White Mughals (96 page)

Some later Hyderabadi sources maintain that Mir Alam had considered marrying Mir Dauran to his cousin Khair un-Nissa, and that the frustration of this plan added to Mir Alam’s dislike of James. This is not, however, mentioned in any contemporary source, and Mir Alam succeeded in marrying his son to the daughter of a far more powerful Hyderabadi
omrah
than Bâqar Ali Khan, Bahram ul-Mulk.

James was especially angry as this was Mir Dauran’s second attempt at trying to win him over to Mir Alam’s cause by dishonest means. Eight months earlier, in March, he attempted quite blatantly to bribe James, who had reported to William: ‘I rejected with disdain a bribe which he offered me in his fathers name of a lakh of rupees in jewels and another in money. He had the meanness to hint pretty plainly to me, that he was ready to assist in any views that I might have in a certain quarter, if I would, upon the principle of give and take, promote those of his father. I could not help telling him in reply, that though I did not immediately understand what quarter he alluded to, yet I could never think of disgracing him so far as employing his services in any unsuitable way.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, Mss Eur F228/11, p.338, 9 March 1800, James to William Kirkpatrick.

In this context, a maidservant.

The streets appear to have been particularly muddy and smelly in December 1800: North Dalrymple, the nephew of James, had arrived in Hyderabad on the very day his uncle lay dying in his tent, and visiting the old city immediately after the funeral had found the back streets ‘extremely narrow and full of mud, so that gentlemen are obliged to go in mounted on elephants’. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, GD135/2904, pp.30-6, ‘Diary of North Dalrymple of the 22nd Dragoons’.

Such tantalising contact led to a whole raft of erotic stories told by European doctors, though it is impossible now to say whether they are true or imagined. The Italian quack and confidence trickster Niccolao Manucci, who occasionally attended the ladies of Aurangzeb’s harem, maintained that ‘there are some [women] who from time to time affect the invalid simply that they may have the chance of a conversation with and have their pulse felt by, the physician who comes to see them. The latter stretches out his hand inside the curtain; they lay hold of it, kiss it, and softly bite it. Some out of curiosity apply it to their breast … ’ Niccolao Manucci (trans. William Irvine),
Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India, 1653-1708
(London, 1907, 2 vols), Vol. 2, p.353.

Gonah (more usually spelled
gunah
) in fact means a sin rather than a fault.

One coss is just over two miles.

Even Henry Russell, who was by this stage becoming James’s closest friend in the Residency, later claimed in a letter of 30 March 1848 that he never once heard James mention his marriage, though both Khair un-Nissa and Sharaf un-Nissa confirmed to him that it had taken place.

A Muslim marriage traditionally has two parts, the
nikah
and the
shadi
. When the
nikah
is performed the marriage becomes legal. The
shadi
is the public and ceremonial portion of the marriage, but is not essential for the consummation of a marriage.

All these details would seem to confirm that the marriage was a ‘permanent’ one, not a ‘temporary’ marriage, which was an option in Shi’a law, and which some Hyderabadi scholars have suggested to me in conversation might have been available to Kirkpatrick had he wanted it. But James showed great fidelity to Khair un-Nissa, and there is absolutely no suggestion that he went into the marriage intending to divorce his wife soon afterwards—quite the opposite. He was taking a considerable political risk by marrying Khair un-Nissa, and the only reason to have done so would have been his own desire to permanently legitimise the relationship in the eyes of her family.

i.e. She had had a dream in which Maula Ali had appeared to her.

‘I applied to the Shah [Alam II, the blind Mughal Emperor] in your name for permission to transcribe his copy of the
Mahbharrut
,’ he wrote at one point. ‘I was assured that it would have been most cheerfully granted if the book had been in his possession, but his library had been totally plundered & destroyed by that villain Ghullam Khauder Khan [who had also blinded the prostrate Emperor with his own thumbs]. He [Shah Alam] added, not without some degree of indignation, that part of the books had been purchased at Lucknow, that is by the Vizier [i.e. the Nawab]; & upon enquiry find this to be the case, for his Excellency [the Nawab] produced some of them to the English Gentlemen, boasting that they were the ‘King’s’. Amongst them were two volumes beautifully painted & illuminated for which he gave 10,000 Rs.’This is probably a reference to the most beautiful of all Mughal manuscripts, the great
Padshahnama
, which the Nawab soon afterwards sent on to London as a gift for George III. Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 29,172, Vol. XLI, 1790, p.184, 21 November 1790, Agra. The
Padshahnama
is now one of the principal treasures of the Windsor Castle Library.

Hindustan at this period was a geographically vague term that encompassed that part of northern India which lay around the Ganges and the Jumna and formed the hinterland to Delhi and Agra—roughly the western half of modern Uttar Pradesh plus Haryana.
^‡
William rather unwisely looked to his Scottish friend David Anderson for money for Sarah’s maintenance, writing in March 1792 that ‘the heavy losses and disappointments which I have sustained, compel me to lay a small tax upon your friendship and generosity. Having been for some time past utterly unable to make any Remittance to my Mother and Wife if it will not be at all inconvenient to your affairs, you will most essentially serve to oblige me by an advance of Two Hundred pounds towards their support to be paid into the hands of my friend Mr Cooke of Greenwich Hospital. I make no apology for this liberty being convinced that you will rather thank me for the confidence which I place in you on so delicate an occasion.’ Anderson, a careful Scotsman and notably tight with his purse-strings, was most put out by the request, pointedly telling his friend in his reply from Edinburgh that he had to learn to manage his financial affairs better, and that he himself had recently had to give up his much-loved beagle pack for reasons of economy. He did however send the money, later writing to his brother: ‘I am almost angry at my friend Palmer for his thoughtlessness … but as he has trusted to me for this advance for the support of his Wife and Mother, I cannot (whatever inconvenience it may be attended with to myself) suffer his expectations to be disappointed … at the same time I must request that you will tell Palmer that he must not impose such a Duty on me again.’ British Library, Anderson Papers, Add Mss 45,427. p.203, March 1792. Anderson had a point: for all his debts, Palmer enjoyed a princely salary of £22,000 a year—which would make him almost a millionaire in today’s currency (though that sum was also supposed to cover all his Residency expenses). As Anderson suggested, Palmer’s permanent lack of cash had more to do with his celebrated extravagance than with any lack of resources.

The Frankfurt-born Zoffany (1734-1810) lived in Lucknow for two and a half years, staying much of the time with Claude Martin. On his way back to England (where he had settled in the 1750s) he was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal.

The formulation ‘my sister the Begum’ is of course additional evidence that Palmer did go through some sort of marriage ceremony with Fyze. It is hardly likely he would claim Nur Begum as his sister-in-law if Fyze was merely an unrecognised concubine.

‘Zeenut’ and ‘Mihr un-Nissa’ would probably be transliterated today as ‘Zeenat’ and ‘Mehr un-Nissa’, but I have retained the spelling used in the sources.
^‡
Mihr un-Nissa is referred to in letters of de Boigne as the adopted daughter of the powerful Mughal General Najaf Khan and his wife Moti Begum. Moti gave Mihr to de Boigne as a present after he safeguarded her when he stormed a fortress that Moti was defending. The present was not, however, quite as generous as it first appeared. De Boigne later wrote that ‘when I got this girl [it was understood that] she would live with me in rather an inferior condition, as being only an adopted girl of this Moti Begum. But she was far from being handsome and of a most violent disposition and temper, as well as bad education, so much so that I could not gain upon her to live with her mother at Delhi, who also did not appear desirous to have her on account of her bad temper’. After his departure, de Boigne left instructions that Mihr un-Nissa was ‘free to marry or live single just as she pleases’. See Desmond Young,
Fountain of Elephants
(London, 1959), p.146, and the de Boigne archives, Chambéry, passim.

‘Mulka’ would probably be transliterated today as ‘Malika’, but I have retained the spelling used in the sources.

Intellectually too, there seems to have been a remarkable degree of intercourse between the more enlightened Europeans and the scholars and poets of Lucknow. The greatest collection of Oriental manuscripts in Britain—now the core of the India Office collection—was formed by Richard Johnson while he was the Deputy to the British Resident in Lucknow. During his years in Avadh he mixed with the poets, scholars and calligraphers of Lucknow, discussing Sanskrit and Persian literature, and forming long-lasting friendships with many of them. One of these scholars, Abu Talib Tafazul, was an old friend both of the Palmers and of Khair un-Nissa’s cousin, Abdul Lateef Shushtari; indeed he was probably the man Shushtari most admired in India. In the
Tuhfat al-’Alam
Shushtari described Tafazul as a ‘pious Shiite, who also knew, apart from Persian and Arabic, English and the Roman tongue which they call Latin, which is the learned tongue of the Europeans in which they write their scholarly books, and which has the same position among them as Arabic among non-Arab Muslims. Tafazul even knew Greek and had translated several books by European scholars into Arabic, apart from his own writings on algebra and jurisprudence. India should be proud to have brought forth such a scholar … however much his position gave him the attributes of wealth and status, he never changed his courteous and egalitarian behaviour towards the poor and the weak’; Seyyed Abd al-Latif Shushtari,
Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam
(written Hyderabad, 1802; lithographed Bombay, 1847), p.450. Johnson and Palmer also greatly admired Tafazul, and used to welcome him to their houses, where they would discuss mathematics, astronomy, English and Greek. Palmer even took Tafazul with him to help negotiate a treaty with the Rajah of Gohud, and persuaded him to help with the drafting of letters to the Maratha chiefs; Toby Falk and Mildred Archer,
Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library
(London, 1981), pp.14-20. For Tafazul see Gulfishan Khan,
Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West During the Eighteenth Century
(Karachi, 1998). Writing to Warren Hastings, who was also fond of the old scholar, Palmer called him the embodiment of ‘all that was wise, learned and good among the Mussulmans’; Hastings Papers, BL Add Mss 19,178, Vol. XLVII, 1801-02, 10 July 1801, pp.61-3, William Palmer to Hastings.

After years of agonising as to whether he should stay in India or not, Polier finally decided to return to France and buy a château—with exquisite bad timing—in 1788. He settled near Avignon and was duly lynched and stabbed on 9 February 1795 in the terror that accompanied the French Revolution.

John Palmer was the youngest child of General Palmer’s first wife Sarah Hazell. Since leaving the navy in 1783, he had joined the Calcutta agency house of Burgh, Barber & Co. In the mid- 1790s he became sole manager under the name Palmer & Co. Shortly before this, according to his obituary in the
Englishman and Military Chronicle
, he used all the capital he had saved to bail his impecunious father out of a short period in jail, into which he had been thrown for bad debts: ‘… At the very early period of his career, his father, General Palmer, an extravagant man, was arrested for debt which he was entirely without means of defraying. His son had just at the same time formed arrangements for concerting a commercial partnership, for which he had realized a capital not more than sufficient; this he instantly sacrificed to liberate his father, and by so doing created a general feeling of respect and confidence, which greatly contributed to advance his future prospects.’
Englishman and Military Chronicle
, 23 January 1836, p.157.

The
mahal
was pulled down by Sir George Yule in 1860. See
Bengal Past and Present
, Vol. 27, January—June 1924, No. 53, p.120.

The toys were found, but only got to Thackeray as late as mid-September that year, after a mix-up when ‘the crate of toys sent for Thackeray’s children got swapped for one containing Lord Clive’s collection of arms and armour [intended for Powys Castle, where they remain], to the latter’s amazement when he opened it and found playthings instead’. OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/13, p.164, 16 September 1801. It is interesting to think of the nappy-clad author of
Vanity Fair
growing up playing with Mughal rattles sent by James Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa from the bazaars of Hyderabad.

Some of William’s symptoms sound suspiciously like a severe case of mercury poisoning, which no doubt exacerbated the pain and seriousness of his bladder complaint.