Last Nizam (9781742626109) Read online

  As it turned out, the Nizam’s usefulness as an ally was short-lived. In June 1803 he suffered another stroke, which Kirkpatrick said left him ‘emaciated in the extreme, his eyesight dim and drowsy, his countenance worn, his speech feeble and inarticulate and his faculties greatly impaired’.54 Two months later, on 6 August, he died at the Chowmahalla palace and was buried on the same day at the Mecca Masjid, Hyderabad’s main mosque.

  ‘So passed an eastern monarch, evincing great promise in early years, relapsed into that apathetic life which seems peculiar to an oriental climate,’ wrote Briggs in a fitting epitaph to the Second Nizam’s remarkable reign. ‘He is the first of his family who sought the English; and that he did not make more out of his connection was – whatever may be asserted to the contrary – in consequence of his unbounded faith in his ally.’55

  CHAPTER 3

  Poor Nizzy Pays for All

  ON ONE SIDE OF THE rusty gate is a grimy bus depot. On the other are rows of cupboard-sized bookstalls selling dog-eared university texts to science, engineering and computer-programming students. The gate itself is covered with posters advertising degree colleges and behind it are the blackened branches of dead tamarind trees. Hyderabad has a habit of hiding its most beautiful buildings behind high, ugly walls to ward off encroachers or simply because there is no appreciation of their significance. The Residency is no exception. Despite its dilapidated state, what greets the visitor when entering through the side gate is still one of the grandest relics of the British Raj still standing. Built by James Kirkpatrick in 1803, the Residency was described by one early visitor as ‘the most elegant house which I have yet seen in India’. Kirkpartick’s assistant, John Malcolm, said of the building that ‘it is only surpassed in splendour and magnitude by the Government House at Calcutta. That at Madras cannot be compared with it.’1

  In its heyday six Corinthian columns of ‘dazzling whiteness’ graced the vast portico. The 22 granite steps leading up to the entrance were flanked by two giant lions and the terrace was laid out in black and white marble. The darbar hall was lined with 32 Ionic columns and was entirely furnished in mahogany bought by the Company from the prince regent. Guests trod softly on a specially ordered Wilton carpet 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. A grand staircase led to a gallery and two large oval reception rooms. Expensive chandeliers hung from the 50-foot-high ceiling. The cost of lighting the chandeliers and the thousands of Chinese lanterns Kirkpatrick had installed for a reception was said to be £1000.

  The 60 acres of gardens that ran down to the Musi River contained orchards, flower and vegetable gardens, a dovecote, a deer herd, cranes from Gujarat and two great turtles ‘of indeterminable age’, one of which bore on its shell the mark of a bullet fired by a visiting colonel to test the strength of its protective armour. There was a zenana that Kirkpatrick built for his Indian wife with ‘its fountain within and fountains without . . . its queer decorations of fruits, flowers, birds, and beasts, as well as the military cavalcade attending the native prince and European envoy, curiously introduced and extravagantly bedaubed with rude colours on the walls’.2 At one end of her garden was a model of the Residency so that she could see the fruit of her husband’s labour without emerging from purdah.

  Kirkpatrick spared no expense on building and furnishing the Residency because he didn’t have to. As a result of his liaison with Khair-un-Nissa, Kirkpatrick became Nizam Ali Khan’s adopted son and could therefore lean on the ageing potentate to foot the bill for the extravagant building. When Kirkpatrick grew tired of the old Residency, which consisted of a group of bungalows, he commissioned Lieutenant Samuel Russell of the Madras Engineers to design a new building with two main approaches – one with Oriental overtones for the Nizam accompanied by his elephants, horsemen and foot soldiers, and a more Palladian one for English dignitaries to approach Cinderella-like in their horse-drawn coaches. But when Kirkpatrick showed the Nizam the plan, he turned it down, not because of the cost but because the scale at which it had been presented made it look bigger than his kingdom. When the same plan was resubmitted on a tiny card it was given immediate approval.

  Today the Residency is occupied by the Osmania Women’s College. Though it has been placed on the World Monuments Fund’s list of One Hundred Most Endangered Buildings it bears the scars of severe neglect. The Corinthian columns are no longer a dazzling white, and parts of the building are collapsing, but the edifice still reflects the status and power of the Residents who occupied it until 1947. Hyderabad was now the most important of the Indian princely states. In 1803, the same year as Kirkpatrick laid the Residency’s foundation stone, the British captured Delhi, which was ruled by blind and bedraggled octogenarian Emperor Shah Alam. A year later the Second Maratha War ended with the destruction of Sindia’s war machine and left the British victorious throughout northern and central India. The only significant threats to British supremacy came from the Sikhs and Maratha remnants known as the Pindaris.

  The British Resident at Hyderabad was, therefore, the most important of all the Residents and Agents appointed by the East India Company. His role went far beyond being Britain’s representative or ambassador. He was in many ways a ruler in his own right, maintaining Britain’s supremacy over the Indian states, approving executive appointments and ensuring, with varying degrees of success, that the local administration was efficient and free of corruption. In the case of Hyderabad, a good Resident was expected to gain ‘the Nizam’s good will and esteem, and, at the same time, to discover any intrigues that may be meditated’. He was also expected ‘to keep a watchful eye upon His Highness’s conduct, and to endeavour by every means in their power to establish a confidential and friendly communication between the two governments’.3

  Not all Residents spoke fluent Hindustani and Persian, wore Mughal-style dresses at home, smoked hookahs, chewed betelnut and became so enamoured of the Nizam as Kirkpatrick. His successor, Thomas Sydenham, was ‘a high-minded English gentleman’, while Henry Russell was a fierce critic of all the Nizam stood for.4 In his earliest dispatches he was already complaining of the ‘avarice and rapacity’ of Hyderabad’s governors.5

  What united these men was the immense power they wielded. No longer could the Nizam declare war on his neighbours, appoint his own Prime Minister or even nominate his successor without the agreement of the Resident. Looking back at the situation he inherited when he replaced Russell in 1820, Charles Metcalfe wrote: ‘I can hardly imagine a situation more entitled to pity, or more calculated to disarm criticism, than that of a Prince so held in subjection by his servant under the support of an irrepressible foreign power.’6 It also poisoned the relationship between the Nizam and the British. Hyderabad’s ruler, Metcalfe noted, ‘always entertained and seldom failed to express the most inveterate jealousy of the British power and of its particular influence on the councils of the state and considered every man to be his enemy who was attached to the British Government and every man to be his friend who was hostile to the British’.7

  One advantage of Britain’s stranglehold over Hyderabad was the relatively smooth process of succession. The Resident could not stamp out all the intrigue, but the chances of a bloodless handover of power greatly increased. Kirkpatrick was able to report on 7 August 1803, after the installation of Nizam Ali Khan’s eldest son, 32-year-old Sikander Jah, on the musnud, that ‘the utmost tranquillity reigns and I see no probability in meeting with the smallest interruption’.8

  If the First Nizam’s finer points were administrative and diplomatic, and the Second Nizam’s were patriotic, Sikander Jah’s were largely unseen and unheard. Sikander Jah was a ‘tall, melancholy and careworn man’ with a complexion that was ‘dark for a Mohammadan of his status’, Russell wrote of the Third Nizam. ‘He indulged in wine and women and mixed in a society which could not be regarded as respectable. His education was totally neglected and he could neither speak nor write Persian well. He was fond of books on history and medicine which were read out to him.’ Beaten at every
turn by the British, the Third Nizam was destined to spend most of his reign in ‘gloomy retirement and sullen discontent’ while the conduct of his government and the condition of the countryside sank to new lows.9

  Sikander Jah’s first lesson in realpolitik came when the British ignored his demand to remove Aristu Jah as Diwan. So odious was Aristu Jah to the public that when he died in 1804 ‘the multitude of Hyderabad followed his corpse to the grave with hoots and execrations’.10 Sikander Jah announced he would personally take control of the government and backed his claim by quoting Article 15 of the Treaty of 1800 that prohibited the Company from interfering ‘with the Nizam’s children, subjects, servants or concerns’.11 Again the British rejected the request and appointed as Prime Minister Mir Alam, who in Russell’s words ‘aggravated many abuses and never addressed one’. When Mir Alam died of leprosy in 1809, the Nizam demanded that the late Diwan’s son, Munir ul-Mulk, take over. This time the two sides compromised. Munir ul-Mulk was appointed as the nominal Diwan but was forced to sign a declaration saying he would take no part in the administration. His peshkar (deputy), Chandu Lal, became the de facto Diwan.

  Chandu Lal was a Hindu money-lender whose family had come to Hyderabad from Delhi after serving in the court of the Mughal Emperor. In 1806 he was appointed finance minister in Mir Alam’s administration. Russell found him to be weak, hesitant and lacking in self-confidence on account of his low social status compared with Hyderabad’s nobility. ‘A man with no confidence in himself, can never command it in other people. Everybody likes Chandu Loll, but nobody is afraid of him.’12

  What Chandu Lal lacked in social status, he made up for by being a master of intrigue. He lavishly bribed the nobility and palace officials. Between his appointment as de facto Diwan in 1809 until his resignation in 1843 he exerted more influence over Hyderabad than any other individual, obliging both the British and the Nizam through the reckless expenditure of Hyderabad revenues that in the process nearly sent the state broke.

  For all the power he wielded, Chandu Lal gave the appearance of being physically infirm. He was bent over, thin and toothless, and almost everyone who met him commented on his humble manner. His defenders claimed that ‘no man ever dressed more plainly’,13 yet one of the few surviving portraits shows him wearing egg-sized pearls. Paid on a commission basis and the recipient of numerous nazars, Chandu Lal became one of the richest men in Hyderabad.

  Chandu Lal’s appointment coincided with the retirement of Sydenham, who in a parting swipe described the disorder in the Nizam’s government as ‘too deeply rooted and too widely extended to admit of any remedy short of placing the administration of the state under the control of the Resident’.14 Sydenham was eventually replaced by Henry Russell. Vain, ambitious and corruptible, Russell had arrived in Hyderabad in 1801 as an assistant to James Kirkpatrick. When Kirkpatrick died in 1805, Russell took his widow Khair-un-Nissa to Calcutta, seduced her and then abandoned the 19-year-old in Masulipatnam before returning to Hyderabad, where he married a Portuguese half-caste.

  Russell had little time for the Nizam, who presided over a system that ‘was rotten to the very core – it was a great congeries of diseases. Nothing seemed to flourish there except corruption. Every man was bent on enriching himself at the expense of his neighbour. No one cared for the people and no one cared for the State.’15 He also was quick to reject what would be the Nizam’s last enfeebled attempt to remove Chandu Lal. ‘A perseverance in any measure prejudicial to the interests of British Government would ultimately lead to consequences of the most serious nature,’ Russell warned bluntly.16

  Stung by Russell’s rebuke, Sikander Jah withdrew to the Chowmahalla palace and took no further role in the administration of the state. ‘His original defects of character, the habits of his life, his dislike of his own Minister and his jealousy of our control have gradually withdrawn him into a sullen and total seclusion,’ Russell later reflected without a hint of pity.17 The seclusion was so complete that four years elapsed before the Nizam ventured outside the palace on the pretext of going on a hunting expedition with his harem and 4000 foot-soldiers. His strange conduct and language led to fears for his sanity, though Russell put his behaviour down to ‘the delusion of his own fears and jealousies and the pernicious influence of low, senseless creatures that are about him’.18 Locked inside his palace, Sikander Jah was said to pass his time sitting alone ‘or with a few personal attendants of profligate character and low habits who flatter his prejudices, fill him with delusions of visionary independence and poison him with stories of the treachery of his ministers and the ambitious designs of the British Government’.19

  The Nizam’s seclusion only served to strengthen Chandu Lal’s position. The de facto Diwan became the sole authority for the conduct of any business at the royal court. He also became the linchpin in Russell’s ingenious plan to strengthen the Company’s stranglehold over Hyderabad while enriching himself in the process. All the Resident needed was a pretext.

  In 1812, two battalions of the Nizam’s army mutinied, tied their British commanding officer in front of a cannon, ‘a lighted match held over the priming’,20 and threatened to blow him away unless they were paid on time and their offences pardoned. To Russell the episode underlined the need to professionalise the Nizam’s forces – a colourful but badly armed rabble consisting of 35,680 foot-soldiers and 34,000 cavalrymen, as well as disparate units of Pathan, Rohilla and Arab mercenaries. The nominal pay of soldiers was a mere five rupees a month ‘and that paid irregularly’.21

  With the help of Chandu Lal, Russell established a force that the Diwan later dubbed the Russell Brigade. ‘Formed out of the finest men that Hindoostan could produce’,22 the Brigade was located in the old French gun foundry and initially consisted of 2000 soldiers. Chandu Lal made sure that payment for the Brigade came from the state treasury. As the Brigade grew, so did its cost. The commander was paid £5000 a month, and like other officers received a house and free servants. Keeping a cut for himself, Russell kept on creating fresh posts for new applicants until the proverbial expression in Hyderabad became ‘Poor Nizzy pays for all’.23

  The poor Nizam, however, could not ‘pay for all’ without borrowing money. In early nineteenth-century Hyderabad revenue collection was primitive. Districts were farmed out to contractors who were meant to advance a proportion of their anticipated revenue to the state, but rarely did so. Tax collection was haphazard, as was income derived from bestowing titles on landlords and revenue farmers.

  What Chandu Lal and Russell saw as the solution only drew the Nizam further into debt. Ignoring warnings that Chandu Lal’s intrigues could be ‘inconvenient and embarrassing’ if not downright dangerous, Russell connived with him to allow the establishment of a banking firm known as William Palmer & Co. The bank was the brainchild of William Palmer, ‘a gentleman not of pure blood’ who was born in Lucknow to a British general and a princess of Oudh. Palmer served as a battalion commander in the Nizam’s army and then as a tax collector, before toying with the idea of setting up a logging and shipbuilding scheme on the Godavari River. He quickly realised there was more money to be made from banking.

  To add to the firm’s prestige, Palmer used his East India Company connections to operate from a bungalow inside the Residency grounds. Russell held shares in the bank and used his influence to procure customers and funds from private sources. In case of any problems, Palmer would send over a woman from the zenana ‘to favour the application’.24

  To ensure the support of the Company’s representative in Calcutta, Palmer appointed William Rumbold as a partner in the firm. Rumbold was married to a ward of the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, and had accompanied him to India ‘with the not very rare or unintelligible design of making as much money as he could’.25 Rumbold’s connections in Calcutta through his quasi father-in-law gave the banking firm more clout than the Resident, Metcalfe later concluded. ‘From that time on the affairs of the firm have gone on swimmeringly till it has reach
ed a point of undue influence and profit never I suppose before heard of in any mercantile concern.’26

  The Hastings connection paid off when on 23 July 1816 the Governor-General personally intervened to give Palmer & Co. a licence from the Supreme Government of India to legalise its transactions. Under the arrangement sanctioned by Hastings, executed by Russell and kept well-oiled by Chandu Lal, the Nizam’s treasury borrowed money from Palmer & Co. to pay the troops of the Russell Brigade to the tune of four million rupees a year, or roughly half the entire tax revenue of the state. Palmer & Co. then paid the troops and recovered what they had spent plus interest, which was charged at 24 per cent for villages mortgaged by the Nizam.

  Forced into paying for troops he had no control over and little if any use for, the Nizam was soon caught in a dangerous debt trap. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century the Nizam owed Palmer & Co. a staggering six million rupees. His own soldiers were not being paid and morale in the administration fell to an all-time low. ‘They have no objects of hope or ambition. The splendour of the court has faded with the decay of the government,’ Russell reported to the Court of Directors in 1819. ‘More than one half of the country is a desert; and even where there is cultivation, the farmer has no interest beyond the supply of his immediate necessities . . . Evils produce one another. As a Government becomes weak it becomes rapacious.’27

  Ignoring the fact that he was largely responsible for this state of affairs, Russell wrote to Hastings in November 1819 proposing that ‘nothing short of a close vigilant and decided control over the internal administration of the country’ was needed to rectify the situation. Such control, however, ‘should be exercised through the medium of advice and influence and not by exertions of authority’. Instead of appointing British agents to oversee the collection of revenue, he proposed selecting ‘men of integrity’ as taluqdars (collectors).28