White Mughals (45 page)

Later, discussing with William the distant prospects for following Palmer’s lead and sending the boy to England to be educated, James admitted, ‘it will go to my soul to part with him, to say nothing of the opposition I may expect to meet with on this point in another quarter’.
⁴⁹
But it clearly was not just because he had fallen in love with his baby son that the proud father finally invited his family onto the British Residency compound; he was badly missing Khair un-Nissa too. He knew he was risking everything by allowing his aristocratic Muslim wife into the Residency when he was yet to admit to Calcutta that there was any truth at all in the stories of their liaison, and when that liaison had already caused him so much grief with his masters. The fact that he willingly took that risk—as he had already taken so many others—is a measure of the strength of his commitment to his young wife.

Now he directed all his energies into building Khair a
zenana
-palace that would meet her expectations and requirements. That month he began work constructing the Mughal-style ‘Hindoostanee House’ or ‘Rang Mahal’ (‘Palace of Colours’), which was later described as ‘a very elegant and highly finished specimen of Hindustan architecture’.
⁵⁰
James never describes the building himself in his letters, but according to an impressed visitor who was allowed to look around it in 1809, it was ‘built according to the native fashion & I have been assured that no Indian prince has so elegant a
zenana
. It would be reckoned a most beautiful set of apartments in Europe. It is situated in a garden. Within the court is a parterre. Round the interior of the court is a verandah of which the walls and ceilings are painted & gilded with great brilliancy & taste. The principal bedroom is larger than the Asiatics are accustomed to construct. The dressing room and baths are exactly the size they prefer.’
⁵¹
At the centre of the principal courtyard was a large marble basin of water, fed by numerous fountains and lined by stately cypress trees. The arcades and terraces surrounding the court were gilded and richly ornamented with trellised
jail
screens and paintings of birds, flowers and beasts. Here Khair would entertain the ladies while Kirkpatrick received their husbands in the main Residency building.
⁵²

Seventy years later, almost the entire structure was destroyed and levelled by a shocked Victorian Resident who believed that it smacked of ‘native immorality’.
^el
All that remains now is the beautifully built and decorated gatehouse, and some fragments of the interior including what appears to be Khair’s
kabooter khana
, or pigeon house. Dilapidated and overgrown as these fragments are, lying at the rear of a space still known as ‘the Begum’s Garden’, the quite exceptional finish and beauty of their construction hint at just how fine was the palace that James built for his beloved Khair un-Nissa, and for their son, Sahib Allum, the little Lord of the World.

Wellesley had given Palmer notice that he was to be replaced in June 1800, but a year later he was still in place, thanks to the increasing illness of his putative successor, William Kirkpatrick.

William did not set off from Calcutta until March 1801, and far from getting better on the voyage, as he had hoped, instead found his condition rapidly worsening. He arrived in Madras ‘in a grievous state of health’, with his agonising bladder condition greatly inflamed and much more painful. James immediately sent Dr Ure off to Madras to try to treat his elder brother—Ure had, after all, tended to William throughout his time as Resident in Hyderabad, especially after his health broke down during the siege of Khardla—and for once, Ure’s treatment seemed to work.

On 5 April 1801, James was able to write that he had just heard of the improvement in William’s condition: ‘I may consequently ’ere long have the happiness of embracing you at Hyderabad.’ But he went on to tell William that if things got worse again, Ure had been clear that ‘you should return home without further delay, [and] for heavens sake let no [financial] consideration prevent your doing so by the very next opportunity from Madras.’
⁵³

Twelve days later, however, while staying in Madras with William Thackeray, the uncle of the novelist, William Kirkpatrick’s health had once again broken down. The Madras doctor had made him drink ‘caustic’ in an attempt to unblock his urethra, with drastic results: ‘I am glad you did not attempt to give me an idea of the sufferings you have laboured under, as they have already by a sort of sympathy affected me more than I can describe,’ wrote James. ‘Heaven grant that my dearest brother may never again be exposed to them … I perfectly concur with you in thinking that the caustic ought not to have been applied until the irritation of your body had somewhat more subsided, and I earnestly trust that this opinion will prevent you from submitting to any further operations until your strength shall enable you to bear them, and your habit be in a proper condition to meet them.’ James also promised to search Hyderabad for some presents for Thackeray’s boys and nephews as a way of rewarding him for his care: ‘I will enquire for toys for Thackeray’s children immediately,’ he wrote on the seventeenth. ‘What is there indeed that I would not most heartily make him an offer of, within the compass of my means and ability, if he returns my beloved William to the full enjoyment of health again, which I am now sanguine enough to expect he will.’
^54
em

William’s health continued to fluctuate, but he remained far too ill to proceed in the direction of Pune, and as the omens grew less and less encouraging, James began encouraging him to think seriously about retiring to England, though he was only forty-six: ‘you must now consult your own preservation, my dearest Will, and the well-being of your family in preference to every other consideration’, he wrote at the end of April. ‘These, in my opinion, loudly call for your early return to your native country.’
⁵⁵
He also made it clear that he would consider it his duty to support his elder brother in his retirement: ‘My purse, as you well know, and as I have so often told you, is most entirely at your service, and must be considered in fact as your own.’
⁵⁶

In early May, when William’s health suddenly dipped again, Ure despatched some new ‘electuary’, while James scoured the Deccan to find some ‘very fine fresh figs and prunes’ in order that Ure could ‘compose an electuary that you will approve of both for its taste and its effects. Ure is however decidedly of the opinion that you ought on no account allow of any further operation being performed upon you until you have completely recovered your strength.’
⁵⁷

This never happened; instead William’s health complications became more and more serious, and the pain almost unbearable.
^en
By the beginning of June, he was forced to accept that his career in India was over, at least for the time being. He wrote to Calcutta for permission to leave India on account of his health, and at the end of the month received the brief chit from Wellesley allowing him to head ‘for the Cape, and eventually to Europe on Furlough should the state of your health render a voyage to Europe necessary’.
^58
eo

All that remained now was for William to find a ship to take him home. James wrote: ‘I must still insist on your embarking on none but an Indiaman with a
good
surgeon on board: these you know, are
sine qua nons
to my hearty acquiescence in the step, and if you cannot get such a passage at Madras you should go to Bengal in search of one.’
⁵⁹

While William lingered prostrate in the Thackerays’ house in Madras, the two young Assistants who had accompanied him from Calcutta were told to proceed on their way to Pune, via Mysore and Hyderabad, where they would in due course be joined by a Resident, once one had been appointed to replace William.

Edward Strachey and Mountstuart Elphinstone were, James thought, ‘two very superior young men’;
⁶⁰
and the
double entendre
of this phrase was entirely deliberate. Strachey was twenty-six, Elphinstone barely twenty-one. Both were highly intelligent and capable; but they made little effort to hide the fact that they knew it, or that they clearly believed they were destined for great things.

As there was no need for them to rush to their new appointment in Pune, they took their time about it, zigzagging across almost the whole of India and spending nearly a year
en route.
They travelled in great state with a
sawaree
of eight elephants, eleven camels, four horses and ten bullocks, not to mention the horses and ponies of their servants, of whom there were between 150 and 200, together with an escort of twenty sepoys and, later, what Elphinstone described as ‘a Mahratta condottiere of 30 to 40 men’. One elephant was reserved entirely for carrying their books, including a history of the Bengal Mutiny by Edward’s father, Henry Strachey, as well as volumes of the Persian poets, and editions of Homer, Horace, Hesiod, Herodotus, Theocritus, Sappho, Plato,
Beowulf
, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Dryden, Bacon, Boswell and Thomas Jefferson. As they ambled across India at the Company’s expense, they read aloud to each other, sketched, practised their Persian and Marathi grammar, went shooting and played the flute by the light of the moon. They also kept diaries.
⁶¹

Diaries—and especially travel diaries—often reveal as much about the writer as the place or person written about. In his trip to Hyderabad, the French jeweller Tavernier noticed mainly the gold and diamonds in the bazaars, while the anonymous French soldier-gourmet who wrote an account of Hyderabad in 1750 was transfixed by the city’s celebrated cooking, especially the famous Hyderabad biryani. Edward Strachey, brought up at the height of the fashion for the Picturesque, saw instead a City of Ruins. Elphinstone, meanwhile, raised his nose at so extreme an angle he missed much that was of interest; but what he did record, he noted down with a waspish wit.

The two young Englishmen arrived at the outskirts of Hyderabad on the evening of 22 August 1801. As Strachey noted:

The two diaries, with their detailed record of five months in Hyderabad, form one of the most graphic and immediate sources for the city in the early nineteenth century. From the comments they make, both Strachey and Elphinstone clearly thought they were making a record of a timeless India that had not changed for centuries; but in actual fact the diaries are important and observant records of Hyderabad at a time of massive and rapid change: the ruins Strachey so lovingly describes were irrigated pleasure gardens when Tavernier passed through the city shortly before the Mughal invasion, while a few years later they would be swallowed up in the bustling commercial quarter that quickly grew up around Kirkpatrick’s Residency.

Likewise the picture of their visit to the Hyderabad durbar given by Elphinstone a month after his arrival is a record not of medieval continuity or the timeless customs of ‘Oriental Despotism’, as he and Strachey thought, but an interesting snapshot of ceremonial in a period of transformation, when the old ways copied from the Mughal emperors of the Delhi Red Fort were slowly becoming mixed with new forms imported from Europe: ‘Major K[irkpatrick] goes [to the durbar] in great state and has several elephants, a state palankeen, led horses, flags, long poles with tassels &ca and is attended by ten companies of infantry & a troop of cavalry,’ recorded Elphinstone.