White Mughals (20 page)

For the Nizam, the end came on 17 April. A treaty was signed, giving the Marathas the crucial fortresses of Daulatabad,
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Ahmednagar and Sholapur as well as great swathes of Hyderabadi territory worth an annual thirty-five lakh rupees of revenue. The Nizam was left with a fragment of his old territories and an indefensible frontier, as well as a bill of two crore rupees
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in war reparations. The amount of territory to be ceded was reduced by nearly half at the last minute, but the price was the surrender of Aristu Jah, who was handed over as a hostage into the hands of his old enemy, the Maratha Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis. The contemporary Hyderabad historian Ghulam Husain Khan has left an account of the meeting of the two old rivals:

On 24 April 1795, William Kirkpatrick and his escort limped back into Hyderabad, a few days ahead of the Nizam’s defeated army. He found his brother James waiting for him at the Residency.

The two brothers had last seen each other sixteen months earlier, at Christmas in Vizianagram on the east coast, in the most optimistic circumstances. William’s career had suddenly revived and he had been able to use his influence and new powers of patronage to help his younger half-brother. Hyderabad was a major posting, and there was every reason to think that the brothers would have good opportunities for advancing their careers by increasing British influence there.

Now things were very different. The scale of the defeat suffered by the Hyderabadis raised a serious question mark about the long-term viability of the Nizam’s dominions, while the failure of the British to help their allies in any way had destroyed the Nizam’s confidence in the reliability of the Company; instead he now looked upon Raymond and the French as his real protectors, thus entirely changing the balance of power in the eighteenth-century precursor to the later Great Game. This was a disastrous development for the Company at a time when Britain and France were at war and victorious French armies were occupying Belgium and Holland, and were now menacing north Italy. Moreover, with the exile and imprisonment of Aristu Jah, the British had lost their main advocate at the Hyderabad court, and the durbar was now dominated by nobles deeply antagonistic to the Company. William was severely ill, and needed to leave Hyderabad to convalesce and recover his health in peace. Worse still, his Assistant, Steuart, was clearly beyond recovery. In such circumstances it was not a happy reunion.

Within a month of the Nizam’s return, it began to be apparent that the French were successfully filling the place once occupied by the English. The Nizam said he was seriously considering disbanding the two English battalions which were stationed at Hyderabad, pointing out to William, with some justification, that there was no point in maintaining them at such a heavy cost when they could not be used to defend him from his prime enemy, the Marathas. On 13 May, William and James went together to see the Nizam, and reported that ‘his discourse chiefly consisted of enquiries and observations relative to the posture of affairs in Europe … From the whole tenor it was easy to perceive that some Frenchman had been taking considerable pains by utterly false or highly exaggerated accounts, to impress him with a firm belief that nothing could any longer resist his nation … ’
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Subsequent despatches were filled with details of the growing French power at court and the serious threat to British interests posed by Raymond’s French brigades, which the Nizam had now authorised him to increase in size to ten thousand men.

In November, after Raymond swiftly and efficiently put down a revolt by the Nizam’s younger son, Ali Jah, his rise became even more irresistible. William wrote to his friend Jonathan Duncan in Bombay that only

The Nizam rewarded Raymond for his suppression of Ali Jah’s revolt by raising him to a position of new eminence within the durbar and giving him two Persian titles—Azdhar e-Jang, the Dragon of War, and Mutahwar ul-Mulk, the Bravest in the State.
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He was also awarded a huge estate, located in the strategically vital region immediately next to the Hyderabadi citadel Golconda.
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Over the following year, things went from bad to worse. Already the British were alarmed by reports that the French Republican officers in Tipu Sultan’s island fortress of Seringapatam had founded a Mysore Jacobin Club ‘for framing laws conformable with the laws of the Republic’, which had planted a ‘Liberty Tree’ in the Sultan’s capital.
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Now ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was discovered by British interceptions to be in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to liberate the country and expel the British. He had even sent ambassadors to Paris along with a draft treaty in which he proposed an alliance to drive the British out of India.
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It also became clear that Raymond was in regular touch not only with the French officers who drilled Tipu’s infantry, but also with the French Revolutionary command in Pondicherry and Mauritius. On 16 December 1796, William wrote in cipher to Shore, the Governor General, that his spies in the French camp had discovered that ‘Raymond has very lately received a commission from the French Directory; and also that it has been given out in his camp that Tippoo has despatched a large quantity of provisions to Mangalore for the use of the French armament daily expected to arrive at that Port. The accounts may be false, but they are at least an indication of the wishes and disposition of the French party here.’
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Shore replied, also in cipher, by asking if it was possible to use subterfuge somehow to ‘frame’ or discredit Raymond so as to make him appear suspect in the Nizam’s eyes—a proposal which might imply that the Kirkpatrick brothers already had experience in such covert intelligence operations. But William replied that he thought the plan too risky, and ‘attended with much more hazard of discredit to myself, than danger to him’.
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There was, he advised, only one way of overturning Raymond’s influence: to negotiate a treaty with the Nizam unambiguously promising British support in the event of a Maratha attack. Only then might the Nizam possibly consider himself safe enough to dispense with the support of his French regiments. As before, Shore dithered, and eventually refused permission for William to explore the possibility of such a treaty.
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This was the position when William’s health forced him to resign his post as Resident. By early summer 1797 he knew that, despite the precariousness of the British position in Hyderabad, he was simply too ill to continue in the job. For several months he had been telling Shore of his extreme ‘sufferings from rheumatism and a disordered stomach … I might perhaps be able to go on for a year at H[yderabad], yet so much and so often do I suffer from the pains that have so long afflicted me; and so firmly fixed does the constant coldness of my extremities and especially my hands appear to be that I think I should be little better than a dead weight in a situation requiring not only much mental exertion but also a good deal of bodily fatigue.’
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By the end of 1796 Shore had given him permission to retire to the coast whenever he felt the need. Writing to the Handsome Colonel in November, William stated that ‘I wait for nothing but the return of Peace in Europe (on which all our politics in this part of the world continually hinge) in order to see what a change of air will do for my shattered frame … The Cape would afford me the best chance.’
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But it was not just peace William was waiting for. There was one thing more to be resolved with Shore before he could leave: his brother’s succession to his job. Since the death of Steuart in October 1795, James had been William’s deputy at the Residency—a huge jump in rank for a humble lieutenant who prior to his arrival in Hyderabad had been commanding an obscure garrison in the tribal belt on the modern Andhra—Orissa border. But James had flourished in Hyderabad, where his unusual linguistic skills combined with his instinctive sympathy and liking for Mughal culture had proved a major asset to William.

James had immediately struck up an excellent relationship with the Nizam, and by simple courtesy gained first his ear, and then, later, his trust. Several years later he explained what he believed to be the secret of his success in Hyderabad: ‘The people at Madras I am told are at a loss to conceive by what magic I always continue to work my ends out of the durbar, and if you wish to know what the magic consists in, I will inform you in a few words, that it consists in treating old Nizzy with a great deal of respect and deference, humouring him in all his innocent whims and wishes.’
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Typical was James’s idea of ordering a special quilt for the old man as the Hyderabadi winter set in: ‘I am glad to hear the pelisse for old Nizzy is on its way hither,’ he wrote to Calcutta. ‘It will arrive in very good season as the cold weather is just setting in, when the old gentleman requires warm clothing. You have no idea how kindly these marks of attention are taken by him; I may truly say that by such attentions I have gained his warm heart.’
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James had also proved himself adept at the kind of intelligence work essential in so faction-ridden and strategically sensitive a posting, where the spies of each rival grouping eavesdropped on each other in a rapid merry-go-round of espionage. As events subsequently showed, in his first two years at Hyderabad James had succeeded in setting up an extensive network of spies and contacts in the court and the French camp, ranging from sweepers and harem guards to various senior Begums in the Nizam’s
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some of Raymond’s officers and the Nizam’s official court historian and artist, Tajalli Ali Shah.

William was impressed—and a little surprised—by the performance of his younger brother: ‘I will honestly own,’ he wrote to Shore, ‘that I was a stranger, as I believe he himself also was, to the fullest extents of his talents and capacity for this business, till by being left a few months to himself they had the opportunity of developing themselves.’
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He and James had become very close in the time they spent living together in the Hyderabad Residency. William confided to Shore that if his brother got the job of Resident he felt quite sure that he would support him financially if the change of air at the Cape failed to mend his wretched health and he was forced to retire altogether from the Company: ‘Such is my reliance on his fraternal affection, and on his attachment to my children, and so infinitely better a life is his than mine, that I should consider myself as much more securely provided for by his obtaining [the job of Resident], than I would be by my aiming to retain this situation for another year or two.’
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In the event, James was made Acting Resident—effectively put on probation and given a chance to prove himself—while William was despatched to the Cape to recover his health sometime in the middle of the hot summer of 1797. William was still far from recovered the following January when he was introduced to the incoming Governor General, Lord Wellesley, at Anne Barnard’s house. The two immediately hit it off, sharing a common Francophobia and a similarly bullish attitude to the future of British rule in India.

Writing to his friend Colonel John Collins in Calcutta shortly after he had been offered the job of Wellesley’s Military Secretary, William confided: ‘I have had many conversations with his Ldship since his arrival here [the Cape], in the course of which I have satisfied all his enquiries relative to the politics at the court of Hyderabad … he appears to be extremely well informed for a stranger to Indian affairs [and] to be of pleasing easy manners.’
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More importantly, William wrote that he had persuaded Wellesley of the necessity of signing an unambiguous treaty of friendship and support with the Nizam, something Shore had always refused to do. In due course William wrote a long letter to James explaining how to open negotiations with the Nizam; and a few days after this Wellesley wrote himself. James was thrilled at the chance to take on the French, and wrote back flattered and elated by the new Governor General’s ‘wise and liberal propositions’ and ‘masterly’ instructions.