White Mughals (59 page)

James hoped that a quick sea voyage would do the trick and restore him to health; but he feared that, realistically, it was unlikely to do more than ‘patch up my constitution to a certain degree’.
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He was sufficiently worried to write a will, dividing his now considerable fortune between his children, his nieces and ‘the excellent and respectable … Kheir oon Nissah Begum’.
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Moreover he realised that if the voyage failed to cure him, in the medium term the only other two options were dying (pretty promptly) in India, or retiring to England. His spirit might feel completely at home in India; but his wretched body, less malleable, seemed to need England.

In which case, he wondered, what would happen to his beloved Khair un-Nissa? Most Indian wives and consorts did not accompany their husbands back to Britain when they left the subcontinent at the end of their service, though there was no law preventing it. When the Mughal travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan visited London at about this time he described meeting several completely Anglicised Indian women who had returned with their husbands and children. One of them in particular, Mrs Ducarrol, especially impressed him: ‘She is very fair,’ he wrote, ‘and so accomplished in all the English manners and language, that I was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India.’ He added: ‘The lady introduced me to two or three of her children, from sixteen to nineteen years of age, who had every appearance of Europeans.’
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But other attempts to take Indian wives back to England ran into disastrous and tragic problems. Another Indian woman whom Mirza Abu Taleb Khan met and admired in London was Fyze Palmer’s younger sister from Lucknow, Nur Begum: ‘Noor Begum who accompanied General de Boigne from India … was dressed in the English fashion, and looked remarkably well,’ he wrote. ‘She was much pleased with my visit, and requested me to take charge of a letter for her mother, who resides at Lucknow.’
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But Khan was being discreet here, for he does not say what James and Khair knew well, and what he must have known too: that Nur’s marriage had not survived the transition to England, and though she might look ‘remarkably well’, her life was in ruins.

Within a few months of General de Boigne’s arrival in England in May 1797, Nur had been dumped out of sight in the tiny village of Enfield, outside London, with her two small children Anne and Charles, to which she voluntarily added the extra burden of the orphaned half-Indian son of Antoine Polier, General Palmer’s white Mughal friend from Lucknow who had been killed two years earlier, soon after his return from India, in the terror that followed the French Revolution. De Boigne, meanwhile, had taken up with a beautiful and spirited young French émigrée aristocrat (and, though he only discovered this later when it was too late, a completely unprincipled fortune-hunter), Adèle d’Osmond, whom he married in June 1798, thirteen months after arriving in England with Nur.

Nur’s household receipts, which survive in de Boigne’s family archive in Chambéry, make painful reading: at the same time that ‘Mrs. Begum’ (as she is referred to in the accounts) was expected to subsist on an allowance of £200 a year—with which she had to live, pay her rent, the children’s school fees and all other expenses—de Boigne was cruising around Britain spending, in a single weekend, £78 on necklaces, clasps, bracelets and earrings for his youthful new European wife.
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Fyze and the General had been deeply dismayed to hear of Nur’s fate, and had told James about it. This cannot but have added to his worries about how Khair would fare if a return to England was forced upon him.

There was at least some hope that James’s uncertain health could recover; but there was another, greater, sadness in the air, and from this it seemed that there was no escape. Almost from the day of her children’s birth, Khair un-Nissa had known that they would be taken from her when Sahib Allum reached the age of five, and sent away over the Black Water
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to England. There they would spend the rest of their childhood away from her, receiving an English education—an idea to which she was instinctively and bitterly opposed. James looked forward to the children’s departure with as much dread as she did, but thought that it had to be. In 1801, soon after the birth of Sahib Allum, he wrote to William: ‘I will certainly endeavour to send my little
Hyderabadi
to England as soon as possible: but 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 in spite of any agreements.’
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In sending his little Hyderabadi Muslim children to Britain without either of their parents, James was not (at least in his own eyes) acting heartlessly: on the contrary, he believed he was making a considerable sacrifice for the sake of his children. It was widely and probably correctly believed at the time that the only way Anglo-Indian children had the chance of making something of their lives was if they received a
pukka
English public-school education. English racism against ‘country born’ Anglo-Indian children was now becoming so vicious in India as to make this provision very necessary. Without it, their options were limited in the extreme, and they were condemned to sink to the margins, pushed away and ostracised by both British and Indian society.

One of the most moving testaments to this is General Sir David Ochterlony’s letters concerning his two daughters by Mubarak Begum. These were written around 1803, and in them he discusses the question of whether it would be better to bring the girls up as Anglo-Indian Christians and attempt to integrate them into British society, or instead to educate them as fully Muslim Indians, and to propel them as best he could into the parallel world of late-Mughal society. ‘My children are uncommonly fair,’ wrote Ochterlony, ‘but if educated [in India] in the European manner they will in spite of complexion labour under all the disadvantages of being known as the NATURAL DAUGHTERS OF OCHTERLONY BY A NATIVE WOMAN—In that one sentence is compressed all that ill nature and illiberality can convey, of which you must have seen numerous instances during your Residence in this country.’
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If he were to make his daughters Christian and keep them in British company, argues Ochterlony, they would be constantly derided for their ‘dark blood’; but he hesitates to bring them up as Muslims, with a view to them marrying into the Mughal aristocracy, as ‘I own I could not bear that my child should be one of a numerous haram
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even were I certain that no other Disadvantages attended this mode of disposal & were I proof against the observations of the world who tho’ unjust to the children, would not fail to comment on the Conduct of a father who educatedhis offspring in Tenets of the Prophet.’ The letter to Major Hugh Sutherland, another Scot in a similar position who had eventually opted to bring up his children as Muslim,
^gy
ends rather movingly: ‘In short my dear M[ajor] I have spent all the time since we were parted in revolving this matter in my mind but I have not yet been able to come to a positive Decision.’
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A similar dilemma faced James. Six months after Sahib Allum’s birth, James had written to his brother in Madras asking him to take especial care to look after his other unnamed ‘Hindustani’ son when William arrived in England. In the course of the letter James reflects with pain on the racism then prevalent among the British in India, which he well knew to be especially harsh towards children of mixed race, and he writes of the worries this causes him for his young baby’s future.
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At first he believed the solution to the problem lay in sending Sahib Allum to join his cousins in Britain, where colour prejudice was still much less prevalent than among Company servants in India: ‘I still retain the opinion I expressed to my father,’ he wrote to William in September 1801,

Over time, however, with the example of the Anglo-Indian Captain William Palmer’s growing power and success in Hyderabad before him, James seems to have reconsidered his assumption that his children’s future necessarily lay in Britain. Without an élite British education, and the
éclat
that brought, Anglo-Indian children would almost certainly suffer from the worst prejudices of both races, just as James feared; but with it, as Palmer’s career seemed to show, it might be possible for his children to use both sides of their racial inheritance to their advantage, and to be equally at ease in both worlds. With due preparation, in other words, their future might well lie in India.

For this reason, by the beginning of 1804 James had begun to write to the Handsome Colonel to find out if the old man was still active and energetic enough to add two more grandchildren to his collection, and to explain in some detail his hopes and ideas for their education: ‘On the subject of the girl’s education,’ he wrote to his father in October 1804,

This latter clause seems to be a reference to what must have been the last of the Handsome Colonel’s many illegitimate children, fathered—if this is the correct interpretation—while the old Lothario was in his early seventies. In the same letter, James explained that when he sent the children to England, ‘as my own state of health has long required a temporary change at least of climate, I propose if I can obtain leave of absence for the purpose, to accompany them myself to the Presidency in December or January next, and after seeing them safe on board, to take a cruise to sea, as the most likely means of recovering a sufficient stock of health to enable me to return to my station’.
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Eight months later, by June 1805, James’s plans had solidified, and bookings had been made. Dr Ure had, like him, decided to send his two-year-old boy to England, but with the difference that in the Ures’ case, Mrs Ure was to go with the boy on the journey. James realised that this was an excellent chance for the children to be accompanied by a woman they knew and who also spoke Urdu. As he wrote to William: