well a lot of folks and especially my patients from outside of India ask me about Hyderabad and its history.i find it difficult to tell them about Hyderabad since i am much too young for any first hand experience,mostly i tell them what i learnt from my grandmother and my parents.however recently i was reading a book and i thought William Darlymple desribed it best.i have copied the excerpts from his book.
The rulers of Hyderabad, once the richest people in the world, were
ruined by politics and family feuds. Now their cultural heritage is being
restored.
By William Dalrymple
Sixty years ago, four months after British rule had come to an end in
India, the Nizam of Hyderabad, then the richest man in the world, was still
refusing to join the new Indian union. Sir Osman Ali Khan saw no reason why
Hyderabad should be forced to join either India or Pakistan. His state, which
had remained semi-independent within the framework of the Raj, had an economy
the size of Belgium's, and his personal fortune was more remarkable still
-according to one contemporary estimate, it amounted to at least £100m in gold
and silver bullion and £400m in jewels. Many of these came from the Nizam's own
mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor and the Great Mogul diamond, at the time the
largest ever discovered. He also owned one of the Islamic world's great art
collections -libraries full of priceless Mughal and Deccani miniatures,
illuminated Qur'ans and the rarest and most esoteric Indo-Islamic
manuscripts.
Partly because of this extraordinary wealth, the Nizam was always
feted by the British as the most senior prince in India, and given precedence
over his rivals. For more than three centuries, his ancestors had ruled a state
the size of Italy as absolute monarch, answerable - in internal matters at least
- to no one but themselves, and claiming the allegiance of up to 15 million
subjects.
In the years leading up to the second world war, the Nizam was
regarded by many as the leading Muslim ruler in the world. In 1921, his two sons
had been sent to Nice where they married the daughter and the niece of Abdul
Majid II, the last Caliph of Turkey. The Caliph had recently been expelled from
the Topkapi palace by Atatürk, and sent into exile in France. As part of the
marriage arrangements, the Caliph had nominated the Nizam's son as heir to the
Caliphate, so uniting the supreme spiritual authority of the Muslim world with
its greatest concentration of riches. The dynasty seemed
unassailable.
Yet by the late 30s, more far-sighted observers realised that the
Nizam's world could not last. "He was as mad as a coot and his chief wife was
raving," I was told by Iris Portal, sister of the British politician Rab Butler.
She had worked in Hyderabad before independence: "It was like living in France
on the eve of the revolution. All the power was in the hands of the Muslim
nobility. They spent money like water, and were terrible, irresponsible
landlords, but they could be very charming and sophisticated as well. They would
take us shooting, talking all the while about their trips to England or to
Cannes and Paris, although in many ways Hyderabad was still in the middle ages
and the villages we would pass through were often desperately poor. You couldn't
help feeling that the whole great baroque structure could come crashing down at
any minute."
Portal
became friends with Princess Niloufer, the Nizam's daughter-in-law and niece of
the Caliph. One day, the princess took her to see some of the Nizam's treasure
which was hidden in one of the palaces. They went down a flight of stairs, past
a group of Bedouin guards, and there at the bottom was a huge underground vault,
full of trucks and haulage lorries. The trucks were dusty and neglected, their
tyres flat, but when the women pulled back a tarpaulin, they found that they
were full of gems, pearls and gold coins. The Nizam, fearful of either a
revolution or an Indian takeover of his state, had made plans to get some of his
wealth out of the country if the need came. But then he lost interest and left
the lorries to rot.
The
disintegration of the state, and the dispersal of the wealth of the Nizam, the
seventh in his line, is one of the 20th century's most dramatic reversals of
fortune. After months of failed negotiations, India invaded Hyderabad in 1948,
replacing the Nizam's autocratic rule with parliamentary democracy. Twenty-six
years later, in 1974, India abolished the Nizam's title - along with those of
all the other princes - removed their princely state pensions and made them
subject to crippling new taxes and land acts, forcing them to sell most of their
property.
When the
seventh Nizam died in February 1967, his grandson, Mukarram Jah, succeeded him,
quickly finding himself enmeshed in debts and financial chaos. He had inherited
a ridiculously inflated army of retainers: 14,718 staff and dependants,
including 42 of his grandfather's concubines and their 100-plus offspring. The
principal palace, the Chowmahalla, alone had 6,000 employees; there were around
3,000 Arab bodyguards, 28 people whose only job was to fetch drinking water and
38 more to dust chandeliers; several others were retained specifically to grind
the Nizam's walnuts. Everything was in disarray: the Nizam's garages, for
example, cost £45,000 a year to keep in petrol and spare parts for 60 cars, yet
only four were in working condition, and the limousine supposed to carry the new
Nizam from his coronation broke down.
Most
debilitating was the legal wrangling initiated by the several thousand
descendants of the different Nizams, almost all of whom claimed part of Jah's
inheritance. Jah's father, who had been passed over in the will, and his aunt
led the legal challenge. Even securing the smallest sum to live on proved
difficult for the new Nizam: his vast inheritance had been distributed among 54
trusts, the control of which was disputed. From the beginning, he was reduced to
selling jewellery and heirlooms to keep solvent.
Eventually,
in 1973, disgusted by the weight of litigation and the bitterness of the family
in-fighting, Jah relocated to a sheep farm in Perth, Australia. There, he donned
blue overalls and spent his days under the bonnets of his cars or driving
bulldozers. As his biographer, John Zubrzycki, put it in The Last Nizam: "His
grandfather composed couplets in Persian about unrequited love. To Jah's ears
there was nothing more poetic than the drone of a diesel engine."
Jah sacked
most of the 14,000 staff he left behind in India, and divorced his first wife,
the sophisticated Turkish princess Esra, who saw no reason why she should move
to a remote Australian sheep station. Over the following two decades he married
four more times. One of his wives, a secretary named Helen Simmons, died of an
Aids-related illness in 1989, which led to intimate details of the marriage
being splashed across Australian tabloids. All five of the marriages added to
Jah's growing pile of litigation, as each successive wife demanded fabulous sums
in alimony.
In his
absence, Jah's unsupervised Hyderabad properties were looted and his possessions
dispersed by a succession of incompetent, dishonest or unscrupulous advisers.
When Jackie Kennedy came to Hyderabad on a private visit a few years later, she
recorded her impressions of this collapsing and leaderless remnant in a letter
to a friend: "We had an evening with the old noblemen of the court..." she
wrote. "There were three ancient classical musicians playing in the moonlight,
and the noblemen were speaking of how it was all disappearing, that the youth
didn't appreciate the ways of the old culture, that the great chefs were being
taken by the Emirates... The evening was profoundly sad. My son, John, told me
the next day that the sons of the house had taken him to their rooms because
they couldn't stand the classical music - and had offered him a tall glass
filled with whisky and had put on a pornographic cassette in the Betamax, and
the Rolling Stones on the tape deck. They wore tight Italian pants and open
shirts..."
In 1997,
when I first visited Hyderabad, the plundering of the Nizam's property was
nearly complete. The drawing rooms of the city were still buzzing with stories
of how precious jewels, manuscripts, Louis XIV furniture and chandeliers from
the Nizam's palaces were available on the market, for a price.
Meanwhile,
his various palaces were decaying - some sealed by order of court, some sold off
or encroached upon. Between 1967 and 2001, the Chowmahalla estate shrank from 54
acres to 12, as courtyard after courtyard, ballrooms and stable blocks - even
the famous "mile-long" banqueting hall - were acquired by developers, who
demolished the 18th-century buildings and erected concrete apartments in their
place.
I visited
the huge Victorian pile of the Falaknuma Palace, just to the south of the city.
The complex, which stood above the town on its own acropolis, was falling into
ruin, with every window and doorway sealed by red wax. Wiping the windows, I
could see cobwebs the size of bedsheets hanging from the corners of the rooms.
The skeletons of outsized Victorian sofas and armchairs lay dotted around the
parquet floors, their chintz upholstery eaten away by white ants. Outside, the
gardens had given way to scrub flats, waterless fountains, and paint-flaking
flagpoles at crazy angles. It was a truly melancholy sight: a derelict
Ruritania.
In 2001, on
another research trip to Hyderabad, I received a phone call from a friend. The
first wife of the present Nizam, Princess Esra, had unexpectedly appeared in the
city after an absence of three decades. With her, she had brought the celebrated
Indian lawyer Vijay Shankardass. Esra, it seemed, had recently met her
ex-husband at the wedding of their son, Azmet, in London. She was shocked to
hear of the state of Jah's affairs: he had been forced to sell his beloved sheep
farm and flee his creditors. A partial reconciliation followed, and Esra was
given the authority by Jah to try to save something for their son and daughter
before what little remained in Hyderabad disappeared, too. It was her intention
to settle the many outstanding law cases, open the palaces and lease Falaknuma
to a hotel chain. She planned to turn Chowmahalla into a museum.
Chowmahalla, dating from 1751, was one of the finest
royal residences in India. After some negotiation, I was allowed to accompany
the princess on her visit, and so was there at the breaking of the seals of some
rooms that had not been opened since the death of the previous Nizam in
1967.
What we saw
was extraordinary, as if we were in the palace of Sleeping Beauty. In one
underground storeroom, thousands of ancient scimitars, swords, helmets, maces,
daggers, archery equipment and suits of armour lay rusted into a single metallic
mass on a line of trestle tables. In another, album after album of around 8,000
Victorian and Edwardian photographs of the Nizam's household was covered in a
thick cladding of dust. A unique set of 160 harem photographs, dating from 1915,
lay loose in a box. On the walls, dynastic portraits were falling out of their
frames. In one room were great mountains of princely dresses, patkas, chaugoshia
and salvars, drawers of Kanchipuram silk saris, and one huge trunk containing
nothing but bow ties. There were long lines of court uniforms as well as sets of
harem clothes once worn by the Nizam's favourite wives. Almost 8,000 dinner
services survived, one of which alone had 2,600 pieces.
In the King
Kothi palace, the Nizam's dynasty's complete correspondence since the mid-18th
century filled three rooms floor to ceiling. When the archivists had been sacked
in 1972, the archive, all 10 and a half tonnes of it, had been stuffed into the
rooms and sealed. Other rooms were stacked with crates of French
champagne.
It looked
an impossible task even to begin to sort out the mess and dilapidation. Yet
remarkably, six years later, the Chowmahalla is now open to the public and 1,000
visitors a day are streaming through. A massive conservation project, unique in
India, has restored and catalogued the best of what remains. The result is
little short of incredible.
In the
story of how the Nizam's inheritance was saved, Esra's lawyer, Vijay
Shankardass, plays the most extraordinary role. An urbane figure, Shankardass is
the only lawyer who has both chambers in Lincoln's Inn and a practice in Delhi.
He is renowned for being as clever as he is honest and, as the man who
represents Salman Rushdie, he is also celebrated for his courage and
tenacity.
I met him
in the largest suite of Hyderabad's grandest hotel, which he has occupied
intermittently since beginning work on the Nizam's estate in 1996: "I was
contacted by Princess Esra's lawyers in England," he told me, "and asked if I
could intervene in trying to sort out the jewellery trusts which the last Nizam
had set up." His initial response had been: " 'No way - it sounds like a snake
pit.' No other Indian royal family had this level of indebtedness and financial
chaos..." Then he met Esra and decided she was a remarkable woman - "upright,
straight, clear-headed and trustworthy. So I agreed to help."
It was
Shankardass's amazing achievement to have persuaded all 2,740 claimants -
legitimate and illegitimate descendants of the different Nizams - to agree to a
settlement of the jewel issue. In the process he was regularly blackmailed and
threatened, both by the Hyderabadi mafia and the claimants them-selves. Several
threatened to shoot him; on one occasion his car was hijacked as he drove to the
airport. "There were some extremely rough men among the sahibzadas [princes],"
he said. "Undesirable characters - hollow, shallow and proud. I had to have a
full-time guard for two years."
In the end,
the Indian government banned the export and public auction of the jewels, which
they rightly regarded as a national treasure, but instead agreed to pay around
£40m for them - less than a quarter of the market value, but much more than
anyone had expected from the government. Of this, just under half was to go to
the Nizam.
Next, the
130-odd legal cases still outstanding against the Nizam were settled, and debts,
then standing at around £3m, were paid off.
All this
still left a considerable fund for Esra to invest in the restoration of the
Nizam's properties. She has the same talent for picking honest and effective
people to work for her as her husband once proved to have for employing crooks.
To supervise the restoration of Chowmahalla she chose Martand Singh, chairman
and one of the founders of Intach, the Indian National Trust: "The first time I
saw the state the palace was in, I thought it would be impossible to save,"
Singh remembers. "I thought it was hopeless. After the Nizam sacked his 14,000
staff, it had gone to the dogs. Decomposition can set in very quickly in India -
one monsoon can do it - and these properties had been neglected for 30 years.
Most of the decay was actually cosmetic. From the start, Esra was completely
positive. She asked, 'How long is this going to take?' 'Three to four years,'
she was told. 'Too long,' she replied. 'I want it done in two.' And Rahul
succeeded in two and a half."
The first
task was to restore a service wing of the palace, which was turned into a
scholars' retreat, where architects, urban designers, art and ceramic
consultants, conservators, specialist carpenters, photographic experts, textile
restorers, antique upholsterers and historians could be lodged while they worked
on the different collections. A conservation laboratory and museum store area
followed. By 2002, the largest team of restorers ever employed on an Indian
restoration project was at work. The collection of arms, along with the best of
the textiles, carriages and photographic records - including the harem pictures,
published here for the first time - were ready for the recent grand opening of
the Chowmahalla palace.
Fifteen
Urdu and Persian scholars are currently sifting through the Nizam's vast
archives. Already they have stumbled across a major historical discovery: the
Nizam's negotiations in the early 40s with the Portuguese to buy Goa and so
provide his state with a port, and with it a real hope - never realised, perhaps
thankfully - of remaining independent from India once the British finally quit
India.
Last month,
Princess Esra returned to Hyderabad from her base on an island off Istanbul, to
oversee progress. She swept in, sari-clad, imperious, a flurry of energy, and as
ever, everyone stood to attention. Long lines of unframed canvases were laid out
along the corridors and she walked past them, giving an instant decision. "No,
not that one. It's Venetian - I don't like it. Not that, either. Now look at
that - the sixth Nizam out riding with the Kaiser - yes, send that off for
restoration immediately."
I asked if,
looking back, she had any regrets. "Many," she said. "If I had the head on my
shoulders I have now a few years ago, I would never have let things get into the
state they did. But I was too young. At the time it all seemed impossible - the
law suits, the huge taxes, debts accumulating, criminal cases, people abusing
the trust we had put in them. We had no ready cash, and the palaces seemed like
white elephants. So we fled, and then terrible things happened. So much just
disappeared - jades, miniatures, furniture, chandeliers..."
"And the
Nizam?"
"He had a
brilliant brain when I met him," she said. "He'd had the best education money
could buy - Harrow, Cambridge, LSE, Sandhurst. But partly because of his
diabetes he went into decline, and in the end really, well, disintegrated. Today
he keeps to himself in Turkey. Lives simply, doesn't love extravagance. Lives in
a two-room flat in Antalya, and spends his time exploring Roman ruins, going
swimming... He's upset, of course - that he didn't achieve what he had hoped,
and he feels awkward he let so much go. He wishes he had done things differently
- but then that is true of most people..."
Esra's
47-year-old son Azmet, heir to the eighth Nizam, Mukarram Jah, hopes to come
back to Hyderabad and take on what remains of the family role in the city. Bin
Laden and the assorted Islamist extremists who hope to bring back the
institution of the Caliphate are no doubt unaware that Azmet, the man who has
the strongest legal claim to inherit the title, was until recently a
Hollywood-based cameraman who has worked with Steven Spielberg, Richard
Attenborough, Nicolas Roeg.
"I am
planning to spend much more time here," Azmet told me. "The death threats and
law suits that kept us away are cleared up now, and I have great affection for
this place." He paused: "I am determined to maintain what has been saved. We'll
not make the same mistakes again."
· William Dalrymple latest book is The Last Mughal: The
Fall Of A Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (Bloomsbury)
