected: that Tipu was seeking French troops and supplies from the Governor of Mauritius, and was actively plotting with Bonaparte to bring down British rule in India. Wellesley was determined he would never allow either Bonaparte or Tipu a second chance. The captured letters were the excuse he needed to open hostilities and to play the checkmate in the forty-year-long struggle between the sultans of Mysore and the East India Company.

Now that the Corps Français de Raymond had been disarmed in Hyderabad, and the news had come through of the defeat of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, Wellesley began making detailed logistical preparations for a major assault on Tipu’s well-fortified river-island capital of Seringapatam. He wrote personally to Tipu in a vein of deepest sarcasm, breaking the news to him of Nelson’s devastating victory at the Battle of the Nile: ‘Confident from the union and attachment subsisting between us that this intelligence will afford you the deepest satisfaction, I could not deny myself the pleasure of communicating it.’
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Meanwhile he worked late into the night preparing the logistics for Tipu’s destruction.

On 3 February 1799, everything was in place and General Harris, the Commander in Chief, was ordered to mobilise and ‘with as little delay as possible … enter the territory of Mysore and proceed to the siege of Seringapatam’.
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A message was also sent to the Nizam to call up his troops to assist his British allies, as had been agreed in the Preliminary Treaty he had signed five months earlier.

Bâqar Ali Khan, as
bakshi
to the British troops in Hyderabad, had to go with the army and act as liaison between the British and the Hyderabadis. Mir Alam came too, as overall commander of the large contingent of Hyderabad troops, though as his younger brother, Sayyid Zein ul-Abidin Shushtari, was Tipu’s Private Secretary and a senior Mysore courtier,
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he must have felt a certain ambivalence about the campaign.
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More ambivalent still must have been the attitude of the (at least) four thousand Hyderabadi infantry soldiers who had formerly been sepoys of Raymond’s corps until they were reassigned to British-officered regiments after the French capitulation. Ironically, they were now under the direct command of James Kirkpatrick’s Assistant Captain John Malcolm, who had played such a major role in their surrender only four months earlier.
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Realising that his situation was now very serious, Tipu wrote a desperate plea to the Nizam warning him that the English ‘intended extirpating all Mussulmans and establishing Hat Wearers
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in their place’, and arguing that the Nizam and he, fellow Muslims, should join together to resist the Company; but it was too late.
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On 19 February, the six East India Company battalions in Hyderabad under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Dalrymple, along with the four battalions of Hyderabadi sepoys under John Malcolm, and over ten thousand Hyderabadi cavalry under the command of Mir Alam, joined up with General Harris’s huge Company army, which had marched up from Vellore. On 5 March, with some thirty thousand sheep, huge stocks of grain and a hundred thousand carriage bullocks trailing behind them, the two armies crossed the frontier into Mysore.
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In their wake were at least a hundred thousand camp followers. Wellesley, who had moved south to Madras to see the army off, believed it to be ‘the finest which ever took the field in India’; but it was a huge and unwieldy force, and it trundled towards Seringapatam at the agonisingly slow place of five miles a day, stripping the country bare ‘of every article of subsistence the country can afford’, like some vast cloud of locusts.
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Whatever the new war might mean for Hyderabad, Sharaf un-Nissa was quite clear about the opportunities it presented her in her efforts to outflank her father on the issue of the unsatisfactory marriage which had been arranged for her younger daughter. At Nazir un-Nissa’s wedding, James Kirkpatrick had seen Khair un-Nissa, and they had apparently made a deep impression on each other. Now the women of the
zenana
seem to have decided that Kirkpatrick was the answer to their problem, and to have persuaded themselves that he was a far more appropriate suitor for the girl than the unpopular son of Ahmed Ali Khan.

With this in mind, according to James, ‘every inducement had been held out to him by the females of the family: the young lady had been shown to him when she was asleep, his portrait had been given to her by her mother, or grandmother, and she had been encouraged in the partiality which she expressed for the original from a view of the portrait, that he had been perpetually importuned with messages from the ladies to visit at the house of the Khan, and on an occasion of his indisposition he had received daily messages from the young lady herself to inquire after his health—[indeed] that occasions were even afforded her of seeing him from behind a curtain, and that latterly she was permitted in that situation to converse with him. In conclusion they were purposely brought together at night in order that the ultimate connection might take place.’ For this to happen, according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Bowser, ‘the ladies of Bauker’s family paid a visit of two days to those of the Resident’.
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About Khair un-Nissa’s motives there is little dispute: James Kirkpatrick certainly believed that the girl had fallen in love with him, and he may have been right: certainly nothing in her behaviour contradicts this view. To his brother William, James later wrote that ‘[among] all the ranks and descriptions of people here, the story of B[âqar Ali Khan]’s grand daughter’s long cherished partiality for me [is] perfectly known’. James’s belief was echoed by Bowser in the Clive Report: he stated under oath that ‘it is said that the lady fell in love with the Resident’.
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James also claimed that Khair un-Nissa had threatened to take poison unless he helped her escape from a ‘hateful marriage’.
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Exactly why Sharaf un-Nissa and her mother, Durdanah Begum, were so keen on the match is, however, a much more difficult question to answer. It could of course have been a mother’s sympathy with her lovelorn daughter, and a wish to save her from unhappiness and possible suicide. But Khair un-Nissa was a descendant of the Prophet, a Sayyida, and so part of a strictly endogamous clan who never married their women to non-Sayyids, and whose prestige and notions of honour depended largely on this stricture being rigorously observed. Moreover, there was no tradition of love marriages in eighteenth-century Indian society— indeed at that period it was a fairly novel concept even among aristocratic families in the West—and yet it is clear that Sharaf un-Nissa not only gave her assent to Khair un-Nissa’s attempt to seduce Kirkpatrick, she and Durdanah Begum went out of their way to help her achieve it; indeed if James is to be believed, the two women more or less pushed the girl into his bed. Why would they do this?

The most likely explanation is that they realised that such a connection would be hugely advantageous to their family. James was not only a powerful British diplomat; since February 1798 he had also been an important Hyderabadi nobleman, with a series of titles given to him by the Nizam—Mutamin ul-Mulk, Hushmat Jung (‘Glorious in Battle’), Nawab Fakhr ud-Dowlah Bahadur—and an elevated place in the Nizam’s durbar.

Other Indian women who had married British Residents at this time had found that marriage brought them prestige, wealth and rank. James’s opposite number at the Maratha court, General William Palmer, for example, was married to a Delhi begum named Fyze Baksh who would later become Khair un-Nissa’s best friend. Fyze’s father was an Iranian immigrant and a captain of cavalry who had moved from Delhi, where Fyze was born, to Lucknow. On her marriage to William Palmer, she was formally adopted by the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam and loaded with titles: the spectacular gilt
sanad
awarding her the title Sahib Begum survives in the India Office Library, and there can be little doubt that it represented a considerable jump in rank for a woman who was from a respectably aristocratic but hardly imperial background.
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