White Mughals (29 page)

When in 1787 Aristu Jah sent his Secretary on an important embassy to Calcutta, Bâqar Ali accompanied Mir Alam to the Company’s Bengal headquarters along with a large escort of cavalry, seven caparisoned war elephants and seventy camels laden with gifts and supplies. In Calcutta, the embassy was received by Lord Cornwallis, and Mir Alam struck up an enduring friendship with the Governor General, who was impressed by his ‘straightforward good sense and intuitive understanding, as well as by his easy eloquence’. At their parting, Cornwallis presented the Mir with a diamond-encrusted walking stick.
⁸

Mir Alam and his cousin stayed three years in Calcutta, learning about the English and making a wide variety of contacts among the officials and Orientalists of the city. They became especially friendly with Neil Edmonstone, later to become Wellesley’s Private Secretary and the head of the Company’s Intelligence Service, whom they regarded, somewhat unexpectedly, as ‘a good musician and mathematician’.
⁹
They were particularly impressed by the military arsenals they saw in Fort William: ‘Three hundred thousand rifles hung up in good order and easy to collect, ammunitions factories hard at work, and two to three thousand cannons in place with five to six thousand more in reserve and ready for use.’
¹⁰
It was a visit that made a profound impression on Mir Alam. After what he had seen, he remained convinced throughout his career that the British were effectively invincible in India, and that the best interests of the Hyderabad state—and of Mir Alam—lay in allying with them as strongly and as closely as possible.

While Mir Alam and Bâqar Ali were in Calcutta, they heard a rumour that another member of their clan had just arrived from Persia, aboard an English vessel. Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari, another first cousin of Mir Alam, and the son of one of Sayyid Reza’s brothers, had like Bâqar Ali Khan made the journey from Persia with a view to hitching his career to that of Mir Alam; unlike his cousin Bâqar Ali, however, he left a detailed and entertaining account of his Indian travels and impressions, the
Tuhfat al-’Alam,
or ‘Gift to the World’:

Shushtari’s
Tuhfat al-’Alam
is one of the most fascinating texts to survive from the period: a strikingly immediate and graphic account of late-eighteenth-century India as perceived by a disdainful, fastidious and refined émigré intellectual—a sort of eighteenth-century Persian version of V.S. Naipaul. Written in 1802, when Shushtari was under house arrest in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of James Kirkpatrick’s liaison with Khair un-Nissa, and the entire Shushtari clan was in deep disgrace, it gives a highly jaundiced account of India, which Abdul Lateef regards with all the
hauteur
that high Persian culture was capable of: ‘Since I came to this country, I cannot begin to recount all that has happened to me by way of suffering, deception and diseases, with no one intelligent to talk to … Alas, alas, how could I know that matters would come to this present sorry state—broken and stuck in the hellish climate of Hyderabad!’

In this spirit he compares his book to ‘the flutterings of a uselessly crying bird in the dark cage of India’, remarking that ‘to survive in Hyderabad you need four things: plenty of gold, endless hypocrisy, boundless envy, and the ability to put up with parvenu idol-worshippers who undermine governments and overthrow old families’. Yet for all its sectarian animosity and intellectual arrogance, the
Tuhfat
is a perceptive and observant account, which brings the intrigue and faction-ridden world of courtly Hyderabad into sharper focus than any other surviving text.

It also, more pointedly, provides the best source for how Khair un-Nissa’s wider family felt about her affair with James Kirkpatrick.

Abdul Lateef’s visit to the subcontinent started badly. On arrival in India, the easily-disgusted Persian recorded his horror at the sights that greeted him at Masulipatam, his first port of call. Welcomed by a group of Iranian Qizilbash
^cc
traders who lived there, he remarks that he was ‘shocked to see men and women naked apart from an exiguous cache-sex mixing in the streets and markets, as well as out in the country, like beasts or insects. I asked my host “What on earth is this?” “Just the locals,” he replied, “They’re all like that!” It was my first step in India, but already I regretted coming and reproached myself.’
¹²

Calcutta Shushtari liked better. He admired the Company merchants’ beautifully whitewashed villas, some of them ‘painted and coloured like marble’. Appalled by the dirt of Masulipatam, he was especially appreciative of Calcutta’s exceptional cleanliness: ‘Seven hundred pairs of oxen and carts are appointed by the Company to take rubbish daily from streets and markets out of the city and tip it into the river,’ he noted appreciatively.

Shushtari’s account is throughout surprisingly Anglophile, as he takes an interest in European science and admires the technological achievements of the British: the
Tuhfat
discusses such diverse subjects as polar exploration, gravity, magnetism, the scientific comparisons then being made between men and monkeys, and even sceptical atheism, which he touches on but prefers not to discuss in detail, regarding it as ‘inappropriate for this book’.
¹³
He is also impressed by the fact that the British at this period were still profoundly respectful to Indian men of learning:

Deferential and enquiring the British might have been, but according to Abdul Lateef they had a lot to learn from the Persians in terms of personal hygiene, as well as in matters of high culture. Shushtari was particularlyhorrified by what the British did to their hair, ‘shaving their beards, twisting their hair into pony-tails, and worst of all, using a white powder to make their hair look white.’ Not content with these enormities, ‘neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state’.
^15
cd

Shushtari was of the opinion that European women were particularly bizarre, immoral and headstrong creatures: ‘most European women have no body-hair,’ he notes,

This, believes Shushtari, is largely the fault of the Americans; indeed Abdul Lateef must go down in history as the first Muslim writer to take up cudgels against the United States, which, 180 years ahead of his time, he already regards as the Great Satan:

India is, however, fully a match even for the horrors of America. There are many things that disgust Shushtari about the subcontinent, but his real venom is reserved for the Muslims of India who have, as he sees it ‘gone native’, and by intermarrying with Hindus—or Muslim converts from Hinduism—assimilated not just their customs but their very un-Islamic morality: ‘They accept water from the hands of Hindus, use the oil they buy from them, eat their cooked foods—whereas they flee from all contact with the English, who at least in appearance are People of the Book and who respect religion and the law.’
¹⁷

The only thing that appalls Abdul Lateef Shushtari more than the men in India is the behaviour of the women, Hindu and Muslim alike, who in his eyes have no idea about proper modesty, and take every imaginable liberty. He discusses at some length the case of Muni Begum, who was the effective ruler of the state of Murshidabad in Bengal: ‘she is neither the mother of the present ruler, nor even from a good family, but was a singer kept by Ja’far [Ali Khan, the ruler of Bengal] who became completely infatuated with her and the Supreme Giver opened the doors of good fortune for her’.

Shushtari’s surprise at the power of women in late Mughal India is very significant. Islam has never been monolithic and has always adapted itself to its social and geographical circumstances. The Hindu attitude to women, to their place in society, to their clothing and to their sexuality has always been radically different from that of Middle Eastern Islam. But over centuries of Hindu—Muslim co-existence in India, much mutual exchange of ideas and customs took place between the two cohabiting cultures, so that while Hinduism took on some Islamic social features—such as the veil worn by upper-caste Rajput women in public—Indian Islam also adapted itself to its Hindu environment, a process accelerated by the frequency with which Indian Muslim rulers tended to marry Hindu brides.

As this happened the cultural gap between the court culture of Mughal India and Safavid Iran widened ever larger. Women in Iran were more confined and less able to act in the public sphere than in India where, thanks to the influence of Hinduism, notions of purdah, and ideas about the seclusion and protection of women, were always less deeply entrenched and less central to notions of male honour.
¹⁸
As a result, Muslim women in India have always played a more prominent role in politics than their sisters in the Middle East. Indian society, both Hindu and Muslim, was certainly very patriarchal and hierarchical; yet there are nevertheless several cases of very powerful Indian Muslim queens: Razia Sultana in thirteenth-century Delhi; or Chand Bibi and Dilshad Agha, the two warrior queens of sixteenth-century Bijapur, the first of whom was famous for her horsewomanship, while the latter was renowned for her prowess as an artillerywoman and an archer, personally shooting in the eye from atop her citadel Safdar Khan who had the temerity to attack her kingdom.
^19
ce

Moreover Mughal princesses tended to be richer, and to possess far greater powers of patronage, than the secluded Iranian noblewomen Shushtari would have been familiar with in Iran: half the most important monuments in Shah Jehan’s Mughal Delhi were built by women, especially Shah Jehan’s favourite daughter Jahanara, who independently constructed several mansions (including one in the Red Fort which alone cost 700,000 rupees,
^cf
a garden, a bath-house and a palatial caravanserai; she also laid out the whole of the principal avenue of the city, Chandni Chowk.
²⁰