The Age of Kali (31 page)

That this fairy-tale extravagance has always been part of the culture of Hyderabad is demonstrated by the mediaeval Qu’tb Shahi
tombs, a short distance to the east of the Falaknuma. They are wonderfully ebullient and foppish monuments dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with domes swelling out of all proportion to the bases, like a watermelon attempting to balance on a fig. Above the domes rises the craggy citadel of Golconda, source of the ceaseless stream of diamonds which ensured that Hyderabad’s rulers would never be poor. Inside the walls you pass a succession of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens – a world that seems to have jumped straight out of the pages of
The Arabian Nights
. When the French jeweller Jean Baptiste Tavernier visited Golconda in 1642 he found a society every bit as decadent as this architecture might suggest. He wrote that the town possessed more than twenty thousand registered courtesans, who took it in turns to dance for the King every Friday.

The romantic and courtly atmosphere infected even the sober British when they arrived in Hyderabad at the end of the eighteenth century, and the city is the location of one of the most affecting Anglo-Indian love stories to emerge from the three-hundred-year interaction of the two peoples. The old British Residency, now the University College for Women, is an imposing Palladian villa which shelters in a massive fortified garden in the south of the town. A pair of stone lions lie, paws extended, below a huge pedimented and colonnaded front, looking out over a wide expanse of eucalyptus, breadfruit and casuarina trees, every inch the East India Company at its grandest and most formal. Yet surprises lurk in the undergrowth at the rear of the compound.

The complex was built by Lieutenant-Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Resident between 1797 and 1805. He was an unusually imaginative and sympathetic figure, whose love and respect for the people of Hyderabad was symbolised by his adoption of Hyderabadi clothes and ways of living. Shortly after his arrival he fell in love with Khair-un-Nissa (‘Excellent among Women’), a great-niece of the
diwan
of Hyderabad, whom he married in 1800 according to Muslim law. This caused great alarm in London, as it was thought – probably correctly – that Kirkpatrick had become a Muslim, an
impression that was reinforced by the report of Mountstuart Elphinstone, who wrote that Kirkpatrick had become perhaps dangerously assimilated with his surroundings:

I found a battered token of Kirkpatrick’s love for his wife in the garden at the back of the Residency. As Khair-un-Nissa remained all her life in strict purdah, living in a separate
bibi ghar
at the end of Kirkpatrick’s garden, she was unable to walk around her husband’s great creation to admire its wonderful portico. The Resident hit upon the solution of building her a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace, so that she could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with her own eyes. The model survived intact until the 1980s, when a tree fell on it, smashing its right wing. The remains of the left wing and central block now lie under a piece of corrugated iron, near the ruins of the Moghul
bibi ghar
, buried deep beneath a jungle of vines and creepers, in an area still known as the Begum’s Garden.

As in Delhi and Lucknow, the extravagantly aristocratic culture of Hyderabad filtered down to the streets. The people of other cities say we are a little lazy,’ said a shopkeeper in the bazaar, ‘that we all behave as if we are little Nizams. That we work slowly, eat slowly, wake up slowly, do everything slowly. Many shopkeepers in Hyderabad don’t open their shutters until 11 a.m. We like to take life gently, to take lots of holidays and only to work when we have no money in our pockets.’

Another legacy of the nobility to filter down to the streets is a
fondness for witchcraft and sorcery. In the Lad Bazaar, a short distance from the Char Minar, the ceremonial centrepiece of the city, I found a shop which sold nothing but charms and talismans.

‘In the Nizam’s time the Hyderabad princes were always hiring a
murshad
[sorcerer or holy man] to make spells on their enemies,’ said Ali Mohammed, who ran the shop. ‘Now Hyderabad is famous for its magic. Everyone is making too many spells. So they must come here to get protection.’

Ali showed me his stock: silver
ta’wiz
blessed by famous Sufis, special kinds of attar that deflected the Evil Eye, nails worried into the shape of a cobra to protect from snake bites. On one side of the shop were piled huge bundles of thorns: ‘Its name is
babul
. Put it at your gate along with a lime and a green chilli and it will take on any bad magic that someone may cast on you.’

‘Do you really believe such curses work?’ I asked.

‘Definitely,’ said Ali. ‘I have seen it for myself. The
murshad
of Hyderabad are very powerful. They can kill a man with just a look, if they want to.’

‘Magic? Oh yes, there was no shortage of magic,’ said Mir Moazam’s wife, the Begum Meherunissa, when I told her about my conversation in the bazaar later that afternoon. ‘What that shopkeeper said is quite true. In the time of the Nizam the Irish head of police kept an entire department to deal with
bhaha mati
[black magic] and exorcism. Oh yes: there were many such stories.’

‘Can you remember any of them?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember very well the most powerful
murshad
in Hyderabad. I came to know him quite well. But of course he had a very tragic end.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘On summer evenings the womenfolk of my family would go out for a stroll in one of the Moghul gardens. One day after they had returned from a walk my aunt began to shiver and to behave very oddly. Moreover, there was this strange smell of roses wherever she went. Luckily my grandfather realised what had happened, and knew exactly what to do. He called a
murshad
who questioned my aunt closely. Quite suddenly she started speaking with a man’s voice, saying, “I am the
djinn
of the rose garden and I am in love with this woman.” The
murshad
performed an exorcism, and the
djinn
was sent off. After that the
murshad
became a regular visitor at the house.’

‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he was a strange, dark-complexioned man, with a black waistcoat and white
kurta
-pyjamas. He never walked straight, but rocked from side to side. People said he was a
qalander
, a holy fool, and very close to God. Certainly he could work small miracles, some of which I saw myself.’

‘You saw him work miracles?’

‘Many times. Or rather, not him, so much as his
djinn
.’

‘He had his own
djinn
?’

‘That’s right. To master a
djinn
and make him your servant, you must first fast for forty days. Very few succeed. But this man succeeded, and the
djinn
gave him the strong powers. The children all knew him as
Misri Wallah Pir
[the holy man who gives sweets], and they would run after him and shout, “Pir Sahib, give us sugar.” So he would bend down and pick up a handful of mud and throw it, and before it reached us, midway in the air it would turn to sugar! It did; I tasted it myself. It was delicious – clean and white, with no sand or impurity or anything. My mother was very angry when I told her I had eaten some of Misri Wallah Pir’s sugar, and said that it would become mud or a stone again in my stomach. But as far as I was aware it never did, or if it did it never did me any harm.’

‘So you saw him turn mud into sugar more than once?’

‘It was his favourite spell. We children would follow him around
and spy on him. He was like a child, talking and laughing to himself. Sometimes he would appear to be talking directly to a wall, but if you got close enough you could hear what sounded like the wall talking to him. I would sit beside him to see if the
pir
was making the noise himself, but it wasn’t him. It was his
djinn
, Mowakhal, replying to him. Sometimes he would read the Koran, and the
djinn
would correct him when he made a mistake. At other times the
pir
would reach out his hand and from nowhere sweetmeats would come, which he would feed to cows.

‘Once we were on the verandah watching a lady in the street walking past with a great basket of fruit on her head. Pir Sahib was walking down the road in the opposite direction, so I shouted to him, as a joke, “Pir Sahib, get me some of that fruit.” And there and then that huge basket of fruit flew from the woman’s head and came to rest at my feet! The fruit carrier was used to Pir Sahib’s tricks, and smiled and said, “Pir Sahib, give it back,” so after I had taken a banana, Pir Sahib did send the basket back to her. The banana tasted sweeter than any other I have ever tasted.

‘Once my friend asked Misri Wallah Pir for some
biryani
. Pir Sahib said, “I am a poor man. How can I afford
biryani
?” But she pleaded with him, and eventually he called his
djinn
: “
Idder ao Mowakhal
!” [Come here Mowakhal!] And within seconds a delicious
biryani
appeared before her out of the thin air. Another time a sick man begged him for grapes. It was not the season, and there were no grapes in Hyderabad, but the
djinn
brought them all the same.’

There was a pause, and the Begum looked up, I think to see if I was secretly laughing at her memories. ‘It’s up to you whether you want to believe all this,’ she said simply. ‘But I witnessed it.’

‘You mentioned that the
pir
had a very tragic end,’ I said.

‘His
djinn
left him and he lost all his powers,’ she replied. ‘He died in great poverty.’

‘What happened?’

‘After Mowakhal left him I never saw the
pir
again. But the story I heard – much later, in about 1979 – was that one day a poor man
had come to him and said that he had never seen a diamond. So Misri Wallah Pir called Mowakhal and sent him off to fetch the diamond necklace of the Queen of Mysore. The necklace arrived, and the
pir
gave it to the beggar to examine. But the man had blood on his hands, and it got on the necklace, so Mowakhal refused to take it back again. No
djinn
will carry anything that has been touched by blood. The
pir
was furious, because he didn’t want to be accused of stealing the necklace, so he began to curse the
djinn
, who simply disappeared, and never came back.

‘After that the
pir
took the necklace to a police station and told the constable what had happened. But of course he didn’t believe a word the
pir
said, and when he asked the
pir
to prove that he had a
djinn
, he couldn’t, because Mowakhal had gone. So the police beat him up and asked him how he had stolen the necklace, and what else he had taken. After he was released the
pir
became very sick, and his condition just got worse and worse. Eventually he died alone and penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave.’

As we were talking, Mir Moazam had appeared from his study where he had been busily writing a lecture to deliver the following day.

‘You see what I mean?’ he said to me when his wife had finished her story. ‘The world we grew up in was a different age.’

‘Were you aware at the time that it was all about to be swept away?’ I asked.

‘Up to a point,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘Looking back now, Hyderabad during my childhood seems like it was going through a period of glorious sunset. But at the time, of course, I thought it would all go on for ever. It was only as I grew older that I realised that it couldn’t last, that the sunset must be pretty close. You could feel it coming.’

Mir Moazam sat down in the rocking chair beside his wife and rested his chin on his palm before continuing: ‘You see, I was from the Moghul nobility. And so of course I felt a certain loyalty to that world. But I was not blind to the defects of the Nizam. As a graduate of Madras University I had been exposed to fiery speeches by
Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress leaders, and I realised then that the old order could not last. What had been possible in the Nizam’s father’s time was no longer feasible. After that I was in a real dilemma: I could see both sides of the picture.

‘As the British prepared to leave, I think the Nizam should have negotiated realistically with Nehru. He might have got a viable deal, a treaty that would have allowed him to keep some form of real autonomy. That way a lot of bloodshed might have been avoided. In 1947 the place was already in chaos, with the [overwhelmingly Muslim] Razakar movement attacking Congress supporters, and
agents provocateurs
burning down the railway station and looting the district treasuries. But despite all this, the Nizam still couldn’t see that he had been sustained in power by the British, and that now they were going he had reached the end of the line. Half-hearted negotiations dragged on, until eventually the Nizam decided to declare outright independence from India. It was utter madness. Legally and constitutionally he may have had the right to do so, but it was still quite unrealistic.’