White Mughals (43 page)

Palmer’s replacement, it was announced, was to be William Kirkpatrick, whom Wellesley knew would bring a much tougher and more inflexible approach to British relations with Pune. Nana Phadnavis, the great Maratha Minister and Aristu Jah’s former rival, had died just three months earlier, and without him to hold it together, the Maratha Confederacy began to unravel at speed, as rival chieftains and warlords jockeyed for power. Wellesley knew that unlike Palmer, William Kirkpatrick would be quite prepared to take full advantage of what the Governor General described as ‘the critical state of affairs in the Mahratta Empire [which] becomes hourly more interesting’, adding, ominously for the Marathas: ‘opportunities [for British intervention] appear likely to open up … ’
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The idea that William Kirkpatrick’s health was in any way better than Palmer’s was laughable: while Palmer was a fit, active man of sixty, Kirkpatrick, fourteen years his junior, was almost an invalid: his ‘cure’ at the Cape had been of short duration, and he spent much of his time in Calcutta prostrate with both severe rheumatism and a serious bladder complaint, the pain from which he attempted to alleviate with larger and larger doses of opium. Nevertheless, publicly at least, Palmer accepted his enforced ‘retirement’ with good grace, replying to Wellesley: ‘I am perfectly sensible, My Lord, that the cares and fatigues of an arduous public station may require powers of mind and strength of constitution that it cannot be expected I still possess.’
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Privately, however, Palmer was outraged at his ‘removal from office without the slightest public pretext’ after a lifetime of highly distinguished service to the Company.
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He would not normally be expected to retire from the Residency for many years, unless he actually wished to do so: twenty years later, for example, the Delhi Resident, Sir David Ochterlony, was still busily at work at the time of his death aged sixty-seven. Writing to his old friend and patron Warren Hastings, now retired into the depths of the Gloucestershire countryside, Palmer maintained that he had ‘preserved the best understanding with the [Maratha] durbar during my Residency, and have experienced more attention & cordiality from the Peishwa & his principal servants than any of my predecessors … Perhaps my disposition is not thought suitable to the management of our concerns, and if alliances are [now] to be obtained by menace & intimidation instead of argument & persuasion & conciliation, then it is certain that a fitter person than I may easily be found.’
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Palmer was one of the last survivors of an earlier generation of East India Company scholar-officials. His career had flourished under Hastings, who had shared his love of, and interest in, all things Indian. For four years between 1776 and 1785 Palmer had been Hastings’ Military Secretary in Calcutta, before being sent up-country as his personal agent (or representative) at the sybaritic court of Lucknow.

While performing his diplomatic duties, Palmer had spent his leisure hours busily searching around for interesting Sanskrit and Mughal manuscripts, often for Hastings, to whom he wrote a long series of enthusiastic, scholarly letters about his quest.
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Palmer also formed his own extensive collection of ancient Indian coins, and took a scholarly interest in the traditions of the eighteenth-century military adventurers.
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With these interests and enthusiasms, the General soon grew to love the highly cultured city of Lucknow. In the late eighteenth century, with Mughal Delhi sinking into headlong decline, Lucknow was at the height of its golden age and had usurped the great Mughal capital to become indisputably the largest, most prosperous and most civilised pre-colonial city in northern India. The city’s courtly Urdu diction and elaborate codes of etiquette were renowned as the most subtle and refined in Hindustan;
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its dancers admired as the most accomplished; its cuisine famous as the most flamboyantly baroque. According to one historian, this hedonistic city resembled an Indian version of ‘[pre-Revolutionary] Teheran, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, with just a touch of Glyndebourne for good measure’.
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It was here, in this Bacchanalian atmosphere that Palmer met his lifelong love, and the woman who in due course would become Khair un-Nissa’s closest friend, Begum Fyze Baksh.

Palmer was, in fact, already married at the time he met Fyze. As a young man he had been sent as a soldier in the 70th Foot to the West Indies. There, in 1761, on the island of St Kitts, he had married Sarah Hazell, a Creole beauty, by whom he had three boys and two girls.
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But when Palmer was posted to India six years later, Sarah opted to stay in St Kitts with her daughters while her husband and three boys caught ship to India. The boys continued to write to their mother,
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and after she left the Caribbean and moved to Greenwich, the permanently impecunious Palmer tried to persuade his friends in Britain to send her money;
^‡
but there seems to have been no question of Sarah ever intending to join him in Lucknow, nor of William planning to return to England to see either her or the two girls who had remained with her.
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The marriage, one can only assume, had collapsed—or at least jaded into mutual distaste—in the West Indies, and the two had agreed to separate, though there was no divorce and Palmer continued to refer to Sarah as his ‘wife’. Either way, by 1779 Palmer had met and married Fyze, according to Muslim law;
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and the following year the couple had their first child, named William Palmer after his father. In due course the boy’s destiny was to be closely—and tragically—interwoven with that of James Kirkpatrick, Khair un-Nissa and her mother.

Palmer’s young bride had been born in Mughal Delhi. She was the daughter of ‘a Persian captain of cavalry’ formerly in the service of the Emperor Shah Alam II, who had emigrated to Lucknow where he rose to prominence in the Nawab’s service, and where he later married Fyze’s Lucknavi mother.
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Fyze also had a sister, Nur Begum,
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who having been married as a child to the Nawab of Pundri, to the west of Delhi, found herself widowed at the age of fifteen, before the marriage could be consummated, and who thereafter seems to have spent much of her time with Fyze in her house in Lucknow. Over the next few years, with Nur on hand to play the role of maiden aunt, Fyze produced child after child on an almost annual basis, until the couple had produced a brood of six—four boys and two girls—in just eight years.

Both Fyze and her children figure prominently in Palmer’s letters. ‘Your little friend Fyze sends Bunder-gee and bote bote Salaam [many good wishes and may peace be with you],’ he wrote to David Anderson in 1781. ‘She brought me a little boy soon after you left Lucknow and another here last year, but born dead. I expect another in about four months.’
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In May 1783, William was outside Lucknow, unable to return home due to an epidemic that had attacked his children. ‘It is my intention to proceed to the residency as soon as I can move my little family,’ he reported. ‘The boy is just recovered from Small Pox and a Girl which Fyze brought me six months ago is still ill of it.’
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A year later ‘poor Fyze’ was pregnant yet again, and ‘has been for this month past so unwieldy that she [cannot make it to their first-floor bedroom and] has been obliged to sleep below stairs’.
¹⁸

A picture of the family painted between April and July 1785 by the artist Johan Zoffany
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survives today in the India Office library in London.
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It is one of the most charming images of a family group to survive from the entire Indo—British encounter. Fyze is placed at the centre of the picture, barefoot and dressed in Lucknavi court costume: a magnificent saffron
peshwaz
and
dupatta
over a brief
angia
bodice.
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She is seated on the ground, surrounded by her children and their
ayahs
and wetnurses, a calm, serene and beautiful young woman in her late teens, modest and maternal, but hung with the finest Mughal jewellery: sparkling diamond earrings, several strings of pearl necklace and silver
payal
anklets. In her lap she lovingly cradles a sleeping newborn infant. This is her third son, later baptised Hastings Palmer, but now still wrapped in swaddling clothes, his head covered with an embroidered Muslim
topi.
Hastings’ two elder siblings, William and Mary, then aged five and three respectively, look on engagingly from the sides of the canvas in their long, flowing Lucknavi
jamas.

To Fyze’s left, seated in a European chair and wearing the formal red coat of his British military uniform, is her husband, a dark, thin, still-handsome man in his early forties. He looks down at Fyze with a long gaze that is at once adoring and protective. To his left, kneeling at his feet but with her expression directed at her elder sister, sits Fyze’s sister Nur, then a beautiful girl of around sixteen, wearing a thin white veil. Another sister looks on from the right of the painting.
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Sometime towards the end of the 1780s Nur married William’s friend, the great Savoy-born Maratha General, Benoît de Boigne, and went to live with him in his house in Aligarh, near Agra. The letters between the two brothers-in-law, preserved in the de Boigne family archives in Chambéry, contain many fond references to the two sisters: ‘Fyze sends her affectionate salaams to her
bahyne
[sister], to which I add mine,’ Palmer writes at one point. ‘Give my love to the Begum & kiss the young Baron for me,’ he writes again in February 1792; then more unexpectedly two months later, ‘Make my affectionate salaams to my sister the Begum.
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How will she bear a rival princess?’
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This is a reference to one of de Boigne’s two other concubines, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut,
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who were both given to de Boigne as spoils of war, although of at least one of them he swore ‘
Je ne l’ai jamais touché.
’
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When de Boigne returned to Europe in November 1796, bringing Nur with him, he left the allowance due to his two other women in the hands of Fyze, and the Chambéry archive contains a fascinating Persian
arzee
, or petition, in Fyze’s hand, begging her brother-in-law de Boigne to increase their pensions—a fascinating instance of female solidarity within the
zenana
: after all, Mihr un-Nissa and Zeenut might in other circumstances have been taken to be rivals of Fyze’s sister, and therefore hardly eligible for her support. The
arzee
is headed, very grandly:

The Lucknow that Fyze and Palmer inhabited was every bit as hybrid as their own marriage; indeed Lucknow in many ways pioneered the sort of white Mughal Residency culture which James Kirkpatrick later cultivated at Hyderabad. If the Nawab sometimes amazed foreign visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral, or even as a clergyman of the Church of England, then the Europeans of Lucknow often returned the compliment.
²⁴
Miniature after miniature from late-eighteenth-century Lucknow shows Europeans of the period dressed in long white Avadhi gowns, lying back on carpets, hubble-bubbles in their mouths, as they watch their nautch girls dance before them. Some Europeans even married into the Nawabi royal family: William Linnaeus Gardner’s Anglo-Indian son James, for example, married the Nawab’s sister-in-law, Mulka Begum.
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eh

Nor was this sexual curiosity one-way: at least two British memsahibs (or possibly Anglo-Indians) were recruited to join the Avadhi harem, and a mosque survives which was built by the Nawab for one of them, a Miss Walters.
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Another Englishwoman who was married to a prominent Lucknavi Muslim nobleman at this time wrote a remarkable book entitled, somewhat cumbersomely,
Observations on the Mussulmauns of India Descriptive of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Opinions Made During Twelve Years Residence in their Immediate Society
, which she published under the name Mrs Meer Hassan Ali.
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After returning to England, Mrs Meer Hassan Ali ended her life, bizarrely enough, ‘attached in some capacity to the household of [George III’s sister] Princess Augusta’.
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ei

Equally integrated into the life of Lucknow was one of Palmer’s best friends, the Swiss-French engineer, businessman, spy and scholar, Colonel Antoine Polier. On his
jagir
near Agra or in his
haveli
in Lucknow, Polier lived entirely like a Mughal nobleman, as his voluminous Persian correspondence, now in the Bibliothèque National in Paris, shows. One day he might instruct his agents to find him betel-leaf holders, hookahs and luxurious palanquins; the next he would send for the great Lucknavi painter Mir Chand and order an album-ful of miniatures of his wives and dancing girls; a third he might send out for his favourite green mango pickle or a particular type of scented tobacco. He had two Indian wives (one senior, one junior, who were deeply jealous of each other and fought incessantly), a large number of half-Indian children (one of whom, George, later went to live with Palmer’s sister-in-law Nur Begum in Sussex
²⁹
), and a vast collection of rare Mughal manuscripts (which mostly ended up in Paris).
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ej