The Age of Kali (30 page)

‘Finally the plan would be approved, the masons would get to work, and – hey presto! – the Hyderabad skyline had a new palace. Except that then he would go and visit it and say, “This door is not wide enough. I can’t possibly fit through this with the Resident’s wife on my arm.” So the whole thing would be torn down and work would restart. Even as an old man he was still adding new wings and towers and porticoes to his palaces, and despite his debts, none of his sons ever had the guts to argue with him.’

‘Did he have a favourite palace?’

‘I don’t know about a favourite, but the one he lived in for longest was Iram Manzil, just around the corner from here. It wasn’t the largest of his palaces, but one of the reasons he loved it was the stuffed tiger.’

‘The stuffed tiger?’

‘You see, after building, my grandfather’s other great love was tiger shooting, and the season for tiger shooting was only a few months each year. So on the hill outside Iram Manzil he built this miniature railway track, and on the track he placed a stuffed tiger on wheels. It would be let loose from the top of the hill and we would all line up and fire away with our double barrels:
bang! bang! bang!
all of us aiming at this wretched tiger as it careered down the hill, shooting in and out of the rocks, down the gradient, getting faster and faster as it went down. By the time it reached the end of the track it was completely peppered: blown to bits, poor thing. So the men who were employed to look after the tiger would patch it up and pull it back, and off we’d go again.’

‘I can see why your grandchildren might find all this a little … fantastic.’

‘But I think what they find
most
difficult to believe is not this sort of thing, but the simple business of my grandfather’s eating habits.’

‘Eating habits?’

‘Well, Fakrool Mulk was a most fastidious man, but he did like his food.’

‘He ate a lot?’

‘He would always work it off with long walks, horseback rides and by swinging Indian clubs, but yes, he did get through a bit of
khana
[food].’

‘So,’ I ventured, ‘on any given day what might be on your grandfather’s table?’

‘I’ll never forget Fakrool Mulk’s dinners,’ said Mir Moazam. His face lit up at the memory: ‘He would sit in the middle of this huge table, with the doctor, the butler and the assistant butler looking on, while his secretary read to him from the
Hyderabad Bulletin
. First they would bring a tankard of wonderfully thick, creamy chicken broth, then came the pomfret from Bombay – two pieces. He would finish that, then followed the whole chicken, so tender it would fall apart at the touch. Only when he had single-handedly demolished this fowl would the next course be brought in: a selection of spectacular Mughlai dishes, eight curries or so in silver bowls, and a great plate of the finest ground Hyderabadi kebabs. They would just melt in the mouth: I’ve never tasted anything like them anywhere else. Of course there was always a mountain of soft white pillau rice, and everything was served on the most beautiful monogrammed porcelain. When he had finished he would pass the plate to me, and I would transfer what was left to my plate: in our tradition that was considered a great privilege, and I would
salaam
profoundly as I did so. There was very strict protocol: we wouldn’t sit until asked to, and wouldn’t dream of talking until talked to. He did the talking, we responded.’

‘And that was the end of dinner?’

‘No, no. There was still pudding. After the curries had been carried away, then in came the sweets: two different kinds of English pudding – hot and cold – followed by a silver platter of Mughlai sweets, all of which were served with a great big bowl of clotted cream. When that was finished he would take his hubble bubble and puff away at that, until he was ready to go downstairs and play billiards, after which it was off to bed. A story-teller would be brought in to an alcove covered with a curtain, and from there he would tell stories from the
Shahnama
about Sohrab and Rustam, or perhaps tales from the
Mahabharat
, or Deccani tales about the deeds of the Qu’tb Shahi kings. Those old story-tellers could talk for days without stopping. Only when they heard snoring from the other side of the curtain would they stop.’

Mir Moazam looked up, and again slowly shook his head: ‘Now, of course, almost everything has gone,’ he said, ‘and I suppose I’m one of the last who can remember that way of life. We’re going pretty fast, and after us there will just be the same monotonous uniformity. All that will be left of that world is what is recorded in books and memoirs.

‘But like my grandchildren,’ he added, looking me in the eyes, ‘you probably find it difficult to even conceive the life I’m describing. And why shouldn’t you? This entire world was almost completely destroyed and uprooted years before you were born.’

But I did believe Mir Moazam, for I had long heard equally fantastical stories about the State of Hyderabad. Years ago, Iris Portal, an old friend of my grandmother, had told me a story I had never forgotten: how one day in the late 1930s she had been taken to see some of the Nizam’s treasure which was kept in open-fronted sheds in the grounds of one of the palaces. This was at a time when
Iris’s husband ran the staff of the Nizam’s younger son, and Iris had befriended his wife, Princess Niloufer.

Niloufer had led Iris past the Bedouin Arab guards all lolling about in a state of
déshabille
, and there at the back of the sheds were lines of trucks and haulage lorries. The trucks were dusty and neglected, their tyres rotting and flat and sinking into the ground, but when the two ladies pulled back a tarpaulin, they found that the trucks were laden with gems and precious stones and pearls and gold coins. The Nizam apparently lived in fear of either a revolution or an Indian takeover of his state, and had equipped the lorries so that he could get some of his wealth out of the country at short notice if the need came. But then he lost interest in his plan, and left the lorries to rot, quite incapable of going anywhere, but still full of their consignment of jewels. The guards did little to protect the riches in the lorries: what really protected them, thought Iris, was the aura of the ruler.

Other stories of Iris confirmed this picture of Hyderabad as a sort of fantastical Indian Ruritania, where an unreconstructed feudal aristocracy preserved extravagantly rococo rules of etiquette, and where life revolved around fabulously intricate and elaborate orders of precedence.

The Nizam, said to be the richest man in the world, had no fewer than eleven thousand servants: thirty-eight dusted the chandeliers, others were employed only to prepare betel nut. In addition, he had three official wives, forty-two concubines and nearly twenty children.

‘He was as mad as a coot, and his [chief] wife was raving,’ Iris told me. ‘It was like living in France on the eve of the Revolution. All the power was in the hands of the Muslim nobility. They spent money like water and were terrible, irresponsible landlords, but they could be very charming and sophisticated as well. Many had English nannies, and had been to English schools or universities. They would take us shooting – snipe and partridges – talking all the while about their trips to England or to Cannes and Paris, although in many ways Hyderabad was still living in the Moghul
Middle Ages and the villages we would pass through were often desperately poor. You couldn’t help feeling that the whole great baroque structure could come crashing down at any minute.’

For all the fairy-tale quality of Iris’s tales, they were confirmed in every detail by the most sober history books. The Nizam, Major-General Sir Osman Ali Khan, did indeed possess the largest fortune in the world: according to one contemporary estimate it amounted to at least £100 million in gold and silver bullion and £400 million in jewels, many of which came from his own Golconda mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor and the legendary (though now lost) Great Moghul Diamond which, at 787 carats, is thought to have been the largest ever discovered.

The Nizam was also the most senior Prince in India, the only one to merit the title ‘His
Exalted
Highness’, and for most of the first half of the twentieth century he ruled a state the size of Italy – 82,700 square miles of the Deccan plateau – as absolute monarch, answerable (in internal matters at least) to no one but himself. Within this vast area he could claim the allegiance of fifteen million subjects. The grandest members of the Hyderabad aristocracy – known as the Paigah nobles – were richer than most Maharajahs, and each maintained his own court, his own extraordinary palace – or palaces – and his own three or four thousand strong private army. Nor, despite all the dreadful inequalities of wealth, was Hyderabad a poor country: in its final year of existence, 1947–48, the state’s income and expenditure rivalled those of Belgium and exceeded those of twenty member states of the United Nations.

Moreover, from what I could gather from my reading, the Nizam appeared to be every bit as eccentric as Iris had indicated. While most Indian Maharajahs dressed in magnificent costumes and bedecked themselves with jewels the size of ostrich eggs, according to one British resident the Nizam resembled ‘a snuffly clerk too old to be sacked’. All his life he wore the same dirty old fez, a grubby pair of pyjamas, and an ancient
sherwani
; towards the end he even took to knitting his own socks. When he died in 1967
The Times
described the Nizam as ‘a shabby old man shuffling through his
dream world’, and described his hobbies as ‘taking opium, writing Persian poetry and’ – a wonderful detail – ‘watching surgical operations’.

Yet for all this, under the Nizam Hyderabad grew to be an important centre of learning and the arts. After the fall of Lucknow to the British in 1856, Hyderabad remained the last redoubt of Indo-Islamic culture and the flagship of Deccani civilisation, with its long heritage of composite Qu’tb Shahi, Vijayanagaran, Moghul, Kakatiyan, Central Asian and Iranian influences. Its Osmania university was the first in India to teach in an indigenous Indian language, and it was far ahead of most regions of India in the spread of education. In the early twentieth century it was the most important area for the production of Urdu literature in the subcontinent, and the people of Hyderabad had evolved their own distinctive – and often very sophisticated – manners, habits, language, music, literature, food and dress. Moreover their capital was famous as a city of palaces, rivalling in grandeur and magnificence anything in South Asia.

It is often hard to believe this as you drive through Hyderabad today. For while the city is still fairly prosperous – certainly a far cry from the urban death rattle that is modern Lucknow – fifty years on it is a pretty unprepossessing place, ugly, polluted and undistinguished, all seventies office blocks and bustling new shopping centres: ‘Darshan Automobiles’ and ‘Dervish Home Needs’, the ‘Jai Hind Cycle Store’ and ‘Posh Tailors: Ladies and Gents a Speciality’. The trees have all been cut down and attempts at urban planning utterly abandoned. New buildings are mushrooming everywhere, often built over the old Indo-Islamic bazaars and colonial townhouses, so that only piles of discarded pillars remain to hint at what once occupied the site of the new concrete jeans emporium or pizza restaurant.

In the older bazaars, the great cusped gateways of the old Hyderabadi
havelis
still stand, but now they lead nowhere, except perhaps to a half-built matrix of foundations and concrete piles. The palaces of the Paigah nobility have mostly been knocked down or else
taken over by the government, and have been so badly kept-up, or so unsympathetically converted into offices, that they are virtually unrecognisable.

But look a little further, and you discover that small pools of the old world do still survive, often out of bounds to the casual visitor. The Falaknuma Palace is one such place. A huge and magnificent complex of white classical villas and mansions raised above the town on its own acropolis, the Falaknuma was the principal residence of the sixth Nizam, the father of Osman Ali Khan. But today it is the subject of a bitter legal dispute between the Taj group, who wish to turn it into a hotel, and the last Nizam’s grandson, now mainly resident on a sheep farm in Australia, who claims never to have sold it. While the buildings await the decision of the courts, they lie empty and semi-ruinous, locked by court order, with every window and doorway sealed with red wax.

Wipe the dust from the windows and peer inside, and you see cobwebs the size of bedsheets hanging in the corners of the rooms. The skeletons of outsized Victorian sofas and armchairs lie dotted around the parquet floors, their chintz entirely eaten away by white ants, so that all that remain are the wooden frames, the springs and a little of the stuffing. Vast imperial desks, big enough to play billiards on, stand on rotting red carpets peppered with huge holes, as if they have been savaged by some terrible outsized supermoth. On one wall hangs a giant portrait of Queen Mary, on another a strange, faded Victorian fantasy of Richard the Lionheart on the battlements at Acre. Beyond are long, gloomy corridors, leading to unseen inner courtyards and
zenana
wings: mile upon mile of empty classical arcades and melancholy bow fronts, now quite empty but for a pair of lonely
chowkidars
shuffling around with their
lathis
and whistles. Outside stretch acres of scrub flats, once presumably soft green lawns, dotted here and there with kitsch statues of naked cupids, waterless fountains, giant silver oil lamps and paint-flaking flagpoles leaning at crazy angles.