White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India - Rilegato

Dalrymple, William

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670031844 ISBN 13: 9780670031849

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2003

Riassunto

Traces the practice by British colonizers in India to assume local customs and religious practices, offering a particular focus on James Kirkpatrick, who converted to Islam and spied on the East India Company while having an affair with the great-niece of the region's prime minister. 15,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

William Dalrymple is the author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, and From the Holy Mountain

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

I

On 7 November 1801, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, two figures were discreetly admitted to the gardens of Government House in Madras.

Outside, amid clouds of dust, squadrons of red-coated sepoys tramped along the hot, broad military road which led from the coast towards the cantonments at St Thomas's Mount. Waiting in the shade of the gates, shoals of hawkers circled around the crowds of petitioners and groups of onlookers who always collect in such places in India, besieging them with trays full of rice cakes and bananas, sweetmeats, oranges and paan.

Inside the gates, beyond the sentries, lay another world: seventy-five acres of green tropical parkland shaded by banana palms and tall tamarind trees, flamboya, gulmohar and scented Raat-ki-Rani, the Queen of the Night. Here there was no dust, no crowds and no noise but for birdsong-the inevitable chatter of mynahs and the occasional long, querulous, woody call of the koel-and the distant suck and crash of the breakers on the beach half a mile away.

The two figures were led through the Government Gardens towards the white classical garden house that the new Governor of Madras, Lord Clive, was in the process of rebuilding and enlarging. Here one of the two men was made to wait, while the other was led to a patch of shade in the parkland, where three chairs had been arranged around a table. Before long, Lord Clive himself appeared, attended by his Private Secretary, Mark Wilks. It was a measure of the sensitivity of the gathering that, unusually for a period where nothing could be done without a great retinue of servants, all three men were unaccompanied. As Clive administered an oath, Wilks began to jot down a detailed record of the proceedings which still survives in the India Office Library:

The Rt. Hon. the Lord Clive having required the presence of Lieut. Col Bowser at the Government Garden for the purpose of being examined on a subject of a secret and important nature, and having directed Captain M Wilks to attend his Lordship for the purpose of taking down the minutes of the examination, addressed Lieut. Col Bowser in the following manner:

The object of the inquiry which I am about to institute involves considerations of great importance to the national interest and character. I am therefore instructed by His Excellency the most Noble Governor General to impress this sentiment on your mind and to desire that you prepare yourself to give such information on the subject as you possess with that accuracy which is becoming [to] the solemnity of the occasion ... 1

The oath taken, Clive proceeded to explain to Bowser why he and his colleague, Major Orr, had been summoned four hundred and fifty miles from their regiments in Hyderabad to Madras, and why it was important that no one in Hyderabad should know the real reason for their journey. Clive needed to know the truth about the East India Company's Resident at the court of Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick. For two years now rumours had been in circulation, rumours which two previous inquiries-more informal, and far less searching-had failed to quash.

Some of the stories circulating about Kirkpatrick, though perhaps enough to raise an eyebrow or two in Calcutta, were harmless enough. It was said that he had given up wearing English clothes for all but the most formal occasions, and now habitually swanned around the British Residency in what one surprised visitor had described as 'a Musselman's dress of the finest texture'. Another noted that Kirkpatrick had hennaed his hands in the manner of a Mughal nobleman, and wore Indian 'mustachios ... though in most other respects he is like an Englishman'.2

These eccentricities were, in themselves, hardly a matter for alarm. The British in India-particularly those at some distance from the main presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay-had long adapted themselves to Mughal dress and customs, and although this had lately become a little unfashionable it was hardly something which on its own could affect a man's career. It was certainly not enough to give rise to a major inquiry. But other charges against Kirkpatrick were of a much more serious nature.

Firstly, there were consistent reports that Kirkpatrick had, as Clive put it, 'connected himself with a female' of one of Hyderabad's leading noble families. The girl in question was never named in the official inquiry report, but was said to be no more than fourteen years old at the time. Moreover she was a Sayyeda, a descendant of the Prophet, and thus, like all her clan, kept in the very strictest purdah. Sayyeds-especially Indian Sayyeds-were particularly sensitive about the purity of their race and the chastity of their women. Not only were they strictly endogamous-in other words they could never marry except with other Sayyeds-in many cases Sayyed girls would refuse even to mix with pregnant women from outside, lest the unborn child in the stranger's womb were to turn out to be male and thus unwittingly contaminate their purity.3

Despite these powerful taboos, and the precautions of her clan, the girl had somehow managed to become pregnant by Kirkpatrick and was recently said to have given birth to his child.

Early reports in scurrilous Hyderabadi newsletters had claimed that Kirkpatrick had raped the girl, who was called Khair un-Nissa, then murdered a brother who had tried to stand in his way. There seemed to be a consensus that these accounts were malicious and inaccurate, but what was certain-and much more alarming for the Company-was that news of the pregnancy had leaked out and had caused widespread unrest in Hyderabad. Worse still, the girl's grandfather was said to have 'expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and had declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city)'.4 There he promised to raise the Muslims of the Deccan against the British, thus imperilling the British hold on southern and central India at that most sensitive period when a Napoleonic army was still at large in Egypt and feared to be contemplating an audacious attack on the British possessions of the subcontinent.

Finally, and perhaps most shockingly for the authorities in Bengal, some said that Kirkpatrick had actually, formally, married the girl, which meant embracing Islam, and had become a practising Shi'a Muslim. These rumours about Kirkpatrick's alleged new religious affiliation, combined with his undisguised sympathy for, and delight in, the Hyderabadi culture of his bride, had led some of his colleagues to wonder whether his political loyalties could still be depended on at all. More than a year earlier, the young Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had written to his elder brother Richard, the Governor General in Calcutta, expressing exactly this concern. As Commander in the neighbouring state of Mysore, Colonel Wellesley had heard reliable reports that Kirkpatrick now seemed to be so solidly 'under the influence' of the Hyderabadis that 'it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam's court than those of his own government'-that Kirkpatrick might, in other words, have 'gone over' to the other side, to have become, to some extent, a double-agent.5

The question of how to respond to these allegations was one that the Governor General, Lord Wellesley,* had agonised over for some time. There were several complicating factors. Firstly, despite all the stories in circulation, Kirkpatrick had an exceptional record in the East India Company's Political [diplomatic] Service. Without a drop of blood being shed, he had succeeded in expelling the last serious French force from southern India and had successfully negotiated an important treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad. This had, for the first time, brought the Nizam's vast dominions firmly into alliance with the British, so tipping the delicate balance of power in India firmly in Britain's favour. For this work Wellesley had, only a few months earlier, recommended Kirkpatrick to London for a baronetcy.

But this was not the only complication. Kirkpatrick's elder brother William was one of the Governor General's closest advisers in Calcutta, indeed was credited by Wellesley himself as being one of the principal architects of his policy. While Wellesley was determined to find out the truth about the younger Kirkpatrick, he wished to do so, if possible, without alienating the elder. Finally, he knew it was going to be difficult openly to investigate any of these sensitive stories without causing a major scandal, and possibly inflicting considerable damage on British interests not only in Hyderabad, but all over India. Yet the rumours were clearly too serious and too widespread to ignore.

For all these reasons, Wellesley decided to fall back on the strategy of holding a secret inquiry in Madras, and there to solicit the sworn testimony of the two most senior British soldiers in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr, both of whom had come into close contact with Kirkpatrick, without either of them being close enough friends for their veracity to be compromised. It was not a perfect solution, especially as Wellesley did not much admire the new Governor of Madras, Edward, Lord Clive. He was son of the more famous Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey forty-four years earlier had begun the East India Company's astonishing transformation from a trading company of often dubious solvency to a major imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than those of the country which gave it birth.

After their first meeting, Wellesley wrote that Clive was 'a worthy, zealous, obedient & gentlemanlike man of excellent temper; but neither of talents, knowledge, habits of business, or firmness equal to his present situation. How the devil did he get here?'6 Yet Wellesley realised it would be impossible to conduct an inquiry in Calcutta without involving Kirkpatrick's brother, and that there was little option but to delegate the job to Cli...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670031844
• ISBN 13: 9780670031849
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 400