White Mughals (98 page)

The sanguinello or blood orange is not in fact any relation to the pomegranate.

General Claude Martin (1735-1800) was General Palmer’s old friend from Lucknow and the founder of the La Martinière schools in Lucknow, Calcutta and Lyon. See Rosie Llewellyn-Jones,
A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India
(New Delhi, 1992).

A lack of good-quality china seems to have remained a consistent grouse of the English in India throughout the nineteenth century. During the Raj it became a custom in the remoter stations to invite guests to dinner ‘camp fashion’, which meant they had to bring not just their own servants and their own chair, but their own plates, cutlery and glasses. In 1868 an anonymous army officer wrote in
Life in the Mofussil
that ‘it was amusing to see three pretty girls, daughters of an indigo planter of a remote part of the district, drinking champagne out of three-pint pewters, which they had brought with them as safer than glass. They were clearly accustomed to camp fashion.’

Dr William Roxburgh (1751-1815), a Scot from Edinburgh, started his career on the Andhra coast and published
The Plants of the Coast of the Coromandel
from his time in the vicinity of Hyderabad. In 1793 he was appointed the East India Company’s Chief Botanist and the first Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens. He was the first botanist to attempt to draw up a systematic account of the plants of India, published posthumously as
Flora Indica.

i.e. They would probably be rotten by the time they arrived, but it would be possible to plant the stones.

Writing to his brother’s old friend (and his own former patron) Sir John Kennaway a little later, James mentioned how the park had been constructed from areas outside the original garden perimeter: ‘These in your time were all Paddy Fields, but are now partly converted to the aforementioned use and partly covered with handsome bungalows, regular sepoy barracks for my escort, stabling and farm yards, while a lofty and well constructed Flag Staff which I have erected in a centrical and appropriate spot serves at once to convey an idea of Security and Grandeur.’ OIOC, Kirkpatrick Papers, F228/59, p.31, 24 October 1804, James Kirkpatrick to Kennaway.

The English word ‘paradise’ derives from the walled Eastern garden, or enclosed hunting park—specifically from the Persian words
pairi
(around) and
daeza
(a wall). The word passed into English via the Greek
paradeisoi.
See Elizabeth B. Moynihan,
Paradise as a Garden in Persia and Mughal India
(New York, 1979).

The
mulsarry
(or
maulshree
in Sanskrit) was unusual in the Deccan, though it was extensively used by the Mughals in Delhi and Agra as its neat crown lent itself to formal planting arrangements. (I would like to thank Pradip Krishen for his help with this intriguing tree.)

Indeed, in the Imperial Mughal court, the wetnurses of the Mughal emperors often became important figures of state: Maham Anaga, Akbar’s wetnurse, was one of the most powerful figures in sixteenth-century India, and her eldest son, Akbar’s foster-brother, the cruel and unprincipled Adham Khan, grew so influential and unruly that he became a major threat to the stability of the Empire. Adham Khan eventually became so uncontrollable that in 1561 he killed the Mughal Prime Minister, Atagha Khan, before being himself despatched by Akbar, who in a fit of anger following the murder knocked him out and then threw him from a second-floor palace window. Filled with remorse after the event, Akbar did penance and built a magnificent tomb for Adham Khan that still stands above the Qutb complex and the walls of Lal Kot in south Delhi. See Abu’l Fazl,
Ain i-Akbari
(Calcutta, 1873-94), Vol. 2, pp.269-71.

This name is corrupted in the source document which is almost illegible at this point.

Modern Indian doctors frown on the practice, which can lead to breast abscesses forming. Full-term babies, both male and female, have palpable mammary glands and breast engorgment can occur after three days, leading to the secretion of a milky substance called ‘witch’s milk’ by modern doctors. This is due to maternal hormone withdrawal. (I would like to thank Dr Prita Trehan for help on this matter.)

Sharaf un-Nissa refers to James as a practising Muslim in her evidence to Dr Kennedy published in the Clive Enquiry, where she mentions that ‘the Resident had for the Six months past become a real Mussulman’. This is corroborated by Munshi Aziz Ullah, who in a Persian letter to Sharaf un-Nissa after James’s death prays for his soul using a very specific construction that would only be used of a
pukka
Muslim, ‘may Allah illumine his dust and grant him abode in heaven’. Letter from Munshis Aziz Ullah and Aman Ullah to Sharaf un-Nissa, 25 August 1810. The letter is in a bound volume of Russell’s Persian correspondence in the Bodleian Library. These letters somehow became detached from Russell’s well-catalogued English correspondence and languished uncatalogued in a box in the library’s Persian Department. I am extremely grateful to Doris Nicholson for finally locating the vital folder of correspondence.

Whatever his own views, James was however quite clear—both in a letter to his father and in his will—that his children should be baptised ‘as soon as possible after their arrival in England’, just as General Palmer had had William baptised before his English schooling, and without which both fathers must have feared—probably correctly—that their children would never be accepted in Britain. See OIOC, F228/84, ‘The Last Will and Testament of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, and Kirkpatrick Papers. See also the fascinating letter (F228/59, p.27) of 24 October 1804, James to William Kirkpatrick, where James seems to imply that it would not be possible to baptise the children on a trip to Madras as Khair un-Nissa would be there (and, implicitly, either she would not allow it, or he did not want to offend her by performing the ceremony in her presence).

According to custom, it also marked the moment that the child could be placed in a
gahwarah
(swinging cradle).

Known as the
kanchhedan
ceremony. Sahib Begum’s ears were pierced by July 1805 when, at the age of three, she was painted by George Chinnery wearing a pair of large pearl earrings.
^‡
Known as the
bal gunthan.

In some families it was a tradition to celebrate the
bismillah
on the fourth day of the fourth month of the child’s fourth year.

One of the advantages for Khair in marrying James was that she would never have had to contend with the will of a mother-in-law, as would almost certainly have been the case had she married within Hyderabadi society. Instead, at the age of sixteen she found herself mistress of her own
zenana.
See p.140n.

That the model was once a dolls’ house was also the conclusion reached independently by preservationist Elbrun Kimmelman and her student team. In the summer of 2001 they began work restoring the model, and reached their conclusions partly by comparisons with other eighteenth-century dolls’ houses of similar dimensions. The fact that Kirkpatrick was ordering dolls from Europe at the same time as he was building the replica—a fact unknown to Kimmelman—can be taken as clinching evidence of their speculations. Intriguingly, in
Palaces of the Raj
, Mark Bence-Jones notes that ‘the miniature palace, complete with portico and balustrade, remained a feature of the Begum’s Garden, a delight to future generations of Residency children who were, however, discouraged from playing with it since it harboured snakes and insects’. That the model predates the completed building is clear from various differences between the two, and a number of small architectural features included on the model that were never actually constructed on the Residency proper. Work conducted by Kimmelman on the dolls’ house resulted in a successful application to the World Monuments Fund for the entire Residency complex to be selected for the Fund’s Hundred Most Endangered Sites list in 2001.

Perhaps £150,000 in today’s currency.

Perhaps £3.8 million today.

In 1761, for example, he led the army of Hyderabad into battle against a vastly superior Maratha army, telling his troops, ‘In this life, which is like a bubble of water and which vanishes like the scent of a flower, to leave behind a reputation for cowardice is against all honour. He who does not mind losing his life and wants to sacrifice himself, can come with me and meet the challenge of the swords. Otherwise everybody is permitted to go … ’The victory which followed was one of the greatest ever won by the Hyderabadis. See
Gulzar i-Asafiya
, pp.121-34.

i.e. Finishing him off.

‘
Maistry
’ (or the modern Hindi
mistri
) means a highly skilled foreman or ‘master’ craftsman. According to
Hobson-Jobson
the word, ‘a corruption of the Portuguese
mestre
has spread into the vernaculars all over India and is in constant Anglo-Indian use’.

William finally set off from Madras for England on 18 February 1802. He never saw James again.

The Nizam’s austere father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had chosen to be buried near his hero Aurangzeb at the Chisti Sufi shrine of Shaykh Burhan ud-Din Gharib at Khuldabad near Aurangabad, at the other end of the Deccan. All the subsequent Nizams, however, followed Nizam Ali Khan’s lead and were buried in Hyderabad under a succession of surprisingly modest and unostentatious cenotaphs in the forecourt of the Mecca Masjid, where they still lie.

Among Jaswant Rao’s commanders at this point was the freebooter William Linnaeus Gardner, the husband of Begum Mah-Manzel ul-Nissa of Cambay, and the former friend of both James and General Palmer. Gardner had left the Hyderabad Finglas Battalion and joined Jaswant Rao’s service in 1799, his place being taken by the newly arrived Captain William Palmer. Shortly after the capture of Pune, he was falsely accused by Jaswant Rao of collaboration with the British, and tied to a cannon to await execution. He managed to escape, however, and took his wife and family to Jaipur, where he briefly became commander of the Maharajah’s irregular cavalry, before resigning to found his own regiment in the Company’s forces, Gardner’s Horse.

Rajah Ragotim Rai appears frequently in James’s correspondence with William, usually under the pet name ‘Ragged Tim’.

Around £120 million a year in today’s currency.

Around £1.8 billion.

See pp.39-41.

In other words, in the basement of his Georgian mansion James built a Mughal-style
tykhana
, or cool house.

Presumably Samuel Russell—but it is important and significant that James says Russell only ‘assisted’ in the building, and was not the principal architect, as has been traditionally believed.

Unsuccessful members of the fishing fleet who failed to land their fish and had to return to England single were (rather cruelly) described as ‘returned empties’. This seems to have been the fate of many of the fleet at this period: ‘Hindoo Stuart’ in his extraordinary book
A Ladies Monitor
quotes a conversation he had at a Calcutta dinner party attended by a whole group of ‘returned empties’ who complained that Englishmen in India all preferred Indian women to Europeans, and that few were interested in marrying a white girl, everyone being more than happy with their
bibis
: ‘One of the ladies observed, that it were better they had staid at home; that marriages were little in fashion now-a-days; and that the bad taste of the men rendered unnecessary the introduction of any more foreign beauty; at least, until that desire for novelty, which scarcity ever produces, should induce gentlemen to incline to their own country-women, as an agreeable change, enhanced by the pleasure of variety.’ Stuart believed that half the problem was the unattractive busks and corsets worn by English women at the period, and suggested they might have more chance of competing with the
bibis
if they all adopted the sari, which he clearly regarded as the sexiest garb imaginable (and to promoting which he dedicates many thousands of words). The change in morality brought about by the rise of the Evangelicals in the 1830s and 1840s seems to have radically improved the fishing fleet’s chances of success, as it became increasingly unacceptable to take an Indian
bibi.
See Hindoo Stuart’s anonymously published
A LADIES’ MONITOR Being a series of letters first published in Bengal on the subject of FEMALE APPAREL Tending to favour a regulated adoption of Indian Costume; and a rejection of SUPERFLUOUS VESTURE By the ladies of this country: with Incidental remarks on Hindoo beauty; whale bone stays; iron busks; Indian corsets; man-milliners; idle bachelors, hair powder, side saddles, waiting-maids; and footmen. By the author of A VINDICATION OF THE HINDOOS
(Calcutta, 1809), pp.16, 21.

It was, thought James, ‘curious and amusing, but upon too small a scale, and extremely defective moreover from the awkward circumstances of the ingredients in the bottles’. The perils of mail order seem to have been at the root of the problem, and James struggled to reconcile the box in front of him with the instruction booklet: ‘No. 28 [does not correspond] to the printed list in the Book of Experiments that accompanied the box and thus rendering
all
the experiments that require ingredients
beyond
what are contained in the phials up to No.28 impracticable. I will thank you therefore to send me as soon as possible a similar chemical apparatus but upon a much larger scale; and above all, with a more faithful & correct correspondence between the articles in the respective phials, and what is laid down in the printed list in the accompanying Book of Experiments. Let the supply both of solid and liquid phosphorus in particular be as abundant as possible.’ This last, presumably, was to impress Hyderabadi
omrahs
with bright flashes of spectacular chemical fluorescence.