White Mughals (73 page)
Authors: William Dalrymple
Kitty herself clearly had no doubt that she was Blumine. Indeed she was once heard to take on an embarrassed Carlyle with the forthright words: ‘ ‘’You know you were never made immortal in that manner!” … where upon they both laughed.’
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Six years after finding herself the romantic heroine of one of the most bizarre novels to be written in Victorian England, in May 1841 Kitty was visiting Mrs Duller, a childhood friend, when she was taken to tea with one of Mrs Duller’s country neighbours who lived in a grand Berkshire mansion named Swallowfield, to the south of Reading. She had never been to the house before, nor did she know the owners. She could therefore have had little inkling of what she would find inside.
To Mrs Duller’s amazement, Kitty walked through the front door of the house and promptly burst ‘into floods of tears … and was much affected’. On the stairs, instantly recognisable, was the portrait of her and her brother painted by Chinnery just before they left India, thirty-six years earlier.
Swallowfield, it turned out, was the house of Henry Russell, now Sir Henry Russell, a name Kitty may have dimly remembered from her childhood. Russell himself was away in London on business that day, and his second wife, a French woman named Clothilde, gave the ladies tea and promised to find out from her husband how it was that he had somehow acquired the Chinnery portrait.
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Russell eventually wrote to Kitty explaining that it had been given to him after Khair un-Nissa’s death in 1813, and promised that he would leave her the picture in his will; but he did not offer to hand it over immediately, and seems to have made no attempt to meet the woman whom he must have remembered as a little girl in the Residency
mahal.
His reticence was hardly surprising; after all, there was clearly a limit to how much of the truth he could tell Kitty.
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Russell eventually wrote to Kitty explaining that it had been given to him after Khair un-Nissa’s death in 1813, and promised that he would leave her the picture in his will; but he did not offer to hand it over immediately, and seems to have made no attempt to meet the woman whom he must have remembered as a little girl in the Residency
mahal.
His reticence was hardly surprising; after all, there was clearly a limit to how much of the truth he could tell Kitty.
Russell had been back in England for nearly twenty years, having left India in deep disgrace with the Company, but with the redeeming compensation of having hoarded away a phenomenal fortune for his premature retirement. Fearing he might be humiliatingly removed from office, he had resigned as Resident at Hyderabad in 1820, after nine years in the job. Though he did not know it, even as he packed up and headed off towards Masulipatam for the last time, a set of furious letters were in transit from the Court of Directors in London ordering ‘that Mr Russell be immediately removed from the Residency of Hyderabad and that he not be employed again at any other court’.
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The ostensible reason for Russell’s summary removal was the death of two brigands whom, without any reference to the Nizam’s government, Russell had ordered to be severely flogged; both men had died the following day from the brutality of the wounds inflicted on them. This was however something of a pretext: Russell had become a major embarrassment to the Company, and was widely suspected of massive corruption and bribe-taking, something that the astonishing fortune with which he returned to England would seem to bear out: having come into the job of Resident with total savings of £500, he managed to ship home a fortune of £85,000, which he had impressively succeeded in accumulating in just nine years on an annual salary of £3400.
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During his time as Resident, Russell had presided over a dramatic souring of relations between the East India Company and the Hyderabad durbar. Despite a personal fondness for Hyderabad, Russell was always personally ambitious, and in a bid to impress his masters in Calcutta he had imposed a series of damaging new treaties on the Nizam, forcing him to pay for ever larger and more unnecessary numbers of British troops at a total cost of forty lakh rupees a year—a sum which amounted to nearly half the entire tax revenue of Hyderabad. This vast fortune all went to pay the salaries of the enlarged Subsidiary Force and Russell’s new Hyderabad Contingent, for which the Nizam had no use and over which he had in reality little control. Unlike the treaties James had signed, which at least initially were hugely useful to Hyderabad, and which did much to preserve its independence, Russell’s not only provided no tangible benefit to the Nizam, they severely undermined and threatened the entire financial stability of his dominions.
Count Edouard de Warren was a French soldier of fortune working for the Nizam and a relation by marriage of Russell’s second wife.
iy
He had however little liking for the gross injustices over which Russell presided:
iy
He had however little liking for the gross injustices over which Russell presided:
Thus we see the ruler of a country larger than France … the finest jewel in the broken crown of the Moghuls … entirely deprived of his liberty, held in utter check-mate, without a soldier of his own worth the name, barely able to count on the loyalty of a few hundred mercenaries, the dregs scraped from distant lands—Sikhs, Arabs, Afghans—who look like robbers lounging at his palace gate, dressed in rags and sporting wretched weapons—is it any surprise then, that the Nizam spends the entire year shut away in his harem, seeking to forget that he is a prince, by drowning himself in vicious pleasures? … [Such is the hatred now felt for Europeans in the city] that no European can normally enter Hyderabad dressed in European costume, whether on foot, on horse or in a palanquin, without exposing himself to the insults of yogis, the execrations of fakirs and the real risk of physical harm from the mob.
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None of this surprised de Warren, as the British in Hyderabad, especially the soldiers, were now in the habit of behaving with disdain and extreme rudeness to their hosts. He was especially horrified by the behaviour and lack of manners of the British officers at a levée given by the new Minister, Raja Chandu Lal:
The entertainment was above reproach … but as a European I was disgusted and ashamed by the lack of refinement, indeed the gluttony, shown by English officers of all ranks and ages: they threw themselves on the French wines, especially the Champagne, with intemperate greed which must have seemed doubly despicable to our native hosts, so sober, grave and courteous, so full of human dignity. Yet again, it was these northern conquerors who were the real barbarians. Even the Resident was aware that his party was transforming itself into a herd of swine, and before the metamorphosis was complete, hurriedly rose from the table and brought the meal to an end.
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One person de Warren felt particularly sorry for was Fyze’s son, William Palmer. A great deal of Russell’s money had come from his secret and illegal partnership in Palmer’s extraordinarily successful bank, which by 1815 had grown to become the most successful business operation in India outside British control. Henry and William had initially been friends as well as business partners, and Russell had often dined at Palmer’s rambling mansion, known as Palmer’s Kothi. There he would pay his respects to Fyze (or the Sahib Begum, as he always referred to her), who had moved in after the old General had died in 1816. Fyze was eventually buried by her son in a pretty Muslim tomb surrounded by gardens and a small mosque a little to the north of the
Kothi.
iz
But Russell, worried that his illegal financial links with the bank would be exposed, had eventually fallen out with Palmer, and put in train a series of restrictions on Palmer’s business that eventually brought about its complete and disastrous collapse soon after he left Hyderabad.
Kothi.
iz
But Russell, worried that his illegal financial links with the bank would be exposed, had eventually fallen out with Palmer, and put in train a series of restrictions on Palmer’s business that eventually brought about its complete and disastrous collapse soon after he left Hyderabad.
De Warren was disgusted by the way Russell and the other British had treated Palmer, and wrote an affectionate description of him in his book
L’Inde Anglaise
, in which he contrasted the starchy manners of the Residency with the elegance and refinement of Palmer’s mansion:
L’Inde Anglaise
, in which he contrasted the starchy manners of the Residency with the elegance and refinement of Palmer’s mansion:
At the Residency, the manners are stiff, cold and polite, and conversation choked in half-whispers, as in a European court; but nearby is the more oriental court of the Palmers, where reigns the politeness of the Persians, the dignity of the Moghuls, the hospitality of the Arabs. At William Palmer’s table, there are always some 20 places laid for any visitors who might chance to come by, and at the head of the table presides Palmer himself, who in spite of the original sin of being half-caste, is ennobled by his own genius. Small in stature and as black as the servant standing behind his chair, he calmly smokes his hookha while running his eye over papers written in the Persian or Nagari script and stacked next to the luncheon he barely touches. His two charming nieces sit next to him and do the honours of his table. While they entertain the English guests, the elite of the three cantonments, he receives the humble salutations of the greatest nobles of the city. The learned Pandit, the pious Mulla, the proud Amir all bow with deep reverence before this frail old man.
Messrs Palmer have long served as intermediaries between the Nizam and the British government in India, loyally serving both as the Rothschilds of the Deccan. In any crisis, their honestly acquired wealth came to the rescue of the protectors as well as of the protected. And how were they thanked? Just what one would expect from an ungrateful world: the two governments came to an agreement to strip them bare of their assets … and the Palmers lost all their money. Today they have nothing left but a meagre allowance paid at the caprice of [the Minister] Chandu Lal—which is neither reliable nor regular. What they have in undiminished quantity and quality is their honour—the respect of whites as well as of natives will follow them to the grave.
De Warren went on to give a description of the life led by William Palmer and his younger brother Hastings. It is one of the last accounts that would ever be penned of the hybrid white Mughal lifestyle: when de Warren’s book went to the press in 1845, British and Indians were drawing fast apart, and Palmer’s lifestyle had already become something of an anachronism, a survival from an earlier age. De Warren’s tone, with its mid-nineteenth-century racial stereotypes, is another indication of how fast the world was changing:
The private life of the leaders of this family is overtly epicurian … Their European education has made them sceptical deists; their oriental upbringing has habituated them to an extreme refinement; their mixed blood has made it impossible for them to find wives who could also be intellectual partners, and so drives them back to unadulterated oriental sensuality. So they each have their harems filled with women of all ages and colours and creeds, all married and divorced according to the whims of favour, but all kept honourably and generously. Their progeny would do honour to King Priam—I have seen there children of all ages and shades. This family has still been able to hold its own against the prejudice that pursues it relentlessly, but woe to them the day William Palmer should die! Only he can face out public opinion, to overwhelm prejudice by the prestige of his genius, his learning, his independent and liberal ideas, his long-term renown, the memory of his boundless generosity, of his immense hospitality in the years of good fortune, which led to his being called ‘Prince of Merchants’, a title shared with his half-brother in Calcutta.
But William is a frail and elderly man, worn out by the climate and his private griefs. He will not accept the reality of his poverty, nor put a limit to his generous impulses, and still takes care to relieve the miseries of the poor while poverty itself invades his own home. His superb gardens are untended, trees collapse out of sheer old age and are not replanted; the pools without water; even the house itself is crumbling and may well not outlive its aged master. I last visited the garden and its cypresses in 1839 at the moment when I was leaving India for the last time. Poor Palmer, only these trees will remain after you, and the English whom you have so often hospitably received at your table will repay your generosity by heaping scorn and insults on your children, blocking and refusing them entry into society.
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Russell had played his part in Palmer’s downfall, and in the inquiry which followed the failure of the bank, which ruined more than 1200 of its investors (who all lost everything), he had not only failed to come to Palmer’s defence, he had also resolutely denied having any connection whatsoever with the bank. He even went so far as bribing, at a cost of £60, the printers of the official inquiry report,
The Hyderabad Papers
, in order to make sure that the link between him and Palmer was never published.
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The Hyderabad Papers
, in order to make sure that the link between him and Palmer was never published.
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It must therefore have been something of a surprise to Russell when in 1841, two years after de Warren’s last glimpse of Palmer’s crumbling mansion, and a year after Kitty’s surprise visit, a letter from Palmer should arrive at Swallowfield. It must have been even more of a surprise that the subject of the letter—after twenty-one years of silence—was none other than Sharaf un-Nissa.
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