White Mughals (94 page)

Elephant stables (and the whole establishment and paraphernalia related to the keeping of elephants).

Ionian or Byzantine medicine, passed to the Islamic world through Byzantine exiles in Persia.

Literally ‘twelve doors’: the open garden kiosks with arcades of three arches on each side popularised by the Mughals.

A domed kiosk supported on pillars; often used as a decorative feature on top of turrets and minarets.

Aseels
were the key figures in a
zenana
. Usually slave girls by origin, they performed a number of essential administrative and domestic tasks within the women’s quarters. In the Nizam’s
zenana
the senior
aseels
were important figures of state.

All the younger members of the Residency seem to have suffered from severe attacks of venereal disease at different points. In June 1805, James’s then Assistant Henry Russell wrote to his brother Charles, who had gone to the coast to recover from a particularly painful bout, to tell him the news that another of the younger Assistants, ‘Bailey has proved himself, and has communicated that fashionable disease to his girl … they are now amusing themselves together with Ure’s fine [mercury] ointment.’ A week later Henry Russell himself went down with a painful attack. See Bodleian Library, Russell Correspondence, Ms Eng Letts C155, p.98, 25 June 1805.

According to
Hobson-Jobson
: ‘Havildar: a sepoy non-commissioned officer corresponding to a sergeant.’

Butler (literally ‘master of the household gear’). Today, when butlers are sadly in short supply, the word is more often used of cooks.

The
divan
given by Mah Laqa Bai Chanda is now in OIOC, Islamic Ms, 2768. The book contains an inscription: ‘The Diwan of Chanda the celebrated Malaka of Hyderabad. This book was presented as a nazr from this extraordinary woman to Captain Malcolm in the midst of a dance in which she was the chief performer on the 18th Oct 1799 at the House of Meer Allum Bahadur.’

The Ottoman Emperor. The Muslims always called the Byzantines, correctly enough, ‘the Romans’, and when the Seljuk Turks conquered ‘Roman’ Anatolia in the eleventh century, they renamed themselves the ‘Seljuks of Rum’. When the Ottomans succeeded the Seljuks and conquered Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Sultan became known across the Islamic world as the Sultan of Rum.

In time, that influence would become irresistible. Tînat un-Nissa had risen from the position of Bukshee Begum’s serving girl ‘to the honour of the Nizam’s bed’. Her rise had been due as much to her intelligence and talent for intrigue as to her beauty, and as she grew older she became both more powerful and more ruthless. She also became increasingly opposed to British influence. James’s later Assistant Charles Russell found it almost impossible to win any point she opposed, and wrote to Calcutta that she was a ‘haughty, tyrannical, rapacious, cunning and officious woman’. Indeed he complained that she interfered with every arrangement of government, from the most important to the most trivial. Each Minister or noble of rank felt obliged to seek her patronage, without which his career had no hope of survival. New Delhi National Archives, Foreign Political Consultations, Charles Russell to Minto, 4 August 1810, FPC 6 September 1810, No. 23. Also Hyderabad Residency Records, Vol. 38, pp.79-90. See also Zubaida Yazdani,
Hyderabad During the Residency of Henry Russell 1811-1820: A Case Study of the Subsidiary Alliance System
(Oxford, 1976), p.83.

One of the Nizam’s most talented and popular sons was Feridun Jah, but Kirkpatrick discounted the possibility of him succeeding his father, since ‘the Mother of this promising young Prince is probably a woman of very obscure birth, as it would not appear that she ranks amongst the Begum’s or even Khanums of the Nizam’s Mahl—that is, she is neither acknowledged as a wife, nor distinguished as a concubine’. Instead, Kirkpatrick was able correctly to predict that it would be the unpopular and mean-minded Sikander Jah, rather than one of his more charismatic half-brothers, who would eventually succeed his father on the
musnud
.

Its voluminous archives survive in the records of the
Daftar-i-Dar ul-Insha
, now in the Andhra Pradesh State Archives.

Also known as Kautilya. In modern New Delhi, the diplomatic quarter is named in his honour Chankyapuri; rather muddlingly, it also contains a Kautilya Marg.

Imtiaz was known as the Fakir as ‘during a temporary disgrace he assumed the habit of a Fakir or holy mendicant which he still continues to wear’. For ‘the Fakir’ see James Kirkpatrick, ‘A View of the State of the Deccan, 4th June 1798’, Wellesley Papers, BL Add Mss 13582, f.38, pt 11.

He was not however forced to go as far as his predecessor, his brother William’s friend John Kennaway. During the Mysore Wars, to be sure of avoiding Tipu’s agents, letters from Residents were, according to Kennaway, ‘obliged to be written on a piece of paper that might be inserted in a quill’ and then inserted into the person of the courier; and they were not even then very secure. Kennaway Papers, Devon Records Office, Exeter. Kennaway to Lieutenant Colonel Harris, 16 August 1790.

In September 1798 James wrote to William saying that: ‘Considering the strict secrecy observed by Lord [Wellesley] in his communication of his plans to General Harris [the military commander in Madras], and the reserve of the latter to everyone about him on the subject, the only way I can account for the affair having got out so completely as it has done, is by supposing that General Harris entrusted Lord W’s letter to be deciphered by someone in office [in Madras], who let the secret out.’

A year later, at the fall of Seringapatam, carefully-made copies of much of James’s private and public correspondence were found in the Tipu’s palace. See OIOC, F228/11, p.192, 5 August 1799.

Certainly it was a secret letter from the British sepoys in Hyderabad to the Nizam, brought to the Residency from the palace dustbins by one of the Nizam’s sweepers, that allowed James’s immediate successor to nip a major conspiracy in the bud in 1806. New Delhi, National Archives, Hyderabad Residency Records, vol. 71, from Neil Edmonstone to Thomas Sydenham, 14 October 1806. See also Sarojini Regani,
Nizam—British Relations 1724-1857
(New Delhi, 1963), p.197. Also Delhi National Archives, Secret Consultations, Foreign Dept, 1800, No. 20, p.1.

The tomb was mysteriously destroyed in March 2002. The Archaeological Society of India has promised to rebuild it.

Literally ‘drinker of blood’.

William Linnaeus Gardner eventually founded the Company’s irregular cavalry regiment Gardner’s Horse, which still exists in the modern Indian Army.

Boyd later fell out with the Peshwa as well, and eventually returned to America, where he disgraced himself in the War of 1812 in which he led two thousand Americans to defeat at the hands of eight hundred British Canadians. His entire campaign was described as having ‘no redeeming incident’, while his character was described by one colleague in that war as ‘a compound of ignorance, vanity and petulance’. Another of his brothers-in-arms was equally withering, describing him as amiable and respectable in a subordinate position, but ‘vacillating and imbecile beyond all endurance as a chief under high responsibilities’.
The Dictionary of American Biography
.

Even those who did not formally convert, and who retained some of their European way of life, ended up mixing it to an extent with Mughal culture. This is most strikingly evident in the Catholic graveyard in Agra where many of the mercenaries ended up. Here they lie side by side, buried in one of the strangest necropolises in Asia, filled with line upon line of small Palladianised Taj Mahals, some authentically late Mughal, but most covered with a crazy riot of hybrid ornament: baroque
putti
cavorting around Persian inscriptions; latticed
jali
screens rising to round classical arches. At the four corners at the base of the drum, where on an authentic Mughal monument you would expect to find minarets or at least small minars, there stand instead four baroque amphorae.

The fact that Sharaf un-Nissa returned to her father’s
zenana
, and that it was Bâqar Ali Khan rather than her late husband’s clan—particularly her senior brother-in-law, Mir Asadullah—who arranged the marriage of the two girls, may suggest some sort of rupture between Mehdi Yar Khan’s clan and the intelligent and independent-minded Sharaf un-Nissa.

A cleric; one who does
ijtehad
, the interpretation of religious texts.

They were also known for ‘favouring their own nation’, and for exaggerating greatly about themselves and their origins: stories were told of how, once over the Indian border, the humblest salt-sellers would try to pass themselves off as Persian noblemen and would duly be honoured with huge estates by the Great Mughal. Ellison Banks Findly (trans. William Irvine),
Nur Jehan: Empress of Mughal India
(New Delhi, 1993), p.9; and Niccolao Manucci,
Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, 1653-1708
(London, 1907), Vol. 1, p.171. Abdul Lateff Shushtari, Sayyid Reza’s grandson and our source for his travels, has himself been accused of exaggerating the importance of his clan in the
Tuhfaat al’Alam
. See the essay by Ahmad Kasravi, ‘
Ham dozd ham dorugh
’ (Not Only a Liar but a Plagiarist), in
Peyman
, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1312AH.

An office-holder whose rank was decided by the number of cavalry he would supply for battle—for example, a
mansabdar
of 2500 would be expected to provide 2500 horsemen when the Nizam went to war.

Literally,
qizil
= red,
bash
= head, a reference to the Qizilbash’s coloured turbans rather than their hair-colour. The Qizilbash were followers of Isma’il Shah Safavi, and formed the bulk of the troops of Shi’ite Iran from the sixteenth century, spreading to Afghanistan with the Safavid rule in Herat and Qandahar, and in the eighteenth century to northern India with the armies of Nadir Shah. Colonies of Qizilbash are still scattered in Kabul, Peshawar and Lahore. By the time Shushtari was writing, the term no longer referred only to soldiers but also to traders.

This is something that has always horrified educated Muslims who have come into intimate contact with Westerners: the twelfth-century Arab intellectual Usama ibn Munquid complained of the same unattractive trait in Crusader Syria, telling a story about a visit to a bath-house at Ma’arra in the course of which he notes with some disgust that a Frank he comes across in the baths kept his pubic hair ‘as long as his beard’. See Francesco Gabrieli,
Arab Historians of the Crusades
(London, 1969), p.78.

There are also a number of rare cases of queens in the Arab world, such as Asma Bint Shihab al-Sulayhiyya of eleventh-century Yemen. See Fatima Mernissi’s fascinating study
The Forgotten Queens of Islam
(Cambridge, 1993).

Around £4.2 million in today’s currency.

The most famous courtesan of all was the great Umrao Jan Ada of Lucknow, immortalised in the eponymous novel by Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, and more recently in the film by Mozaffer Ali. A good English translation of Ruswa’s novel was recently produced by Khuswant Singh and M.A. Husaini.

A rather weak pun by Shushtari: Mah Laqa’s pen name, ‘Chanda’, means moon.

Female Hindu fertility nymphs, often associated with sacred trees and pools.

The courtesans and dancing girls of the Hindu gods; heavenly dispensers of erotic bliss.

The devotional Hindu attitude to love was different again, regarding it not so much a matter of pain as a metaphor that eased one’s submission before an omnipotent power.

He then tells an anecdote to illustrate this, which he says was related to him ‘by reliable sources, of an [Iranian] Qizilbash boy in Benares who, a few years before I came to India, fell in love with a Brahmin girl and made a hut of reeds by the bathing ghats to watch the girl coming to the river. They became lovers, but were soon separated by her parents. So they joined in a suicide pact and drowned in the River Ganges, where their bodies appeared momentarily clasping each other, before disappearing, in spite of all the searches of swimmers and divers. Shushtari,
Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam
, p.554.

According to the
Nagaristan-i-Asafiya
and the
Yadgar-i-Makhan Lal
, Sharaf un-Nissa’s husband, Mehdi Yar Khan, and his brother Mir Asadullah were the sons of Mirza Qasim Khan, the
faujdar
(fort-keeper) of Bhongir and a prominent supporter of Nizam ul-Mulk’s great rival, Mubariz Khan. Mirza Qasim Khan was killed when the Nizam defeated Mubariz Khan at the Battle of Sheker Khera on 11 October 1724, so winning the Deccan and frustrating the designs of the Sayyid brothers—the real power behind the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah Rangila—to topple him from power. Mirza Qasim Khan’s family were however quickly forgiven by Nizam ul-Mulk for supporting the wrong side, and Sharaf un-Nissa’s husband Mehdi Yar Khan prospered under both Nizam ul-Mulk and Nizam Ali Khan, before dying sometime in the 1780s or nineties. Sharaf un-Nissa must however have been at least forty years younger than her husband. She was certainly not Mehdi Yar Khan’s only wife, as Khair un-Nissa had an older half-sister, from a different (and probably older) mother, who died in early March 1800 ‘in consequence of medicines she repeatedly took to procure pregnancy’. See entries for Bâqar Ali Khan in the
Nagaristan-i-Asafiyya
and the
Yadgar-i-Makhan Lal
(no page numbers), and Yusuf Husain,
The First Nizam: The Life of Nizam ul-Mulk Asaf Jah I
(Bombay, 1963), p.137. For the death of Khair un-Nissa’s half-sister, see OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/11, p.338, 9 March 1800, James Kirkpatrick to William Kirkpatrick. It is interesting to speculate whether Sharaf un-Nissa’s experience of being married to an old man, and the possible unhappiness this caused her, led her to view more sympathetically Khair un-Nissa’s resistance to her grandfather’s attempt to impose a marriage upon her.