Hyderabad was India's
Shangri-la, a land of palaces and harems ruled by a mad and monied despot.
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE uncovers its diamond-studded, djinn-soaked past
"Fibs," said Mir Moazam Hussain. "That's what every one of your generation
thinks I'm telling, at least when I talk about Hyderabad in the old days. You
all think I'm telling the most outrageous fibs."
The old man settled himself back in his chair and shook his head, half-amused,
half-frustrated: "My grandchildren, for instance. For them, the old world of
Hyderabad is completely inconceivable: they can barely imagine that such a world
could exist."
"But what exactly can't they believe?" I asked.
"Well the whole bang-shoot really: the Nizam and his nobles and their palaces
with their zenanas (harem) and the entire what-have-you that went with the
Hyderabad state."
Mir Moazam is a sprightly and intelligent 84-year-old, with a broad forehead and
sparkling brown eyes. "Take the palace I grew up in," he continued. "It was by
no means the biggest but it had a staff of 927 people, including three doctors.
There was even a regiment of African women who were there just to guard the
zenana. But tell that to my grandchildren. They've seen how we live today, and
they just think that I'm making it up. Especially when I start telling them
about my grandfather, Fakrool Mulk. He was a remarkable man, a great servant of
the state, but he was also - how shall I put it - a larger-than-life character."
"Tell me about him."
"Well, where shall I start? You see, although my grandfather was deputy prime
minister in the Nizam's government, his real passion was building. Over the
course of his life, he built this great series of vast, rambling palaces, but he
was never satisfied. As soon as he had finished one, he immediately began to
build another. Sometimes he would just give an entire palace away. Of course, he
built up enormous debts in the process."
"Was he a trained architect?"
"Well, that was precisely the problem. No, he wasn't. But every evening he would
go out for a walk, and with him he would take his walking stick and this great
entourage of his staff, which always included his secretary, his master mason,
his builders and a couple of his household poets - some 30 or 40 people in all.
"Anyway, on these walks - when the inspiration came - he would begin to draw in
the sand with his walking stick; maybe a new stable block, or a new palace,
according to how the fancy took him. The draughtsmen he had brought with him
would jot it down on paper and then draw it up when they got back. Well into his
seventies he was still adding new wings to his palaces."
"Did he have a favourite palace?"
"The one he lived in the longest was Iram Manzil. It wasn't the largest, but the
reason he really loved it was the stuffed tiger."
"The stuffed tiger?"
"You see, after building, my grandfather's other great love was tiger shooting,
and the season for shooting tigers was only a few months each year. So, on the
hill outside Iram Manzil, he built this railway track and on the track he placed
a stuffed tiger on wheels. It would be let loose from the top of the hill and we
would all line up and let fire with our double-barrels: bang! bang! bang! All of
us aiming at this wretched tiger as it careered down the hill. By the time it
reached the end of the track it was blown to bits, poor thing. So the men who
were employed to look after the tiger would patch it up and pull it back up, and
off we'd go again.
"But, like my grandchildren," added Mir Moazam, looking me in the eyes, "you
probably find it difficult to conceive the life I'm describing. And why
shouldn't you? This entire world was almost completely uprooted years before you
were born."
But I did believe Mir Moazam, for I had long heard equally fantastical stories
about Hyderabad, which was, until 1948, a huge, autono-mous princely state in
central-southern India.
YEARS AGO, Iris Portal, an old friend of my grandmother, had told me how, one
day in the late 1930s, she had been taken to see some of the Nizam's treasure.
One of the Hyderabadi princesses had led Iris to a series of open-fronted sheds
in the grounds of one of nine palaces, past a group of Bedouin Arab guards all
lolling about half-asleep in a state of dishabille, and there at the back of the
sheds was a line of trucks. The trucks were dusty and neglected, their tyres
rotting and sinking into the ground, but when the two ladies pulled back a
tarpaulin, they found that the trucks were full to the hilt with gems and
precious stones and pearls and gold coins. The Nizam apparently lived in fear of
a revolution and had equipped the lorries so that, at short notice, he could get
some of his wealth out of the country if the need came. But then he lost
interest and left the lorries to rot, quite incapable of being driven anywhere,
but still full of their jewels.
For all the fairy-tale quality of these stories, I soon discovered that they
were confirmed in every detail by the most sober history books. The Nizam, Osman
Ali Khan, did indeed possess the largest fortune in the world: according to one
estimate it amounted to at least Pounds 100m in gold bullion and Pounds 400m in
jewels, many of which came from his own Golconda mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor.
For the first half of the 20th century, the Nizam ruled 15m subjects and a state
the size of Italy as absolute monarch, answerable (in internal matters at least)
to nobody but himself. Nor was Hyderabad a poor country: in its final year of
existence, 1947-8, the income of the state rivalled that of Belgium and exceeded
that of 20 member states of the United Nations.
Fragments of this lost world still survive as you drive through the city today.
New buildings are mushrooming everywhere, often built over the old Indo-Islamic
bazaars and the colonial town houses. But look a little further and you soon
discover that many small pools of the old Hyderabad are still completely intact.
The Falaknuma Palace is one such place. A huge complex of white classical
palaces raised above the town on its own acropolis, the Falaknuma was the
principal residence of the sixth Nizam. But, today, it is subject to a bitter
legal dis-pute and the entire palace complex lies empty, locked by court order,
with every doorway sealed by red wax. Wipe the windows and peer inside and you
see cobwebs the size of bedsheets hanging from the corners. The skeletons of
outsize Victorian sofas and armchairs lie dotted around the parquet floors,
their chintz entirely eaten away by white ants, so that all that remains is the
wooden frame, the springs and a little of the stuffing. Beyond are long, gloomy
corridors, leading to unseen inner courtyards and zenana wings, mile upon mile
of empty, classical arcades and melancholy bow fronts, now quite empty but for a
pair of lonely chowkidars (guards) shuffling around with their lathis (long
sticks) and whistles.
That this fairy-tale extravagance has always been part of the culture of
Hyderabad is demonstrated by the Qutb Shahi tombs, a short distance to the east
of the Falaknuma. They are wonderfully ebullient monuments dating from the 16th
century, with domes swelling out of all proportion to the base, each like a
watermelon attempting to balance on a fig. Above the domes rises the citadel of
Golconda, source of the ceaseless stream of diamonds that ensured that
Hyderabad's rulers would never be poor. Inside the walls, you pass a succession
of harems and bathing pools, pavilions and pleasure gardens - a world that seems
to have jumped straight out of the pages of the Arabian Nights.
This oddly romantic and courtly atmosphere infected even the sober British when
they arrived in Hyderabad at the end of the 18th century, and the city became
the location of one of the most affecting of Anglo-Indian love stories. The old
British Residency, now the University College for Women, is an imposing
palladian villa that shelters in a fortified garden in the south of the town.
The complex was built by James Achilles Kirkpatrick, who, shortly after arriving
in Hyderabad, fell in love with Khair-un-Nissa (Excellent Among Women), a
great-niece of the dewan of Hyderabad, whom he married in 1800 according to
Muslim law.
I found a battered token of Kirkpatrick's love for his wife surviving today in
the garden at the back of the residency. As Khair-un-Nissa remained all her life
in strict purdah, living in a separate bibi ghar at the end of Kirkpatrick's
garden, she was unable to walk around the side of her husband's great creation
to admire its wonderful portico. Eventually, the resident hit upon a solution
and built a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace for her, so that she
could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with her own
eyes. The model survived intact until the 1980s, when a tree fell on it,
smashing the right wing. The remains of the left wing and central block now lie
under a piece of corrugated iron, near the ruins of the Mogul bibi ghar , buried
deep beneath a jungle of vines and creepers, in an area still known as the
Begum's Garden.
Another legacy of Old Hyderabad to filter down to the modern streets is a
fondness for witchcraft and sorcery. In the Lad Bazar, a short distance from the
Charminar, I found a shop that sold nothing but charms and talismans: silver
ta'wiz blessed by Sufis, special kinds of attar that deflected the evil eye,
nails worried into the shape of a cobra to protect from snake bites. On one side
of the shop were piled huge bundles of thorns: "Put them at the entrance of your
gate along with a lime and a green chilli and it will take on any bad magic,"
said Ali Mohammed, who ran the shop.
"Do you really believe they work?" I asked.
"Definitely," said Ali Mohammed. "I have seen it for myself. The murshad
(sorcerers) of Hyderabad are very powerful. They can kill a man with a look if
they want to."
"Magic? Oh yes, there was no shortage of magic," said Mir Moazam's wife, the
Begum Meherunissa, when I told her about my conversation in the bazaar later
that afternoon. "In the time of the Nizam, there were many such stories. On
summer evenings, the womenfolk of my family would go for a stroll in one of the
gardens. One day, after we had returned, my aunt began to behave very oddly, and
there was this smell of roses wherever she went. Luckily, my grandfather
realised what had happened. He called a mur shad , who questioned my aunt. Quite
suddenly, she started speaking with a man's voice, saying, 'I am the djinn of
the rose garden and I am in love with this woman.' The murshad performed an
exorcism and the djinn was sent off. After that, the murshad became a regular
visitor. He could work small miracles."
"You saw him work miracles?"
"Many times. Or rather not him so much as his djinn."
"He had his own djinn?"
"That's right. To master a djinn you must first fast for 40 days. Very few
succeed. But this man succeeded and the djinn gave him the strong powers. The
children of Hyderabad all knew him as Misri Wallah Pir (the Holy Man Who Gives
Sweets) and they would run after him and shout, 'Pir, sahib, give us sugar.' So
he would bend down and pick up a handful of mud and throw it and, before it
reached us, midway in the air, it would turn to sugar. It was delicious: clean
and white, with no sand or impurity. My mother was very angry when I told her I
had eaten some of Misri Wallah Pir's sugar, and said that it would become mud
again in my stomach. But it never did me any harm."
"So you saw him turn mud into sugar more than once?"
"Often. We children would follow him around and spy on him. Once, my friend
asked Misri Wallah Pir for some biryani. Pir sahib said, 'I am a poor man, how
can I afford biryani?' But we pleaded with him and eventually he called his
djinn - ' Idder ao Mowak hal !' ('Come here, spirit!'). And, within seconds, a
delicious biryani appeared before us out of the thin air.
"Another time, a sick man begged him for grapes. It was not the season, but the
djinn brought them all the same."
"But, you see, everything changed after the independence," said Mir Moazam,
who had listened to his wife's story. "After the Indian army invaded and toppled
the Nizam in 1948, that whole world collapsed. I left for Paris to work with
Unesco and barely recognised Hyderabad when I returned 20 years later. Almost
all the great houses had gone. The aristocracy lost their status and their
income after the fall of the Nizam, so they sold everything - land, houses. They
knew nothing about business, selling their heritage was the only way to make
ends meet."
The old man took my hand: "My children tell me you mustn't live in your
memories. And they are right, of course. That is why I never go back to the old
palaces where I spent my childhood. At every step there are fragments of
history. And, frankly, it breaks my old heart to see them as they are today."
* William Dalrymple
travelled to India as a guest of Greaves Travel (0171-487 9111). His new book,
The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters, is published by HarperCollins