White Mughals (44 page)

In his letters to Hastings from this tolerant and hedonistic oasis, Palmer’s letters mixed happy expressions of pleasure in the life he lived in Lucknow with darker passages recording his growing horror at the ever-increasing arrogance and indeed naked racism of the Company’s government in Calcutta from the late 1790s onwards. When Wellesley arrived in 1798 things rapidly went from bad to worse, and Palmer’s correspondence shows that he intensely disliked the new Governor General from the start; he wrote perceptively to Hastings of Wellesley’s ‘inordinate love of pomp, and a Vanity which almost surpasses conception’. He added, equally perceptively, ‘It is sincerely to be lamented that such weakness should accompany and defeat the effects of talents of the first order.’ A couple of years later, Palmer had become firmly convinced that Wellesley’s policies were bringing disaster to India, and permanently estranging Indians from the British. ‘I do not take His Lordship’s patriotism to be of the first order,’ he wrote to Hastings after a trip to Calcutta.

A couple of months on, Palmer was gloomier still: ‘Our weakness, arrogance & injustice cannot fail to draw upon us the vengeance of a united India,’ he wrote prophetically. ‘Already there have been insurrections …’
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Against this background of growing British conceit, and with Palmer feeling increasingly isolated as he saw successive new generations of British officials behaving with ever greater
hauteur
to his Indian friends, he quickly realised that James Kirkpatrick represented a kindred spirit. As soon as he arrived in Pune in 1798, Palmer jumped to befriend his counterpart over the border in Hyderabad.

In a series of increasingly warm letters, the General did his best to establish a close friendship with James, though they had yet to meet face to face. Among their many shared enthusiasms, it turned out in the course of their correspondence, was a passionate love of mangoes: ‘The mango season has been late but tolerably abundant & of no bad flavour,’ wrote James in one of the first letters, whereupon Palmer offered to send him a selection of mango grafts for his orchards; the two were soon comparing notes on their favourite varieties, agreeing—sensibly enough—that Alphonsos were hard to beat. When Mir Alam complained to Calcutta about James, Palmer was quick to offer support, and when the Mir finally fell from grace after Aristu Jah managed to get him sacked and arrested, Palmer wrote a characteristically discerning letter about him to James:

Other letters expressed both men’s growing disillusion with Wellesley, and in this Palmer led the way, encouraging his younger colleague to express openly what he really thought about the vain and aggressive Governor General. Letter by letter, Palmer openly voiced the heresies that James had up to now only expressed tentatively to his elder brother: of Wellesley’s personal arrogance, his imperious way of behaving both to his own colleagues and to Indian rulers and ambassadors, his ruinous overspending, and his habit of making appointments and decisions without even summoning the Council through whose majority vote all his predecessors had filtered their decisions.
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Throughout June 1801, James was already becoming more and more disgusted with Wellesley’s bullying approach to Indian rulers, when an order came from Calcutta commanding him to renegotiate the solemn Subsidiary Treaty Wellesley and the Nizam had signed only the previous year. In that treaty, the chunk ofTipu’s territory won by the Nizam after the fall of Seringapatam had been surrendered to the Company in return for the British agreeing to send a large number of extra troops to increase the size of the Subsidiary Force in Hyderabad. The extra troops had yet to arrive, indeed they had not yet left Madras, but when Wellesley discovered that the revenue of the area handed over to the Company had fallen far short of what he expected, he wrote to James demanding that he get the Nizam to make up the shortfall, despite the fact this was specifically forbidden in the small print of the treaty.
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Wellesley had no leg to stand on: he was manifestly bullying an important and friendly ally into handing over large sums of cash without any legal pretext, and in direct contravention of a treaty he had signed only eight months earlier.The fact that no new troops, and only a limited quantity of artillery, had yet arrived in Hyderabad made the blatant injustice of Wellesley’s position all the more glaring.

Palmer was quite clear what this would mean for British relations with Hyderabad: due to these ‘hard exactions … I fear our harmony with the court of Hyderabad will be completely interrupted’.
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James was even more baffled by Wellesley’s ‘cruel’ instructions, and wrote privately to his elder brother in a state of deep depression: ‘My dear Will, the more I reflect on these secret commands, the more deeply they fill me with regret, astonishment and alarm … [they are a] glaring attempt at infringement on a recent advantageous treaty with an old and highly useful ally and [if they should] get abroad nothing on earth could save his Lordship from impeachment [back in Britain].’
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It was a turning point for James. From this moment, he wrote to William, it was ‘no longer in my power to cherish that high awareness of his [Wellesley’s] political wisdom and integrity that I hitherto did’.
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James had his opinion of Wellesley’s rapaciousness confirmed in November 1801, when the Governor General sent his youngest brother Henry to Lucknow to extract massive territorial concessions from the hapless Nawab. Having bullied and threatened Nawab Saadat Ali Khan into signing over more than half of his dominions to the Company, including most of the rich and fertile Doab region, worth a total annual revenue of more than thirteen million rupees, Henry Wellesley was then given charge of the newly seized territories.
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James could not believe what was happening, all of it without any legal justification, and wrote to Palmer that he was again half-considering resignation rather than continue to serve such a master:

In the meantime James had to decide how to react to Lord Wellesley’s instructions to renegotiate his Subsidiary Treaty. He wrote in despair to Palmer, saying that ‘the Dispatch of the Gov General almost sets me frantic. How, after all the assurances that I gave Solomon [Aristu Jah] in the course of the late Negotiations, can I show my face to him with such demands as I am now ordered to bring forward, and how will he, poor man, be able to shew his face to his master?’
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In the end, screwing up his courage, James wrote back to Wellesley and told him that he thought the orders he had received were frankly unreasonable, and clearly contrary to the stipulations of the treaty he, Wellesley, had signed less than a year earlier. It was a major mistake, at least as far as James’s future career was concerned: Wellesley was never one to take criticism lightly, and his attitude towards James, and the language in which his letters were phrased, grew progressively more hostile and adversarial from this point onwards.

James’s letters to Palmer strayed, however, far beyond their shared political beliefs, hopes and fears: the pair also discussed the less upsetting and more intimate subject of Palmer’s Anglo-Indian children, who had all been educated in England and were now returning to try to make lives for themselves in India. In 1799, James had found a job for William, Fyze’s eldest son, in the Nizam’s irregular cavalry, and he now offered to look after their daughter Mary on her return from England as she made her way from Madras to Pune (an offer that in the end was not taken up, as Mary chose instead to join her half-brother John Palmer, a successful Calcutta banker known as ‘The Prince of Merchants’, and so did not in the end pass through James’s Residency
^ek
). The offer was greatly appreciated by Fyze and the General: at a time of growing prejudice against Anglo-Indians, the Palmers felt sure that they could trust James to be friendly to their beloved daughter.

Soon Palmer was writing to James that he planned to visit Hyderabad himself once he had finally been relieved of his duties. He would return to Calcutta via Hyderabad and Masulipatam, and would it be possible for him to stay at the Residency?
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James replied that he was delighted at the prospect: ‘I have a large bangaloe prepared, which will I think accomadate you and your entire family,’ he wrote. ‘There is a zennanah, though rather a small one, attached to it.’
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This, it soon became apparent, was not going to be by any means sufficient. As James wrote in a letter shortly afterwards, the General’s ‘suite is rather numerous and includes at least a dozen females’.
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The Palmers—especially Fyze, now honoured as an ‘adopted daughter’ of the Mughal Emperor, and known by the title Sahib Begum—clearly liked to travel in style.
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In that long, hot summer of 1801, James had also found his own
zenana
rather too small for his needs. For sometime in late August, he had decided to throw caution to the winds, and formally to invite Khair un-Nissa and their little baby Sahib Allum (and also, so it seems, James’s mother-in-law, Sharaf un-Nissa) to come and live in his
zenana
in the Residency, apparently displacing, if they had not done so already, James’s existing concubines.

The reason he later gave for taking this risky decision was that he ‘did hearken to the voice of nature, pleading eloquently in the engaging form of an helpless and innocent infant’, and this may well have been partly true.
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The child was considered by everyone who saw him ‘a most lovely infant’, and ‘by his female connexions as a downright prodigy of loveliness of every kind’.
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James also remarked that ‘among other circumstances which render this child peculiarly dear and interesting to me is the striking resemblance which he bears to my dear father [the Handsome Colonel], which has been remarked by all his female attendants who have seen the picture [of the Colonel] hanging up in my room, and which Ure and his wife (who are the only Europeans who have seen him) declare to be uncommonly strong. He is indeed, in every respect, a most lovely infant, the most so, if their declarations can be relied upon, that Ure or his good wife, ever in their lives saw.’
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