White Mughals (39 page)

Yet while James may have been determined not to abandon Khair un-Nissa in the long term, in the short term he was unable to meet her or even regularly answer her letters, due to the vigilance of her grandfather Bâqar Ali Khan and, more importantly for his own security, his recent promise to James Dalrymple. Instead he was forced to sit impotently in the Residency gazing over the Musi to the old city where Khair un-Nissa lived, forbidden to contact her or reply to her letters. To William he wrote in cipher: ‘I have long since desisted from all intercourse with the females of B[âqar] A[li]’s family … [But] it is generally reported that the young girl is pining miserably, and that her parents have by way of soothing her distress of mind come to a determination not to marry her to any one.’
⁴²

He then, for the first time, hinted to his brother that he was a lot more serious about the affair than he had previously made out. Up to now he had grudgingly admitted to William that he had slept with Khair un-Nissa but denied that he was planning to marry her, or indeed that he regarded his connection with her as anything more than a regrettable lapse of self-control. Now however he made it clear that in fact he was far, far more deeply involved than this. He wrapped up the revelation in the language of honour and duty so as to make it seem less objectionable to his brother, and still pretended that the connection was forced upon him; but the import was exactly the same: that he was prepared to resign from his job and abandon his entire East India Company career before he gave up the girl: ‘I should not be astonished,’ he wrote on 17 August,

If James had hoped to escape from the shadow of the affair during his trip to Maula Ali, he was mistaken.

He set off north on 1 December, and took with him Leith’s replacement as Residency Assistant, a talented, vain and cocky young Oriental scholar named Henry Russell. Russell was a fluent Hindustani speaker, though his Persian was not up to scratch, and he probably got the job as much from his connections as his skills. His father, Sir Henry Russell senior, was the Chief Justice of Bengal, an honest, clever but coarse man whose
nouveau riche
manners appalled the profoundly snobbish Lord Wellesley: ‘I know not where you picked up Sir Henry Russell,’ Wellesley wrote to the Company Board of Control’s President Henry Dundas in London when he first heard hints about Sir Henry’s appointment. ‘He is a vulgar, ill-bred, violent and arrogant brute; he gives universal disgust. I hope you will never allow him to be Chief Justice … at all events do not place that brute in a station which his manners and conduct will disgrace.’
⁴⁴

But while abhorring the father, Wellesley admired Russell’s son, whom he regarded as ‘the most promising young man’ he knew.
⁴⁵
James agreed, and wrote to William that Russell ‘cannot, I think, fail to be an acquisition to me in every point of view. As yet, he has not, I perceive, made much progress in the Persian but he is a very tolerable Hindwy [i.e. Hindustani /Urdu] scholar through the medium of which he will make himself useful to me in the translating turn, and thus by degrees gain himself a knowledge of the language.’
⁴⁶
He also personally liked the boy, whom he found lively, intelligent and companionable, and a welcome relief after the dour and heavy presence of the self-pitying Leith.

By the time Russell, Kirkpatrick and the Residency party arrived at Koh e-Sharif the crowds were already immense. Lines of huge silken
shamiana
tents had been erected amid the palm trees at the base of the hill. The pilgrims milled around, shopping in the temporary bazaars and eating the food and drinking the sherbet provided to everyone free of charge in the huge kitchen erected by Mah Laqa Bai and maintained at her own expense.
⁴⁷
Hindus came with coconuts to bring as offerings to the shrine; Muslims brought sheep to slaughter; beggars lined up for alms. According to Ghulam Husain Khan:

The centrepiece of the festivities—in a syncretic Hindu touch to a nominally Shi’a Muslim ceremony—was the moment at midnight on the sixteenth of Rajab when the tray of holy sandalwood was carried with great pomp on the back of a camel from the graveyard of Takia Rang Ali Shah; after this a second piece of sandal was sent to Koh e-Sharif from Punja Shah, and a third from Malajgiri. The pilgrims surged up to the top of the hill and, according to Ghulam Husain Khan, ‘the crowds are such, that it is difficult to reach the shrine, unless, pushed by the repeated shoving of the strong young men behind you, drenched in sweat, you finallycome into the shrine chamber’. Here they bowed or prostrated themselves before the holy handprint found by Ruby the Eunuch more than two hundred years earlier.

Yet James found that even here, in the middle of the vast anonymous crowds that thronged to the festival, he still could not escape the scandal that was rapidly enveloping him. Wherever he went—up to the shrine, on a hunting trip, or to one of the dance displays—he found himself being shadowed by Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari and his cousin Mir Dauran, the plump, spoilt and deeply unattractive teenage son of Mir Alam.
^dr
Both were intent on trying to persuade James to intercede for their disgraced and exiled kinsman, who was now approaching Hyderabad on his way from Rudroor to his chosen place of internal exile, his estates in Berar, a hundred miles north-east of the city; both men refused to believe James’s protestations that he was unable to exert any influence on Mir Alam’s behalf. James was particularly irritated when the two suggested a deal: that if they got Khair un-Nissa for him, could he agree to get permission for Mir Alam to return home? As James reported to William,

As James knew very well, now that Khair un-Nissa was seven months pregnant and clearly in no state to marry Ahmed Ali Khan’s son, Bâqar Ali and the Shushtari clan were less the problem than Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple. For Dalrymple could still make Kirkpatrick’s life very difficult, especially if he reported to Calcutta that James had broken his solemn undertaking and was again seeing Khair un-Nissa, despite the clear dangers this presented to the British position in Hyderabad.

So when on 9 December, just three days after the end of the Maula Ali festival, news arrived at the Residency that Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple had caught a sudden fever and died in his tent, James must have felt a very mixed series of emotions. Dalrymple was a close acquaintance, and James wrote warmly of his ‘mild, conciliating manners’, of his humility and ‘the heavy loss we have just experienced in the death of my invaluable friend’.
⁵⁰
Indeed, he personally conducted the funeral service at the Parade Ground Cemetery just beside the new British cantonments, and showed every sign of grief as he read the funeral oration. But part of him must have quietly rejoiced. For according to Bâqar Ali Khan’s later testimony, less than two days after the death of Dalrymple, James again began secretly visiting Khair un-Nissa with ‘more eagerness than ever’.
⁵¹

Just over two weeks later a mysterious
harkarra
(messenger) appeared at Aristu Jah’s palatial courtyard house. He entered the Minister’s durbar and in front of the assembled crowds loudly demanded in the name of Hushmut Jung Kirkpatrick that Khair un-Nissa should be immediately handed over to the British Resident. Before he could be questioned, the man slipped out into the crowded street.
⁵²

That same evening Sharaf un-Nissa, accompanied by her mother Durdanah Begum, burst crying and weeping into the quarters of her father, Bâqar Ali Khan. The old man was sitting alone and he anxiously asked what was wrong. Sharaf un-Nissa claimed that she had in the past fortnight received a whole series of threatening messages from the Minister’s house. The first two messages, she said, had come from Aristu Jah’s daughter-in-law, Farzand Begum. Then, ‘the day following the Festival of the Birth of Christ’, another had arrived from Mama Salaha, an
aseel
^dt
in Farzand Begum’s service. Mama Salaha had told her that ‘as the Resident had for the Six months past become a real Mussulman [Muslim] she ought therefore to give her Daughter; but that if she did not Comply, ruin would fall on her Father and his Family’.

Sharaf un-Nissa said she had ignored these threats, but then, only three hours earlier, ‘Mama Nuddeem, another of the Minister’s
Aseels,
brought a message from Furzund Begum, to the following purport, “That if I did not immediately give up my Daughter to the Resident, his eagerness & desire to have her was so violent, that he would Cut off his hair & come & sit down at Bauker Ally Khan’s Door.” ’
⁵³
Bâqar Ali Khan was understandably aghast at these threats, as was Durdanah Begum, who, ‘tearing open her garment and throwing a winding sheet over her shoulders, said “Now I am a fakeer and renounce the world.” ’ She then gave him another winding sheet, saying, ‘Take this and having gone before the [British] battalions, throw it over your shoulders and before the whole of the English gentlemen declare that it is your wish to become a fakeer and to relinquish the world’—turning mendicant being in her view the only sure way to save the family both from such threats and such irreparable dishonour.
⁵⁴