The Age of Kali (32 page)

Mir Moazam shook his head. ‘He was living in a make-believe world,’ he said. ‘I knew that, of course. But when the crunch came I realised that my loyalty had to be to the Nizam. After all, my ancestors had given everything for the throne for two hundred years. I couldn’t just abandon ship. I had to do my duty.’

So far I had avoided the subject of the Indian Army’s 1948 invasion of Hyderabad State, then known as ‘Operation Polo’, and referred to today in nationalist historiography as ‘the Police Action’, as if all that had been involved was a few parking tickets and the odd restraining order. I had steered clear of the topic because I had been warned by mutual friends that the invasion had been an extremely difficult and painful period for Mir Moazam, who in the aftermath had been unjustly arrested and had spent several years in prison before being acquitted. But it was Mir Moazam himself who brought the matter up.

‘After university I had joined the Hyderabad Civil Service, and as fate would have it, on 13 September 1948, when the Indian
Army finally crossed the frontier into Hyderabad, I was the Collector [the Chief District Officer] in charge of the area facing the main Indian attack from the south. We had no tanks, no planes and virtually no artillery. Nothing: just a pile of old .303 rifles. And with those we had been ordered to take on the might of the Indian Army.

‘The morning of the attack I was still shaving when I heard the first shells falling near my house. We had a few platoons of civil guards, so we lined them up along the banks of the River Musi. They were facing a fully mechanised Indian Army unit, with tanks, armoured cars and field guns, and before long the Indians began picking off our men like rabbits. Our first plan was to blow up the bridge, but it turned out the soldiers didn’t have the correct equipment. As head of the district, I was sitting with the Brigadier in the staff car, trying to decide what to do, when the Indian Air Force started strafing us from the air. Our car windows exploded. I lay flat on my belly with bullets shooting over my head. In the end the Brigadier and I took refuge under an arch of the bridge we had been supposed to blow up. The rest of our troops tried to find cover behind clumps of trees along the river.

‘The Brigadier and I managed to escape under intense firing and strafing, and after that we just retreated and retreated. The whole resistance was completely unrealistic. There was heavy aerial bombardment on all fronts: bombs falling everywhere. Yet in all Hyderabad there wasn’t a single anti-aircraft gun. The next day I was in a jeep retreating with the army towards Hyderabad when a bus we were overtaking was blown up by a plane. I had to hide in the paddy. We managed to delay them a little by opening the sluices and flooding the roads, but that was only for a few hours. When the Emperor Aurangzeb invaded Golconda [in 1687], the Hyderabad troops managed to keep the Moghuls at bay for seven or eight months. In our case we only held them up for four days. It was a total collapse.’

What Mir Moazam said was confirmed by the casualty figures: on the Indian side seven killed and nine wounded, of which one
died later; on the Hyderabadi side, an estimated 632 were killed.

‘How did the Indian Army behave when it got to Hyderabad?’ I asked.

‘When an army invades any country – whether it’s Alexander the Great, Timur, Hitler or Mussolini – when it gets into a town, you know what the soldiery does. It’s very difficult for the officers to control them. I can’t tell you how many were raped or killed, but I saw the bodies of many. Old scores were paid off across the state.’

I discovered later that it is in fact possible to make an informed estimate of the numbers killed in the aftermath of the ‘Police Action’. When reports of atrocities began to reach Delhi, Nehru, ‘in his private capacity’, commissioned an unofficial report from a group of veteran Congressmen made up of two Hyderabadi Muslims who had prominently opposed the Nizam’s rule and chaired by a Hindu, Pandit Sunderlal. The team made an extensive tour of the state and submitted their report to Nehru and Sardar Patel in January 1949. Its findings were never made public, presumably because of its damning criticism of the conduct of the Indian Army. It remained unpublished until recently, when a portion of it, smuggled out of India, appeared in America in an obscure volume of scholarly essays entitled
Hyderabad: After the Fall
.

The report, entitled ‘On the Post-Operation Polo Massacres, Rape and Destruction or Seizure of Property in Hyderabad State’, makes grim reading. In village after village across the state, it meticulously and unemotionally catalogues incidents of murder and mass rape, sometimes committed by troops, in other cases by local Hindu hooligans after the troops had disarmed the Muslim population. A short extract, chosen at random, gives the general flavour:

And so on, for page after page. In all, the report estimates that as many as two hundred thousand Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered, which, if true, would make the aftermath of the ‘Police Action’ a bloodbath comparable to parts of the Punjab during Partition.

Even if one chooses to regard the figure of two hundred thousand dead as an impossible exaggeration, it is still clear that the scale of the killing was horrific. Although publicly Nehru played down the disorder in Hyderabad, telling the Indian representative at the United Nations that following the Nizam’s officials deserting their posts there had been ‘some disorder in which Hindus had retaliated for their sufferings under the Razakar militia’, privately he was much more alarmed. This is indicated by a note he sent to Sardar Patel’s Ministry of States on 26 November 1948, in which he wrote that he had received reports of killings of Muslims so large in number ‘as to stagger the imagination’, and looting of Muslim property ‘on a tremendous scale’ – which would seem to confirm the general tone of Pandit Sunderlal’s report.

I asked Mir Moazam what happened to him while all this murderous anarchy was taking place around him.

‘Several of the officers who were under suspicion by the new regime went to Pakistan,’ he replied. ‘Arrangements were made for me, as it was clear I was going to be arrested. But my father said, “Face the firing squad. I will disinherit and disown you if you run away from your post.” So I stayed, and after a farcical trial full
of paid witnesses, I was sentenced to death. I could see the noose from my cell.’

Mir Moazam described his ordeal straightforwardly, with barely a flicker of emotion or bitterness: ‘Later that year the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment,’ he said quietly. ‘After three years in solitary cells, following an appeal in the High Court, I was honourably acquitted. Other officers were less lucky. Many were framed with trumped-up charges. Others were forced to flee to Pakistan, though they dearly wished to stay in Hyderabad. Very few retained jobs of any importance: they were weeded out. Some were removed, some were reduced in rank, others were put in jail. Seeing this, after I was released, I decided to go to London. There English friends of mine and old Civil Service colleagues eventually helped me get a job in UNESCO, and I spent much of the next thirty or forty years either in Paris or as Chief of Mission in Libya and Afghanistan.’

‘You must have seen quite a few changes on your return,’ I said.

‘I hardly recognised the place,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘I arrived back with a friend who was head of a French bank. All the way I had been telling him about the wonders of Hyderabad, and particularly about the City Palace complex. I told him about the Blue Palace, the Green Palace and, most lovely of all, the Pearl Palace. So as soon as we arrived we went over there. I found the
chowkidar
and got him to open the gates. Inside it was completely flat: they had totally levelled it. Nothing was there except a few goats. I’ll never forget the humiliation as I turned to my friend to try and explain what had happened.

‘But of course I soon discovered that it wasn’t just the City Palace: almost all the great houses had gone. Even King Kothi [the Nizam’s palace] had been bulldozed, or at least most of it. There was one wing left, converted into some sort of hospital.’

‘Were the palaces confiscated by the government?’ I asked.

‘No, not as such,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘But the aristocracy lost all their status and their income after the Police Action, so they just sold everything: land, houses, even the doors and windows. They
knew almost nothing about business. Selling their heritage was the only way they could make ends meet.’

The old man shook his head in disbelief. ‘No one thought to protect anything,’ he said. ‘They sold their history just to survive. Now there’s virtually nothing left: just dusty high-rise buildings everywhere. Outside Salar Jung’s palace, for instance, was a garden easily comparable to the Tuileries. I’ll never forget its shady walks and ancient trees, its soft green lawns and parterres bursting with flowers. There was an octagonal fountain so large you could row about it in a skiff. Now it’s a filthy lorry park. So much was lost, unnecessarily, through sheer ignorance.’

I asked Mir Moazam what had happened to his own family.

‘After the Police Action, the family simply disintegrated,’ he replied. ‘Some went to the Gulf, others to France, the UK and the USA. Now we are scattered to the winds, and Iram Manzil [Fakrool Mulk’s last palace] is a government office. It’s just around the corner from here, but it’s almost unrecognisable. For me it stands as a symbol of all that has happened to this town.’

‘Could you show me?’ I ventured.

‘Why not?’ said Mir Moazam.

The old man got to his feet, and collected his stick. Two minutes later we were heading through the new housing estates that seemed to be springing up everywhere in Hyderabad.

‘When I was a boy all this was part of my grandfather’s estate,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘In those days Iram Manzil lay miles outside the town, five hundred acres of land, all beautifully maintained. Where those houses are, that was my grandfather’s nine-hole golf course. See those shacks? That was a polo field. And that mess over there? That was the palace orange groves. It’s impossible to visualise now.’

We turned down a gradient, and drew up outside a large office complex. On the gate was posted the stencilled notice:

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
OFFICE OF THE ENGINEER-IN-CHIEF

‘This was it,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘Unrecognisable.’

I looked where he was pointing. From among a cluster of shacks and lean-tos and concrete outhouses, clinging to the central building like barnacles on an oyster, I could see the outlines of what had once been a magnificent palace. But garages had been built in front of the central portico, obscuring the symmetry of the façade. The paint was peeling, and air-conditioning units hung out of every arched window. A feeling of neglect hung over the whole complex, almost completely masking the grandeur of the original plan.

‘You used to arrive through a gatehouse with two double-storeyed towers,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘A bugler would blow as you passed. The bugler’s name was Joseph, and he used to play the reveille first thing in the morning and sound the retreat each night at sunset. But they bulldozed the tower long ago. Over there, where that ugly garage is now, used to be the tennis courts, and beyond were the French Gardens, with their fountains playing. On the other side, at the bottom, there was a big lake. As you drew up in front of the palace, at a sign from the major domo our band would play ‘God Save the Nizam’ and ‘God Save the King Emperor’. Later, after a game of tennis, you used to have tea on that terrace, over where that temple is now.’

We walked together around the complex, Mir Moazam pointing out where the
zenana
gate stood, before it was bulldozed, and where the African guards used to drill. Here was the pool they used to fill with coloured liquid to play
holi
, there the hall where Mohurram was celebrated and where the Christmas tree stood. Over there, where the arches were now blocked up, used to be the
baradari
hall. At the end of Ramadan, on the night of Eid, the room would be full to bursting, with everyone sitting on the floor, eating a great Mughlai dinner.

‘I remember the Nizam coming here, and the Viceroy, and a whole succession of British Residents. Outside there would be gorgeously caparisoned elephants and over a hundred polo ponies. There were palanquins and teams of palanquin bearers, four-in-hand coaches, and by 1934 nearly fifty cars, mainly Rolls-Royces and Daimlers. I remember the polo matches and the times we used
to stand over there and try to shoot coins thrown in the air, or to pepper that old stuffed tiger on wheels. Then there were the tennis matches and the trips to the Malakpet races and the
shikar
trips into the jungle. It all seems very long ago now.’

‘So what of the future?’ I asked. ‘What do you think will survive of the old culture of Hyderabad?’

Mir Moazam shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very little,’ he said. ‘You can’t keep out change. In fifty years an entire world has been levelled. Much has been utterly destroyed. The process is nearly finished now. I think that everything that is special about Hyderabad is going. Day by day the old ways are disappearing and being replaced by a monotonous standardisation.

‘What we had in Hyderabad was a distinct Deccani culture, the product of a very particular mixture of peoples and influences. It was based on religious tolerance, courtesy, hospitality, love of the arts and a first-rate civil service which made no distinction between creeds or caste or class. But much of the old élite went to Pakistan, and a flood of new people have come, bringing their own ways with them. What is left – the vestiges and fragments – is still vital and has a life and an extraordinary stamina. But who knows how long it can last?’