White Mughals (49 page)

Noor un-Nissa means ‘the Light of Women’; the title Sahib Begum, ‘Lady of High Lineage’, was a reference to the child’s godmother, Fyze.
^ey
Soon James was ending a letter to the General with the postscript: ‘The females of my family all join in [sending their] kind wishes to Fyze, including her little namesake Sahib Begum who is improving daily.’
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A few days later James was telling William that ‘my family here both great and small are all well, and as many as can speak for themselves, beg to be remembered most kindly to Fyze, for whom the young Begum has made up a set of
choorys
[bangles] which I propose forwarding under cover to you, when I have got a smaller sett ready for my little ward [Fanny Khanum]’.

By the end of April, Khair had made still more
choories
for her friend, and James wrote to William that ‘as I find the choorys for Fyze and your little darling are not admissible in the dawke,
^ez
I shall commit them to the charge of [John] Malcolm and request you will assure the Begum with my best remembrances of my readiness to furnish her with further supplies as occasions may offer.
^‡
There are four setts for her, and two for Fanny Khanum.’
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So strong was Khair un-Nissa’s relationship with Fyze that it outlasted her marriage to James, and many years later, as Khair lay dying, Fyze was beside her bed, holding her hand. Six weeks after Khair’s death, according to James’s Assistant Henry Russell, Fyze was still, ‘I fear, in great distress … She says she has lost the only real friend she ever had; and I suspect from what I have heard of her disposition and habits, that it is truly the case … ’
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James and the General also got on as well as, if not better than, both had hoped and expected. They visited court together, went hawking and hunting, and spent long nights talking over their mutual despair at the direction in which Wellesley was taking the Company in India. When the General finally left Hyderabad, James wrote him an emotional letter, telling him of the ‘gloom and vacuity’ into which he had fallen since his departure, and of the ‘gratitude and exultation’ the memory of their friendship brought to him.
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James also sent Palmer a revealing letter that openly acknowledged the degree to which both men had become Indianised. Soon after he left, James wrote to advise him that ‘With regard to your eventual intention respecting a trip to England … I am not sure that your well wishers—that is those who wish you many long years of life and happiness—would rejoice at such a measure, after a residence of more than half your life in the sultry climes of India.’
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At this stage, he gives no hint as to exactly what his worries for the General are; but in a later letter he enlarges on this: ‘I am glad to hear that your darling little Fanny Khanum is to be sent to England,’ he wrote towards the end of the year, ‘but I cannot say I am quite reconciled to the idea of your accompanying her, and I do not know if it depended on me, whether I should not vote for you in preference some snug sinecure in this country where you have passed so large a portion of your life. Recollect my dear friend, that you were long ago yourself doubtful how far you could stand the rigour of an English
summer
, how then can you think of braving an English winter?’
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James, it seems, was thoroughly convinced that the General no longer truly belonged to Britain: India was now his real home, and as far as James was concerned, it would only lead to trouble and serious health problems if he were to return to the West. This was a very different attitude to that of the late-nineteenth-century sahib dreaming of drizzle in Tunbridge Wells while complaining about the bloody awful climate in India. In James’s view, his friend had much more to fear from the chill winds of a British midwinter. India had transformed both him and his friend, the old General. It was one thing for the children to go back to Europe to get a good education; it was quite another for him or Palmer to retire there.
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Possibly James also wanted to protect the eccentric old General from the taunts he suspected a white Mughal such as he might attract in the crowded streets of Piccadilly.

The letters James wrote to Palmer show his love, respect and concern for his friend, and these were feelings that the General clearly reciprocated. The Palmers had come to stay at a particularly stressful and upsetting time for James, and their presence calmed and cheered him at one of his lowest points. James had first learned that he was in trouble with Calcutta again when William sent him a frantic note in cipher at the end of October 1801. William had given his word to Wellesley that he would not tell James of the secret investigation about to convene in Madras, but his note was intended to alert his brother to the fact that something was afoot without explicitly mentioning the Clive Enquiry. The letter contained none of William’s usual gossip, but went—starkly—straight to the point: ‘My dear James,’ it read,

A day later, James received another, more explicit, warning from an anonymous friend in Calcutta: yet again, now for the third time, his relationship with Khair un-Nissa was under detailed investigation. This time, though, James was to play no part in the inquiry; indeed instructions had been issued that he should not even be informed of the existence of the proceedings.

This of course greatly alarmed James; but it also made him furious, and he convinced himself that Wellesley was using the affair as a pretext for removing him from office, just as he had removed Palmer, ‘because I have in a late instance not been so pliantly accommodating to his unaccountable political views, as he perhaps thought that he had a right to expect’. By early December he was again considering throwing in the towel, and wrote to William in cipher: ‘Between ourselves I am so disgusted with Lord W[ellesley]’s conduct towards me from first to last that I should be half-tempted to resign my situation at once, were it not for the triumph it would afford a number of conniving and malicious persons, and for it being liable to be attributed to fear of standing an enquiry.’
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In the end, as he told William, he decided to ‘await the announced
attack
, with the firmness and resignation proceeding from an unconsciousness of having been guilty of anything beyond imprudence’.
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James was especially irritated by the part played in this latest intrusion into his marriage by John Malcolm. The two had got on well when they were together in Hyderabad, and James had helped start Malcolm’s rapid rise five years earlier by asking for him to come to Hyderabad to take up the vacant job of Assistant. The young Scot was talented and ambitious, and had done very well since he left James’s side in 1799; indeed a year previously he had risen to be Wellesley’s Private Secretary. It soon became clear that Malcolm was now the front-runner to replace James at Hyderabad should the investigation go against him. As rumours began to spread, Malcolm wrote a series of letters to William Kirkpatrick explaining his embarrassment at this ‘delicate and distressing’ circumstance which was forcing him to choose between his own self-interest and his loyalty to an old friend. He maintained that he never wanted to be seen as taking advantage of James’s difficulties, and assured William that a promotion to the job of Hyderabad Resident, ‘however great and key in my hopes, will have no charms for me under such circumstances … where I may owe my advancement to the ruin of one
friend
to whom I owe a thousand obligations [i.e. James] & the distress and misery to
another
[i.e. William] to whom I am more indebted than I am to any man in the world’.
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To James, however, Malcolm continued to pretend complete ignorance of what was going on, giving him no hint or warning of his fate. This led James to be increasingly suspicious of Malcolm’s friendship and intentions: ‘I have just received [a letter] from Malcolm,’ he reported to William at the end of 1801, ‘who if he knows anything of what is in store for me—and that he should not is scarcely within the bounds of credibility—is surely acting a strange part towards me.’
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To add to James’s worries and growing sensation of isolation, his relations with the soldiers of the Subsidiary Force were at rock bottom. In the cantonments James was now regarded as the enemy: a turncoat Islamophile, who affected ‘ridiculous native dress’ and who had had the gall to question the honesty and probity of his brother officers. Colonel Vigors, the commander of the Force, had written to James at the end of October challenging him over his inquiries: ‘Hearing that reports have reached you of the inefficient state of the corps, composing the Sub[sidiar]y Force, I have thought it incumbent on myself, and a justice to the Officers commanding these Corps, to inspect them severally, and have now the satisfaction to assure you that they have answered the highest expectations, not only in regard to numbers of effective men … but also to uniformity of dress and proficiency in discipline.’
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Vigors duly invited James to inspect the Force, an offer which James immediately accepted; but the inspection was a disaster. James was not greeted with his usual seventeen-gun salute, no guard of honour was there to receive him, and no Union Flag was raised.
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Worse still, he was treated with disdain by the officers of the men he came to examine. On his return to the Residency he wrote a formal complaint, and copied it to Calcutta. He also picked up his pen to report to William what had happened, informing him that Vigors’s

Things had not improved by the following spring, and there was an unpleasant incident soon after the Palmers left Hyderabad when James reported that some of the Subsidiary Force officers let it be known that they would be ‘refusing to subscribe to a certain [Regimental] Ball, if I was invited’. Moreover, James’s letters continue to contain frequent references to his enemies in the cantonments, who ‘have been so busy in defaming and misrepresenting me’. He was also aware that these enemies ‘would scarcely have dared, I think, to indulge so freely as [they have done] had not the too prevalent idea of my disgrace and approaching end have encouraged them to perseverance’.
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There was also the issue of James’s relations with General Palmer’s successor at Pune, Colonel Barry Close, an Anglo-Irish friend of Arthur Wellesley who very much took the Wellesleys’ line in his attitude to Indians in general and Indian princes in particular. Palmer had been astonished when Close turned up to replace him in Pune without any official instructions or credentials, so breaking all the most elementary courtesies of diplomacy: ‘If the Peishwa had a grain of spirit he would not receive him,’ the General had written to James in December, just before leaving for Hyderabad, ‘and callous as he [the Peishwa] may be, he must feel the contempt implied in appointing an Ambassador to his court and sending him thither without a letter of introduction.’
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But it was not just the Peishwa that Close showed contempt for. By the spring of 1802, as James’s fate still remained uncertain, Close had begun sending his Calcutta despatches, which came via Hyderabad, sealed rather than open, so that James was unable to read the contents. This was an important change from the existing system and usages, which had allowed the Hyderabad Resident to brief himself on developments over the Maratha border.

Close’s actions clearly implied that he felt James was somehow unreliable, or untrustworthy, or a straightforward security risk. After hundreds of copies of James’s Residency correspondence had turned up in Tipu Sultan’s palace chancellery at Seringapatam in 1799, Close had good reason to suspect that security at Hyderabad was not all that it might be.
³⁰
But the ‘mole’ responsible for those leaks—the Residency ‘intelligencer’ Laxmi Narayan—had been exposed and sacked three years earlier; and the clear implication was that Close was dubious about James’s own reliability. He had, after all, been privy to what Mir Alam had told Arthur Wellesley of James’s alleged deal (or accommodation) with Aristu Jah; he also knew about Khair un-Nissa, and might have suspected that her discretion was not to be relied upon, and that James’s pillow talk might easily make its way into other Hyderabad
zenanas
. Whatever his reservations were, they remained unarticulated. Even though James wrote formally to Close to protest, his appeal had no effect. The Pune
dak
continued to arrive in Hyderabad with its seals firmly attached.
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