White Mughals (50 page)

In the end it was William Kirkpatrick who saved James from this extended limbo and who rescued his career, just as nine years earlier it was he who had first kick-started it. Although officially William was just off to the Cape to recover his health, it was now very clear to him that his condition was too serious to be healed by a few weeks at the mineral baths. Deep down he knew that his career was over, and that if he stayed in India, or indeed ever returned to it, he would probably die. He therefore decided to do all he could to save the career of his half-brother, even if it meant sacrificing his own reputation with Wellesley in the process.

From what John Malcolm had told him in his letters, William knew that James had been cleared of the charge of raping Khair un-Nissa or of using force or threats to pressurise her family to hand her over: the Clive Enquiry had accepted that unusual though it was, the women of Khair un-Nissa’s family appeared to have set out to seduce the Resident, rather than the other way around.

Only one serious political charge remained unresolved: that of concealment. The Governor General was quite willing to forgive James for his moral lapse in sleeping with Khair un-Nissa, and was even prepared to overlook his failure of judgement (as Wellesley saw it) in allowing himself to be dragged, through his marriage, into a position where he was open to manipulation by the Hyderabadi durbar: Malcolm had written to William that Wellesley thought James ‘highly culpable considering his station, to have an intrigue at a native court with a woman of such rank’.
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Yet while James may have been culpable, the offence, Malcolm had also hinted, was not unforgivable, and certainly not enough in itself for James to lose his job. But what Wellesley was not prepared to put up with—reasonably enough—was his senior officials deliberately withholding vital political information from him. At the end of the Clive Enquiry, the charge remained that James had knowingly concealed important details about his affair from his superiors, and that his despatches and submissions on the subject had been deliberately misleading.

These charges were in fact unanswerable—James had indeed told barefaced lies to almost everyone, including his own brother, about the degree to which he had become entangled with Khair un-Nissa. William nonetheless took it upon himself to risk a reputation he had spent twenty years building up, and to write to John Malcolm telling him that James—very properly hesitating to explain such delicate matters in a public despatch—had made a full confession to William in his private letters, expecting him to pass it on discreetly to the Governor General; but that he, William, had hesitated to do so, as ‘I did not consider myself at liberty, or view it in any light as necessary, to betray the confidence which [James] had reposed on me on the occasion.’
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It was, in other words, William’s failure, not James’s, that had caused the misunderstanding.

This story was not strictly truthful, but it nevertheless provided James with the perfect cover, and put the onus for failing to reveal the full truth about the affair firmly onto his elder brother. As John Malcolm eventually wrote to William, ‘in consequence of your communication [Lord Wellesley has finally] acquitted your brother of the charge of improper concealment & [has] therefore resolved to continue him in the station which he has filled with so much credit’.
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The latter somewhat unexpected compliment was in part a reference to the fact that James had just successfully persuaded the Nizam to sign a third treaty with the Company, this time one that dealt with matters of commerce
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—yet another sign of James’s unusual degree of influence with the Nizam, and his continuing value to the Company.

After five months of uncertainty, and three inquiries, James had again been forgiven for an affair which over and over again had come close to wrecking his career and reputation. But it was a short-lived respite. No sooner had Wellesley decided to forgive James than another anonymous letter arrived in Calcutta. This time it was a letter of support for James; but one which had a much more damaging effect than any letter of criticism.

Not only did it attack Wellesley in terms that the Governor General regarded as ‘very violent, menacing and indelicate’ as well as libellous, its inside knowledge of the case showed that it was written by a close friend or associate of Kirkpatrick. Its postmark showed moreover that it had been posted in the Residency, and must thus have been written by one of the very few people in Hyderabad who had access to the Residency post room. In the covering letter which Wellesley sent to James along with the offending tract, he demanded that Kirkpatrick immediately track down and unmask ‘Philothetes’, the author of a piece of invective which according to Wellesley ‘violated the Laws of respect and Subordination, by an injurious and dictatorial stile of address to the Supreme Authority in India’.
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This was another scandal, and it broke at exactly the moment James least needed it. Worse still for him, the author—as must have been apparent to James as soon as he opened the package—was none other than the son of his closest and most intimate friends and allies, General Palmer and Fyze.

‘Philothetes’ was quite clearly the young Captain William Palmer, of the Nizam’s irregular cavalry.
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William Palmer had been born in Lucknow in 1780, a year after Fyze had moved in with the General.

In Zoffany’s celebrated portrait of the family, painted when William was five, he is shown wearing a white Avadhi
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. His early years were spent in the cosmopolitan environment of Lucknow, then at the height of its golden age as the centre of north Indian courtly culture. At some point William was shipped off to England to be educated, and ended up completing his schooling at the Vanbrugh-designed Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
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When he returned to India in 1798, aged eighteen, and briefly moved in with his half-brother John Palmer, by now a successful Calcutta banker, he was able to speak English and Persian with equal fluency, and to operate in aristocratic English and Mughal environments with equal ease.
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By the early years of the nineteenth century, many Anglo-Indians were beginning to find their mixed racial inheritance a major drawback: William’s contemporary Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner of Skinner’s Horse, for example, felt that his mixed blood, ‘like a two edged blade, was made to cut both ways against him’.
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But unlike Skinner—and indeedunlike most Anglo-Indians—William was born into the upper echelons of both British and Mughal society, and his father made sure that every resource was available so that he could take advantage of both sides of his ethnic identity and find his mixed blood a boon and a blessing rather than the insuperable obstacle it became to so many other mixed-race children. As William caught ship to India at the end of his English education, the General wrote proudly to his old friend Warren Hastings boasting about his children’s achievements, and how they were all now well set up and provided for.
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Palmer’s first appointment, which James Kirkpatrick had arranged for him, was in the Finglas Brigade of the Nizam’s army, which he joined just in time to see action at the storming of Seringapatam in May 1799.
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Thereafter he rose rapidly through the ranks, so that before long he was commanding a battalion and was in charge of collecting taxes across several Hyderabadi districts.
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This was his position when his parents arrived in Hyderabad in January 1802.

Soldiering was not, however, what William intended to do with his life. In the course of his duties with the Nizam’s forces he had served in the devastated but fertile and potentially rich district of Berar, an area that had been badly scarred by nearly a century of intermittent warfare between the Mughals and the Marathas. Berar’s well-watered soils were however clearly capable of being profitably developed. As he rode around gathering taxes, William—perhaps inspired by the entrepreneurial example of his elder half-brother John—dreamt of somehow repopulating the area, opening it up and planting cotton, indigo and opium there. This, he realised, was quite feasible, as the harvest could be easily transported down to the coast if the Wardha and Godavari rivers were made navigable.

On his visits to Hyderabad, William would have heard James talking about other schemes which were then being provisionally floated to exploit the vast untapped resources of the Nizam’s dominions. One in particular seems to have made an impression on him: a scheme suggested by a private trader named Ebeneezer Roebuck to log the inaccessible malarial jungles and teak forests in the remote reaches of the Upper Godavari. The scheme never came off, but it was the cause of much discussion and correspondence at the Residency at exactly the time when William would have been present: during the visit of his parents in March 1802.
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Certainly the idea must have fermented in William’s head, because in due course he raised considerable capital—some of it from his half-brother John in Calcutta, then at the height of his reputation as the ‘Prince of Merchants’—for a major logging and shipbuilding scheme to exploit the extraordinary mineral, timber and agricultural riches of the wilder reaches and jungles of the Nizam’s vast state.

Moreover, at some point William seems to have realised that he had a major advantage over other businessmen that he could use to enormous effect. Because of his birth in India to an Indian mother, he was classified by the Company’s bureaucracy as an ‘East Indian’, not as a British subject. As such he was permitted to engage in banking operations within the Nizam’s dominions, something that was strictly forbidden to British subjects under the terms of the various treaties James had signed. He was also free to charge any rate of interest that he wished, unlike bankers in British India who were compelled by law to charge no more than 12 per cent. Untrammelled by Company regulations, within a few years William had put in place ambitious plans to open a merchant house that would engage in ‘banking and agency transactions’ while also

The scale of William’s ambitions has echoes of the world of Conrad, with its steamships, up-country logging stations, ivory hunters, uncharted malarial forests and riverboats. Yet, driven forward with an almost manic energy, it was not long before many of these schemes had been realised: by 1815 William Palmer & Co. had grown to be the richest and most important commercial operation in the subcontinent outside British-controlled India; it also ended up bankrolling the Nizam and ‘acquired an ascendancy over the Minister that rendered him a creature of their will’.
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In many ways William Palmer can be said to have brought nineteenth-century Western entrepreneurial capitalism to the late-Mughal world of the Deccan; but what is remarkable is that he did so in a way that was not entirely Western, and which was certainly quite independent of the East India Company. He used local bankers and, mostly, local money, and seems to have operated, at least partly, according to traditional Indian modes of doing business. Moreover, he sought influence and gained patronage by using time-honoured Mughal techniques of giving gifts and seeking favours from his mother’s friends in the Nizam’s
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: according to a later British Resident, if William met any opposition to his plans, ‘the Women of the Palace would be brought over to favour the application’.
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In 1802 this all lay in the future. But throughout the time William was establishing himself in Hyderabad, he had continued to live the hybrid Anglo-Mughal lifestyle which had been such a distinguishing mark of his parents’ home. His house in Hyderabad gradually became a celebrated gathering place where the British and Hyderabadis met on equal terms. A revealing portrait of his domestic arrangements is given by an anonymous English traveller who visited him there in about 1810: