White Mughals (74 page)

After the death of Khair un-Nissa, her mother Sharaf un-Nissa had hoped that Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum would continue to keep in touch with their Hyderabadi family. At Khair’s death they had, after all, inherited not only all Khair’s jewels, the value of which was conservatively estimated at £12,000, and which Sharaf had initially put aside for them, but also considerable estates across the Nizam’s dominions. As Russell wrote soon after Khair’s death, Sharaf un-Nissa’s

Since then, however, things had not gone according to plan. Not only had the children been forbidden from keeping in touch with their grandmother,
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as Palmer’s letter to Russell revealed, the family’s huge and lucrative estates had all been summarily confiscated by the Minister, Rajah Chandu Lal, more than a decade earlier, following the death of Nizam Sikander Jah. For the last twelve years, it now emerged, Sharaf un-Nissa had been living off the charity of William Palmer. Now that Palmer was himself on the verge of destitution, he had suggested that Sharaf had no option but to write a begging letter to Russell, the man who had not only destroyed her beloved daughter three decades earlier, but had also played his part in ruining Palmer himself. Sharaf un-Nissa duly wrote to Russell asking him to use his influence with the Minister, as she was now utterly without means and, having sold her last piece of jewellery, had no one else to appeal to. As she explained through a Persian letter-writer:

The tone of utter desperation pricked Russell’s generally far from over-active conscience, and he wrote back by return, offering to do all he could. In a covering letter to William Palmer, Russell thanked him for getting in touch despite all that had passed between them:

He went on to describe his own growing health problems: a series of ‘paralytic seizures’, and a severe infection in his eyes that had left him all but blind. Via Palmer, he then sent the old lady the first news of her granddaughter that she had received for many years:

The tika he refers to must, presumably, have belonged to Khair un-Nissa, and been a jewel he would have known well on the forehead of his old lover. It is always difficult to divine motives, and especially so in this case. Was this the sexual vanity of an old man? Or can one imagine that Russell was perhaps regretful, or remorseful—or even, at some level, still a little in love with the memory of Khair un-Nissa, and the times they had spent together in Calcutta some four decades earlier, in younger, happier days when his future was still bright and his reputation still un-compromised? Russell was, after all, always a weak, rather than a bad man. But it was too late, in every sense, to recapture that moment or to undo what had been done. William Palmer made discreet enquiries, but answered that sadly ‘the
teeka
was sold many years ago—& there is no trace left of it’. He added: ‘Your assistance came very timely to the poor Begum; she is in great distress. Everything of value has been sold; and a silver chilumchee [basin] was sold through my means a short time back to meet some immediate exigencies. The other things which came with the chilumchee, silver articles of small value, necessitated a breaking up of all that belonged to her establishment... ’
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On hearing this, Russell then did one more thing for the old lady. He finally got directly in touch with Kitty, by return, and told her that her grandmother was in dire need.

Shortly after her visit to Swallowfield, Kitty had had another chance encounter: on a visit to Exmouth in 1841, she had happened to meet the wife of the newly appointed Assistant to the Resident at Hyderabad, Captain Duncan Malcolm, the nephew of James Kirkpatrick’s former Assistant, John Malcolm.

Now, alerted by Russell, and using Malcolm as an intermediary and Persian translator, Kitty managed to re-establish contact with Sharaf un-Nissa, the grandmother with whom she had not communicated for nearly forty years. There followed a remarkable and extremely emotional correspondence between the two women, one writing in English from Torquay, the other from Hyderabad dictating in Persian to a scribe who wrote on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed in a
kharita
, a sealed bag of gold Mughal brocade.

Sitting in her villa in Torquay, looking out over the breakers of the same grey northern sea which had brought her to England in 1805, Kitty wrote:

The letter ends with a postscript requesting that Sharaf un-Nissa send a lock of her daughter’s hair. Sharaf un-Nissa replied in Persian, enclosing the lock of Khair un-Nissa’s hair she had kept all that time for Kitty (‘a portion of it is plain, the rest is made up’), and saying that when she heard that Kitty was still alive,

The correspondence continued for six years. Spectacles (three pairs in all), pills, money, locks of hair and photographs headed off for Hyderabad; illuminated manuscripts, elaborate pieces of calligraphy and Persian poems came back. On one occasion Kitty recalled:

Kitty communicated her suspicions about Russell’s role in her mother’s life to Duncan Malcolm, asking him to find as discreetly as he could whether the Chinnery had really been meant to go to Russell, or to her. This Malcolm tactfully declined to do, remarking in his covering letter that ‘The old lady’s memory is not good and in this matter I am inclined to trust more to Sir Hy’s statement than to your grandmothers account of the transaction of which she does not appear to have a very clear recollection.’
^jb

Kitty also asked her grandmother to send her a full account of her parents’ meeting and marriage, which Sharaf duly dictated and sent to Torquay. One thing she could not produce, however. Kitty had laboured all her life in the unenviable position of being regarded as illegitimate. This was because in his will, James Kirkpatrick had referred to both Sahib Allum and Sahib Begum as his ‘natural children’: contemporary legal terminology for the children of unmarried parents. One of Kitty’s principal concerns when writing to her grandmother had been to try to get Sharaf to find a certificate from the Nizam, or a
mujtahid
which formally proved that some sort of legal marriage ceremony had taken place between James and Khair. Sharaf un-Nissa was happy to put on record a formal signed description of James’s marriage, but she was unable to produce any document from the time which put the matter beyond legal doubt.