CHAPTER 5

A Very Eastern Pantomime

THE ‘DAYS OF THE BELOVED’ were over, but to early twentiethcentury travellers the mystique of the Nizams remained. ‘The city of Hyderabad seems to have been dropped to the earth from an Oriental dream,’ wrote Elizabeth Cooper in her classic account of life behind the veil, The Harim and the Purdah, written just after Mahboob Ali Khan’s death. ‘It is the most Eastern city in this most Eastern land and you are filled with a sense that it is not at all real, but especially staged and set for your amusement, and when you leave, it will all disappear.’ Hyderabad, she continued, was a city of goldsmiths making bracelets, nose-rings and necklaces ‘for dark-eyed women within the zenanas’, of shopkeepers with their ‘great wreaths of white flowers . . . marigolds and garlands to be hung about the necks of friends, or to curtain the doorways at some feast or wedding’, and of the elephant ‘swaying in the street, looking with keen, twinkling eyes at the people who make way for him’. To Cooper it all seemed ‘a part of a pantomime, or a mirage caused by the brilliant sunshine of this Southland’.¹

Stepping uneasily into this very Eastern pantomime was ‘a quiet, serious-minded young man, well-disciplined, polite, unostentatious and self-effacing’.² Osman Ali Khan was 24 when the minister of police, Nawab Shahab Jung, climbed the steps of the Charminar in the centre of the old city, removed his turban, placed a white handkerchief on his head and called out: ‘The state belongs to God and the grace and the power to Mir Osman Ali Khan Asaf Jah VII.’³

In Hyderabad the investiture of a new Nizam on the musnud was always a brief and largely private affair. After sending a telegram to the Viceroy’s representative informing him that Mahboob Ali Khan had died, Alexander Pinhey looked in vain through the Residency records to find what protocol should be followed now that there was no longer an Emperor in Delhi to issue a farman confirming the title on the new Nizam. He concluded that a special ceremony would have to be invented for the state if there was to be a full-blown investiture, but ultimately warned against it. ‘Any innovation of this kind would, judging from innate conservatism and adherence to every form of ancient customs of the Hyderabad State, give rise to many difficulties and I cannot recommend it.’⁴

The day after Mahboob’s burial, Pinhey attended the condolence darbar at the King Kothi palace, which the Sixth Nizam had given to his son. King Kothi had earlier been ‘offered’ to Mahboob Ali Khan by a nobleman known as Kamal Khan after the Nizam hinted rather loudly that he liked the buildings. Instead of changing the initials of the owner, which were embossed as ‘KK’ all over the building, the name was changed to King Kothi. Today the few remaining habitable rooms of the palace house the office of the Nizam’s private estate. The others have been sealed to prevent thieves carrying away whatever remains of value. Stray dogs bark at strangers from behind piles of bricks. Vast cracks have appeared in the walls of those buildings that somehow have withstood decades of monsoonal downpours. In the reception hall stands a lonely stuffed tiger, its glass eyes staring vacantly across a room full of abandoned furniture and rotting curtains. The timberwork is infested with white ants and water occasionally seeps up through the granite floor. Only a fraction of the original palace complex remains; the rest has been sold off to pay tax bills, or has been encroached upon by shops, marriage halls and housing complexes.

Entering the Majli Begam-ki-Haveli, where the condolence darbar was being held, Pinhey was struck by how dilapidated and unkempt much of the palace was even then. The haveli, he wrote, ‘consists of an untidy, not to say squalid looking, courtyard with a fair-sized hall at one side where the Darbar was held’. The whole place looked like it had been ‘unoccupied for years’. ‘In spite of these uncompromising surroundings, so characteristic of the simple habits and attachment to old customs inherent in the ruling family, the proceedings of the Darbar were most impressive,’ Pinhey recorded in his notes. ‘His Highness conducted himself with great dignity and self-possession.’⁵

The next day Pinhey attended the installation darbar at the Khilawat in the Chowmahalla palace. Once again he was struck by how low-key both the ceremony and the surroundings were compared with the prominence and wealth of Hyderabad. ‘Though picturesque, [the Khilawat] cannot compare in size and grandeur with buildings set apart for such purposes in many less important States.’⁶ After the Nizam was presented with nazars by the nobles of the state, Pinhey gave a speech in which he underlined the debt the Nizam owed the British for being put on the throne in the first place. ‘I know it is unnecessary for me to refer to that policy of friendship and loyalty towards the Paramount Power and the confidence in the British Resident, which has been pursued with such conspicuous success and advantage by all your ancestors,’ he told his audience. ‘The continuance of this policy in your Highness’ case may be taken for granted.’⁷

It was not just a case of toeing the line. The British genuinely believed that without the Raj to guide him, Osman Ali Khan, like all his predecessors, would be unable to rule effectively. The new Nizam ‘has been kept very much in the background owing to his differences with his father, and has consequently had little experience in dealing with affairs of the State. A great deal will therefore depend upon such personal influence as may be exercised over him by the Resident,’ Pinhey informed his superiors.⁸

One week after the low-key installation, a traditional darbar was held at Baradari House accompanied by pomp and ceremony more in keeping with Hyderabad’s position in the hierarchy of India’s princely states. Osman Ali Khan wore a muslin cloth dastar (turban) with ‘a golden crest, wrapped in front with a jewelled ornament set in gold, a brocade sherwani designed in vertical stripes, jewelled armlets round the arms and jewelled bracelets on the wrists, a string of pearls, bedecked with glittering diamonds in the neck’.⁹ After a cock was sacrificed, 18 prisoners released and nazars presented by the invited nobles, he mounted a royal elephant and led a procession through the packed streets of the old city.

The suddenness of Mahboob Ali Khan’s death had caught the Residency by surprise. When Osman Ali Khan was proclaimed his successor, urgent telegrams arrived from the Viceroy’s office asking for information about the new ruler. Pinhey conceded that records ‘bearing on the life and character of the new Nizam’ were ‘very meagre’. ‘We have never received any information in any way disparaging to his character.’ Nevertheless, Pinhey added, ‘he is necessarily a very unknown and untried individual’.¹⁰

Official histories of Hyderabad published during his lifetime state that Osman Ali Khan was born in Purani Haveli on 6 April 1886, but they become vague after that. In reality, he was born out of wedlock to a concubine from his father’s well-stocked zenana. Mahboob Ali Khan was only 16 when he met Osman’s mother, Amat-uz-Zehra Begum. One of the several hundred women in the zenana, she was a Shia Muslim and was said to be the granddaughter of Salar Jung and one of his temporary Hindu wives. Osman was the second union of Mahboob’s nocturnal liaisons with Amat-uz-Zehra. The first child died soon after it was born. Pinhey, however, omitted these details in his response to his superiors and instead focussed on the new ruler’s suitability for the tasks ahead. ‘The present Nizam seems, as far as education or training is concerned, to have been much neglected as a boy. The matter caused anxiety to several residents and Viceroys but the [late] Nizam was hard to move.’¹¹

Mahboob Ali Khan was initially opposed to the appointment of an Englishman as the superintendent of his eldest son after being persuaded by his peshi secretary, Sarwar Jung, that such an arrangement would strengthen the hand of the Resident against the Nizam and that his salary would be a burden on the treasury. Instead, Sarwar Jung proposed a scheme whereby several ‘native tutors’, a gentleman-in-waiting and a physician would be hired to bring up the boy. While the presence of an English superintendent was considered essential to balance out the corrupting influence of the palace, British policy at the time was against Indian princes being educated entirely on European lines. ‘We want ruling chiefs in touch with their people, not absentee landlords who race and drink and get into the hands of low Europeans. They are worse than useless,’ Foreign Secretary Mortimer Durand argued in 1894.¹²

Eventually, after the personal intervention of the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, the Nizam was persuaded to make Brian Egerton, an ex-officer in the Punjab police, his son’s tutor in 1899. Egerton was well qualified. He had tutored the Maharajah of Bikaner and had a reputation for ‘turning proper men out of the pampered heirs of princely India’.¹³ Writing to Egerton before he took up his appointment, the Resident described Osman Ali Khan as ‘very shy and dull looking, stoutly built but not attractive. If anything is to be made of him there is literally no time to lose I venture to think . . . The late Nizam has kept him very secluded and has given him no opportunities of travel or of learning experience even in Hyderabad state.’ Apart from Egerton, Osman Ali Khan had Indian tutors to give him lessons in Urdu, Arabic, Persian, theology and Islamic jurisprudence. ‘Instruction in riding, shooting and other manly exercises was not neglected,’ observed his official biographer, D. F. Karaka.¹⁴ He was excellent at tent pegging, riding and at sheep cutting, a sport that involved using a sword while galloping on a horse to slice in half a sheep hanging from a pole. On ‘graduating’ from the palace school, Egerton described Osman Ali Khan as ‘an accomplished gentleman of good family and suave manners’. But for all the stress on developing ‘proper English habits’ such as polo playing, hunting and shooting, Osman Ali Khan preferred to spend his time reading and composing Persian poetry.¹⁵

Though he was brought up in virtual seclusion, Osman Ali Khan was aware of how the conspicuous spending habits of his father and the nobility had bankrupted the state. He developed a strong dislike of the ostentation and indolence of the court and recognised early on the damaging effect of the Sixth Nizam’s hands-off approach to government. He would prove to be a very different ruler from his father both in style and substance. Instead of appearing on a jewel-bedecked elephant at his wedding in 1906, he threw the assembled dignitaries and soldiers off-guard by entering in a battered old car. Every time Mahboob Ali Khan passed through the gate of Purani Haveli he would be showered with artificial flowers made of gold and silver, which were released from a specially constructed box. The entrance to Osman Ali Khan’s palace King Kothi, by contrast, was known as the ‘Purdah Gate’ because it was hidden by a heavy canvas curtain. The curtain still hangs there, mouldy and forlorn. The gate rusted shut decades ago.

Like all previous Nizams, Osman Ali Khan quickly established a sizeable zenana. Behind Nazari Bagh, the residential wing of King Kothi, stand two buildings, both of which are now sealed. The largest, a two-storeyed structure with more than 30 rooms on each floor radiating from a central communal bathroom, was for his concubines. The smaller one was better appointed and meant for his favourite wives. It was linked to the first floor of the main palace by what was dubbed the ‘Bridge of Sighs’. Mukarram Jah remembers how his grandfather would inform the woman he wanted to spend the night with by entering the garden outside the zenana quarters where the wives would gather in the late afternoon and placing a white handkerchief on the chosen one’s shoulder. ‘That way she would know she had to report to his bedroom at nine o’clock.’¹⁶

Surrounded by weeds, blackened by mould, their balconies in danger of collapsing, the zenana quarters today resemble a disused barracks rather than some kind of pleasure garden where soft breezes would bring scents of mimosa and jasmine through latticed windows. A somewhat romanticised account written in the mid-1920s describes Osman Ali Khan’s wives and concubines living in luxurious quarters protected by beefy amazon guards. ‘The women lie on couches of brocade and silk, eating sweetmeats and drinking perfumed coffee. Some of them play musical instruments, some of them sing, all of them gossip. A few of them read poems . . . their eyes holding longing or resignation.’¹⁷

Osman Ali Khan’s first wife, Dulhan Pasha Begum, was the daughter of a nawab from a side branch of the Nizam’s family. The Nizam had three other official wives, including the niece of the Aga Khan (who spent much of the twenties cooling his heels in Nice on the French Riviera). The number of his wives varied from around 200 in the 1920s to 42 at the time of his death in 1967. By then the number of children and grandchildren had swelled to nearly a hundred. In 2005 the number of direct descendants of Osman Ali Khan had crossed the 500 mark, with almost all of them involved in some form of litigation against Mukarram Jah for a share of the late Nizam’s wealth.

Once described by one British aide de camp as resembling a rat, Dulhan Pasha was given her own quarters across the road from King Kothi in a separate palace complex known as Eden Gardens. In her early years she was an accomplished poet and grower of roses, but in her later years she became infamous for wandering around the city half-naked and watching her servants copulate. ‘She would beat up the Nizam when she saw him, throw her slippers at him she was that mad,’ recalls Habeeb Jung, a Paigah noble who was a close confidant of both the Seventh Nizam and Mukarram Jah. ‘She used to call him a chaush – a highly offensive term which means Bedouin Arab.’¹⁸

In February 1907 Dulhan Pasha gave birth to their first son, Azam Jah, and 10 months later to a second, Moazzam Jah. The only daughter from the marriage, Shehezadi Pasha, remained unmarried and rarely left her father’s side. When taking his afternoon nap, the Nizam would tie the cord of his pyjama pants to hers in case she tried to spirit away some of the priceless jewels that were strewn haphazardly around his bedroom. The Nizams believed that if one of their legitimate daughters married and went out of the family it would cause the death of her father. Another superstition stated that if a child was born to her then the father would also die. Forced to lead a miserable and lonely life of constant servitude, Shehezadi Pasha would take her revenge after her father’s death in 1967 by challenging Mukarram Jah’s right to inherit the bulk of his grandfather’s estate.

Despite British fears that he would be an ineffectual ruler, Osman Ali Khan embarked on a series of far-sighted reforms. One of his first farmans was an order restraining Hyderabad’s eunuchs from luring fresh recruits into their ranks, to stem an alarming rise in their numbers. He then banned the institution of devadasis – a religiously sanctioned form of prostitution where young girls were ostensibly married to the Gods but were in fact sold into sexual slavery. He also outlawed some of the more indulgent pastimes enjoyed by Hyderabad’s nawabs such as cockfighting and bullfights and decreed that smoking in courtrooms was bad for judicial decorum.¹⁹

On the fiscal front, the Nizam instituted a number of measures under the guidance of Reginald Glancy, who was the financial advisor to the state. Glancy’s priority was to set right ‘the problem of heavy indebtedness of the Hyderabad nobility as a class, owing to their habit of loose living and undue extravagancy’.²⁰ The most extravagant of the nobles were the Paigahs. Ever since the reign of the first Nizam, the Paigahs had enjoyed special privileges as the private troops of the Nizam’s household. They had been rewarded with vast estates and used the income to build lavish palaces. When Osman Ali Khan took measures to rein in the Paigahs’ expenditure by confiscating their lands, they responded in the time-honoured fashion of plotting against the Nizam by spreading stories that he drank heavily and was involved in all kinds of debauchery.

There was more than a kernel of truth in these allegations. In January 1912, Pinhey, who had taken a close interest in the welfare of the Nizam, advised the young ruler to abstain from wine, women and drugs, to take exercise regularly and not to surround himself with sycophants and spies.²¹ Outwardly a devout Muslim and traditional Indian ruler, Osman Ali Khan had nevertheless developed in his early years a taste for European pleasures. His preferred beverages were invalid port and Moët & Chandon, of which several thousand cases were ordered from France. He set up a whisky distillery and ordered his suits from the firm of Messrs John Barton & Co. in Secunderabad.

To satisfy his newly acquired taste for ballroom dancing Osman Ali Khan would hold lavish parties in the King Kothi palace where Anglo-Indian jazz bands played his favourite tunes, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and ‘Whisperings’. ‘His guests varied according to each occasion, from the stolid British Resident and his wife to the more cosmopolitan gatherings of local jazz fiends of lesser social value,’ wrote Karaka. ‘The Peggys and Maggies of Hyderabad at the time had the honour of being whirled around the improvised ballroom of King Kothi by the enthusiastic young ruler who was anxious to become a polished ballroom dancer.’²²

By April, Pinhey reported that his admonitions had brought about an ‘improvement’ in the Nizam. In fact, Osman Ali Khan was becoming an assertive ruler. The following June he sacked his Prime Minister, Maharajah Kishen Pershad, ostensibly for plotting to replace him with his half-brother Salabat Jah. In 1914 he took the administration of the state into his own hands. Osman Ali Khan had succeeded in breaking the power of the nobility and strengthening his position to a greater extent than any other ruler of Hyderabad since the First Nizam.

Although earlier attempts by the Nizams to take direct control of Hyderabad’s administration had usually been opposed, this time the Resident was happy to indulge the new ruler. When World War I broke out in Europe in July 1914, the Ottoman Turks sided with Germany and the Mufti of Constantinople issued an appeal to Muslims in India, Russia and Algeria to rise against their imperialist masters. Fearing a flare-up of pro-Turkish sentiments among Muslims in India, the British appealed to the Nizam to declare his allegiance to the Crown. As Pinhey admitted, this put the Nizam in somewhat of a dilemma as he owed allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II, who was the Caliph or spiritual head of Islam. ‘To place himself in direct and overt opposition to the call of the Khalifa meant a painful predicament for any Muhammadan ruler.’²³ Denouncing the Ottomans could spark a revolt among the large number of Arab soldiers recruited into his army, as well as radical Muslims who had protested when the Caliph’s name had been omitted from Friday prayers. In the end the Nizam sided with the British and issued a strongly worded farman. ‘The Mohammedan inhabitants of India, especially the subjects of this state, should, if they care for their own welfare and prosperity, remain firm and wholehearted in their loyalty and devotion to the British government, whose cause I believe is just and right,’ it declared. They should keep sacred the tie binding ‘the subjectpeople to their Rulers’ and in no case ‘allow themselves to be beguiled by the wiles of any one into a course of open or secret sedition against the British Government’.²⁴

Osman Ali Khan’s gamble paid off. In 1917 the British rewarded the Nizam for his declaration of support and considerable contribution to the war effort in both manpower and money amounting to £25 million by conferring on him the title ‘Most Faithful Ally of the British Empire’. A year later he became ‘His Exalted Highness’, which placed him heads and shoulders above all other Indian princes if not in physical stature then at least in political terms. The Nizam was ‘the true son of Islam’, Pinhey’s successor, Stuart Fraser, remarked. ‘With far seeing realisation alike of the true interests of his coreligionists and of his duty to the King-Emperor, [he] was content with no passive role of loyalty, but at once boldly stood forth as a leader and spokesman of Mahomedan India.’²⁵

Osman Ali Khan’s elevation by the British to the leader of India’s 66 million Muslims, however, proved to be a doubleedged sword. Calls were made for the Nizam to be made the King of Hyderabad in the same way as the British had made the Grand Sherif of Mecca, Haider Ali Pasha, the King of Hejaz (the lands around the holy places of Mecca and Medina). Muslim leaders and even Hindu princes began demanding that the Crown confer on him the title ‘His Majesty’. But Fraser firmly rejected the calls, saying ‘there could be no “His Majesty” among the feudatory Indian Princes’.²⁶

Disputes about titles notwithstanding, Osman Ali Khan’s period of direct rule is held up even today as the progressive age of Hyderabad’s development. Several commissions were set up to investigate the misappropriation of state funds by high-ranking officials. The revenue department was reorganised, and judicial reforms were introduced, bringing the court system into line with those parts of India under direct British rule. By 1919, just eight years after the state was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, its revenue had grown to a healthy surplus of 50 million rupees. Hyderabad also became a model for religious tolerance in India. To assuage the feelings of Hindus, Osman Ali Khan banned the slaughter of cows and made offerings at their shrines. ‘Muslims and Hindus are my two eyes,’ became one of his favourite expressions.

In 1916 the Nizam issued a farman ordering the foundation of Osmania University, the first institution of higher education in India to offer courses in a vernacular medium – in this case Urdu, the official language of the state. Elsewhere, dams were built and Hyderabad became one of first cities in India to have a reliable supply of drinking water. Schools were expanded and primary education was made compulsory. Roads were relaid with concrete, railways extended, collieries and power stations were set up, government-sponsored co-operative credit societies and agricultural banks were established. A City Improvement Board redeveloped slums into housing colonies. On the banks of the River Musi, the Indo-saracenic silhouettes of the newly built High Court and Osmania General Hospital rose above the palm trees. Hyderabad’s skyline, one visitor commented, was ‘surmounted by “bubbles blown of dreams”, an irresponsible and wholly delightful collection of domes which, like carnival balloons, might be expected at any moment to break loose and float into the sky’.²⁷

Now a sprawling metropolis of seven million people, where corruption and bureaucratic inaction pervades every layer of society, it is hard to reconcile Hyderabad with the model of urban planning it was once held up to be. Decades of uncontrolled growth have turned the city into an urban nightmare beset by power and water shortages and roads that turn to rivers of sewage every time it rains. The waters of the River Musi are so fetid that the stench can be discerned several blocks away. The road outside the High Court is an open urinal for much of its length and rag pickers sort through rotting piles of waste dumped indiscriminately along the main thoroughfares. Oldtimers vainly hold on to cherished memories of a city of 300,000 people with fastidiously maintained public gardens, streets that were regularly washed by water tankers, traffic that flowed smoothly and trains that were clean and always ran on time.

‘All this was not accomplished by waving a magician’s wand,’ stated a commemorative booklet written in the early 1950s honouring the Nizam’s achievements.

Day in and day out, even in the hottest part of the year, when Governments traditionally flitted to the hills, the Nizam was to be found sitting in a corner of King Kothi palace, plodding patiently through masses of files. To this day he has not taken a real holiday, his only relaxation being a regular drive every evening into the city. Grasping the nettle of corruption and rooting it out ruthlessly, the Nizam plucked away the weeds of peculation that without profit sucked the soil’s fertility; lopped away all superfluous branches in the shape of idle sinecures that drained the State’s exchequer. Unscrupulous officials, high and low, trembled. The people rejoiced, for here at last was a Ruler who could rule and was determined to do so in real earnest . . . The sceptics were amazed; the sycophants confounded. Honest men found useful service and the first round of the battle was won.²⁸

The view from the Residency, however, was somewhat different. As far as the British were concerned, the first round of the battle had just started. The honeymoon that followed the bestowing of honours on the Seventh Nizam for his services during World War I was short-lived. In April 1918, intoxicated by his new status, Osman Ali Khan sacked all his British advisors while the Resident was on leave. Among the ‘honest men’ that were appointed to replace them were a number of Indians deemed hostile to the interests of the Crown. ‘The Nizam, it seems, has behaved like a naughty child who away from his nurse at a party has had his head turned and gone back home full of foolish ideas determined to assert his independence,’ W. G. Neale wrote to the Viceroy’s office.²⁹

From being viewed as a progressive and far-sighted ruler, the Nizam had slipped dramatically in Britain’s estimation. During a visit to Hyderabad in March 1919, the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, gave Osman Ali Khan a dressing down that would set the tone for relations between the Residency and King Kothi palace for the remainder of his reign:

You have estranged your nobles, you have alienated your officials . . . you have undermined the respect and love of your people. Needless to say you have thereby shaken the confidence of the Government of India in your rule . . . It has always been clearly laid down that we cannot tolerate misrule; and results such as I have indicated are, to my mind, clear evidence of personal misrule.³⁰

But upsetting the status quo, represe nted by the nobility on the one hand and the British on the other, mattered little to Osman Ali Khan as long as the revenue of the Sarf-i-Aman (state treasury) was in surplus. After five years of the Nizam’s direct rule, his own personal estate was well on its way to becoming the largest in the world. The Sarf-i-Khas (private estate), which comprised 30 per cent of the land in the Nizam’s Dominions, was earning 25 million rupees a year. He had also inherited from his father untold amounts of jewellery, bulk pearls, kilograms of cut and uncut diamonds, gold in the form of coinage and bullion measured by the tonne and enough cash for most of it to lie unnoticed in cellars where it was nibbled by rats. Although the state treasury was virtually broke in 1911, the personal wealth of six generations of Asaf Jahis remained intact.

To the wider masses, however, Osman Ali Khan was determined to show a very different side of his character. He publicly abhorred the use of any goods that were not produced in Hyderabad. He would only smoke cheap, locally made filterless Charminars, ‘the most wretched cigarettes in the world’. He was so obsessive about allowing nothing to go to waste that he scrawled instructions and even drafted legally-binding farmans on the inside of his empty cigarette packets. ‘When I myself do all I can to purchase and use goods made in my own State, and when I say, for instance, that Golconda Soap, made in Hyderabad, is used in all my palaces and is found good and cheap, I think my action itself will appeal to my subjects to do likewise,’ he declared, adding self-assuredly: ‘They love me and the country too well to require further inducements to follow my example in this respect.’³¹

While such sentiments may have been understood and indeed appreciated by the local population, they were often derided by outsiders. His tendency to wear simple cotton pyjamas except for official events prompted one British Resident to describe him as resembling a ‘snuffly old clerk too old to be sacked’.³² At state banquets, paid for by the public purse, guests ate from gold plates and drank wine in gold goblets, but when an invitation came for tea in private, he would carefully count out the number of cookies he served his guests. Osman Ali Khan was fast becoming known as the Howard Hughes of India – a fabulously wealthy but miserly man who had sold his father’s women for 30 rupees and haggled over the price of mangoes. Many such stories had no basis in fact and still rankle the retired nawabs who spend their evenings downing pegs of Old Monk and Mansion House brandy at the Nizam Club’s bar before retiring for dusk-to-dawn rounds of rummy in the card room. To them the Nizam was a frugal and thrifty man whose self-denial was directed mostly at himself. ‘The fact is that thrift is a part of the Nizam’s nature, of his conception of the obligations of his position and of his conviction that he is not here to waste and throw away what the Almighty has endowed him with,’ his Parsi financial advisor, Khan Bahadur Cooverji Taraporevala, later wrote.³³

According to historian Rajendra Prasad, the satisfaction Osman Ali Khan felt in receiving so many honours for his financial contribution to Britain’s war efforts quickly gave way to concerns over how rapidly he was draining his coffers. ‘Until then there has been nothing in his lifestyle to indicate the coming notoriety for miserliness which he was to acquire later in life.’³⁴ The dance parties became less frequent and the champagne was gradually replaced by more traditional relaxants such as opium, which he would continue to consume daily until well into his seventies. He became more introverted. Although he owned a fleet of Packards, Fiats, Rolls-Royces, including a 1911 Silver Ghost which to this day has only 200 miles on the clock, for most of his reign he drove around in a 1934 six-cylinder Ford Tourer. An aide de camp who once pointed out that he needed a new shawl was firmly rebuked: ‘My budget is only 18 rupees and a good one would cost 20 rupees.’³⁵ When the Viceroy Linlithgow suggested to the Nizam that since his walking stick was broken in several places and tied together with string, he would present him with a new one the next time he visited, the Nizam took it as a great compliment. His thriftiness had been noted.

Stung by the dressing down he had received from Lord Birkenhead and swayed by the tentative start the British had made towards self-government in India, Osman Ali Khan announced on 17 November 1919 that he was handing over the administration of the state to an Executive Council operating under a written constitution. Under the new constitution the Diwan was replaced by a Sadr-i-Azam (President) who would head the Council. The Council’s powers and those of individual ministers were strictly defined. However, the creation of the Council was not the radical departure that it appeared to be. Though the Council had administrative powers, there was no enfranchisement of the population. Council members were appointed by the Nizam, who could overrule any of their decisions by simply issuing one of his own farmans. As Britain’s most senior civil servant in India, Sir Conrad Corfield, later wrote: ‘It was very much personal rule in Hyderabad.’³⁶

Nevertheless, the British initially welcomed the move and recommended the appointment of Ali Imam, who had been a Law Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council for the post of Sadr-i-Azam, a recommendation the Nizam accepted. A distinguished barrister who had risen to prominence as a result of his work in the High Court of Patna and the Federal Court, Ali Imam quickly made his presence felt. One of his first acts was to separate the executive from the judiciary, making Hyderabad the first Indian state to do so.

Ali Imam also resurrected on behalf of the Nizam ‘the all-important question of the restoration of Berar’, which the British considered had been settled by the agreement Curzon had obtained from the Sixth Nizam in 1902 to lease the territory in perpetuity. Osman Ali Khan saw it differently. His claim to this ‘integral part of my Dominions’ rested ‘on absolute justice and it is inconceivable that on an impartial examination it cannot be ruled out’. The Nizam was clearly hoping that Ali Imam’s impeccable legal credentials would bring the desired result. Helped by his brother, Hassan Imam, he produced a series of lengthy and detailed claims based in part on the fine print of treaties signed by the Second Nizam as far back as the 1790s. But the presentation was badly handled. Ali Imam marched into the office of the Viceroy, Lord Reading, in March 1925 and threatened to make public the ‘incontrovertible evidence’ of the duress that Curzon had used to obtain the agreement. Reading responded by thumping the table in a rage and terminating the meeting, at which point Ali Imam ‘almost collapsed and the Viceroy had to send for water to revive him’.³⁷

Not surprisingly, Reading rejected Hyderabad’s claim, but the Nizam refused to let the matter rest. In September 1925 he wrote to Reading requesting the appointment of a Court of Arbitration to examine the Berar controversy on the basis that it was a dispute between two equals. ‘No foreign power or controversy is concerned or involved in its examination, and thus the subject comes to be a controversy between the two Governments that stand on the same plane without any limitations or subordination of one to the other.’³⁸

Reading saw the letter as challenging the very omnipotence of British power in India. In March 1926 he wrote a strongly worded response to the Nizam, disputing his assertion that the relationship between Hyderabad and Britain was one of equal allies:

The sovereignty of the British Crown is supreme in India and therefore no ruler of an Indian state can justifiably claim to negotiate with the British on an equal footing . . . I will merely add that the title ‘Faithful Ally’ which your Exalted Highness enjoys has not the effect of putting your government in a category separate from that of other States under the paramountcy of the British Crown.³⁹

Published simultaneously in the Government Gazette, Reading’s rebuff came as a shock to India’s other ruling princes, most of whom professed at least some pretensions to sovereignty. Counting football-field-sized fiefdoms, the number of princely states totalled 562. The largest were Hyderabad with an area of 82,698 square miles (214,105 square kilometres) and Kashmir, which covered 84,258 square miles. Hyderabad topped the list in terms of population (approximately 14.5 million in the 1930s) and an annual revenue of 85 million rupees or £6.3 million. Together the states comprised two-fifths of the area of India and contained about a quarter of its population.

In their mania for protocol, the British devised a system whereby the larger states were distinguished from the smaller states by the allotment of gun salutes. A total of 118 states were entitled to receive salutes ranging from nine to 21 guns. Those at the lower end of the scale were called rajahs, while those with 13 guns or more were maharajahs. Only four states were entitled to receive a 21-gun bombardment – Hyderabad, Kashmir, Baroda and Gwalior. At the other end of the scale was a patchwork of mini-states in present-day Gujarat. One of them, Dadan, was so small that in 1906 it disappeared from official sight.

After World War I, the British instituted the Chamber of Princes with a view to countering the demands for greater democracy by solidifying India’s autocratic states into a common cause. Inaugurated in 1921 by the Duke of Connaught, the Chamber consisted of 120 members, of which 108 were rulers of the largest states and 12 were elected by the next 127 states ranking in importance. To its detractors the Chamber of Princes was nothing more than a ‘glorified debating society’ whose main drawcard was the opportunity for self-indulgent potentates to strut the national stage showing off their diamond-studded jewellery and gold- and silver-plated Rolls-Royces.⁴⁰ British calls for the Chamber to introduce some form of constitutional government in the princely states fell largely on deaf ears, and it was only in 1928 that its members passed resolutions calling on its members to bring their judicial systems into line with the rest of India and separate the ruler’s privy purse from the public exchequer. Part of the problem was the refusal of several key rulers to participate in its meetings, including the Nizam of Hyderabad. ‘I would not like any questions affecting my State being determined on the advice of other Ruling Princes,’ declared Osman Ali Khan. The fate and policy of the other princes of India were no concern of his, he explained to one visiting official. They were merely ‘noblemen, to whom some courtesies were due’.⁴¹

The Nizam’s arrogance and his mishandling of the Berar question eventually prompted the British to make an example out of him. Between 1919 and 1926 successive Residents had unearthed growing evidence of corruption, nepotism, maladministration and the extraction of money in the form of nazars. ‘His miserliness, amounting almost to mania led him simultaneously to adopt all other possible methods . . . for amassing wealth, and at the same time where his own pocket was affected, especially in regard to the maintenance of his own family, payment of servants etc., to practice dire economy,’ reported one Resident. ‘The Nizam has also during this time been indulging in another form of impropriety, viz., the procurement of women for his harem from the families of his Nobles and gentry by compulsion and the meting out of harsh treatment to those families who thwarted him.’⁴²

While the giving of nazars had been adopted by the Nizams from the Mughal court, Osman Ali Khan took the practice to new heights. In October 1920 The Hindu accused the Nizam of using his district tours to squeeze nazars out of every official. ‘The invitation to the people is part of his prerogative and cannot be touched,’ the Residency explained in a telegram to Delhi, noting that the Nizam had ‘brazenly admitted’ taking three million rupees from the Rajah of Dawal and 2.5 million from the Rajah of Wanputri.⁴³

Despite growing public resentment over nazars, the Resident at the time, Charles Russell, was against admonishing the Nizam, arguing it would lead to estrangement. When cautious reproaches were made, the Nizam angrily defended the practice, saying it was a matter between the people and the ruler and ‘interference therein by a third party was not called for’. ‘The principal and, in fact, only duty of the Ruler in the present circumstances is to see that no abuses creep into the working of an authorised system. I have therefore taken the necessary steps to place the whole system on a well-organised and unimpeachable basis.’⁴⁴

The ‘well-organised’ system turned out to be nothing more than a well-oiled extortion racket where the amount of nazar to be given to the Nizam was based on prevailing pay scales. ‘Subordinates drawing from 30 to 60 rupees per mensem pay Rs 15; those drawing from 60 to 100 per mensem to pay Rs 30; officials to give the usual nazars according to their salaries; each ryot to pay two annas per rupee on his annual earnings; each Patel and Patwari to pay half of his annual salary; and each village to supply five goats, ten fowls, two cart loads of grass and tent pegs.’⁴⁵ Careful not to miss an opportunity, the Nizam even insisted on receiving nazars from anyone unlucky enough to receive ‘gifts’ from the palace such as vegetables, honey, mangoes from the royal gardens and even paan.

Such attempts at extortion did not impress William Barton, who replaced Russell in August 1925. During the course of his rule, Osman Ali Khan would see ten Residents come and go, all of them chosen for their ability to represent British interests in what was considered a difficult posting. ‘Very few of our officers who are quartered there contrive to leave it with as good a reputation as they had when they went there,’ Lord Hamilton observed. Gossip and intrigue ran so strongly through the body politic of Hyderabad that the best advice a senior official could give to the newcomer was: ‘Keep you mouth shut, and your bowels open.’⁴⁶ As for the Nizam, opinion ranged from dismissive, on account of his idiosyncrasies, to downright critical. The Viceroy’s political advisor, Francis Wylie, once described the Nizam as ‘the most freakish and disreputable person to be at this date placed in a position of authority over some 16 millions of his fellow human beings’.⁴⁷

Of the Residents who served in Hyderabad, none would make a greater impact on the Seventh Nizam’s administration than Barton. A tough, wiry Oxford graduate who had served in the North West Frontier for nearly 20 years, he was a prolific writer, sending detailed weekly reports to the Political Department on everything from the Nizam’s morbid fascination with watching horrible surgical operations while making his family look on, to his ‘utter disregard of his own dignity as exhibited in scrambling in public for unconsidered trifles’. All this, Barton concluded in one cable, amounted to ‘at least an abnormal mentality’.⁴⁸

Unlike his predecessor, Barton made it clear from the outset that he would not turn a blind eye to abuses of power. Within four months of arriving in Hyderabad he set out a comprehensive memorandum detailing the internal political situation of Hyderabad that was damning in the extreme. Describing the situation as ‘infinitely worse’ than in 1919, Barton wrote: ‘Distrust and apprehension have deepened; the estrangement between the Nizam and his Nobles and subjects has increased, oppression and corruption are rampant everywhere.’ According to Barton, money could now buy everything:

The nazar has corrupted every sphere of public life. The judiciary, especially the High Court which five or six years ago had reached a respectable standard of efficiency and integrity, is now corrupt from top to bottom. The Revenue Department is honeycombed with corruption: Customs officials are a byword for rapacity: the police are more concerned to line their pockets than to suppress crime . . . The nazar system is poisoning public life. The Ruler is prepared to interfere in almost any matter on receipt of a nazar and is accessible to anyone for the purpose. Most of the important appointments are filled by men who have paid the highest nazar.

Concluded Barton: ‘The Nizam is a coward, physically and morally; and if the Government of India insist in this matter he will undoubtedly give way, and the Government of India will earn the undying gratitude of the people of the Hyderabad Dominions.’⁴⁹

Barton urged Reading’s successor as Viceroy, Lord Irwin, to write to the Nizam demanding that the exaction of nazars be limited to ‘nobles and high officials, and even from them only at the traditional rates which are little more than nominal’.⁵⁰ He also called for abolishing the practice of accepting nazars from officials on appointment, which had been carried to such excess by the Nizam that ‘practically all appointments are the prize of the highest bidder’. Irwin obliged and on 8 July 1926 wrote to the Nizam that ‘certain definite measures’ of a remedial nature were needed which would be duly explained by the Resident.

Armed at last with the Viceroy’s sanction, Barton met with the Nizam and outlined a long list of his misdeeds which he said amounted to such a ‘state of gross misrule’ that the Government of India was enjoined by duty ‘to intervene in order to secure an early improvement in the situation’.⁵¹ Aside from curbing nazars, Barton demanded the Nizam respect the powers given to the President and Executive Council and that appointments and removals from the Council be made only after consultation with the Resident. The Nizam was also told to cease interfering with the judiciary, agree to the appointment of British officers as heads of the Revenue and Police Departments and hand back to the Paigahs their confiscated estates.

Osman Ali Khan’s reaction was to buy time, hoping that a change of government in England might thwart the execution of reforms and that other Muslim princes might rally behind him. He also resorted to the ploy of issuing farmans and then revoking them orally, while at the same time avoiding all contact with the Resident. ‘His tactics resemble those of an octopus: to smother his opponent in a cloud of inky fluid,’ Barton wrote in one of his typically florid telegrams to the Political Department. ‘Interviews are an anathema, for one thing because he is a coward and not sincere; another reason is that he is desperately afraid that he will agree in conversation to proposals that he might afterwards seek to repudiate.’⁵²

As the Nizam dithered, conceding to some demands and resisting others, the British became increasingly impatient. On 21 December 1926 Osman Ali Khan issued a farman on the acceptance of nazars in accordance with the Resident’s wishes, but he continued to resist the demand to appoint a British official to oversee the functioning of the district and city police. The city was considered the private domain of the ruler and control of its police force was of utmost importance for all the Nizams. Finally the Viceroy was forced to send yet another strongly worded letter to the Nizam, this time threatening to go public with a list of abuses. Having played his last card, the Nizam gave his approval to the cabinet appointments demanded by the Resident and all outstanding reforms, including reining in the extraction of nazars.

For eight years Osman Ali Khan had tried unsuccessfully to assert Hyderabad’s independence from British rule, believing his status as India’s premier prince would afford him special treatment. His bid to restore Berar had been rebuffed, he had been humiliated into agreeing to curb the giving of nazars, which he had considered his birthright, and to having British officials controlling key administrative posts. Now he realised that he was no stronger than any of the other princely states. ‘In Hyderabad the British were faced with a replica of the Mughal court. They had stamped one out in 1857 and now they were determined to stamp the other out,’ Mukarram Jah would reflect later.⁵³

As for Barton, he felt vindicated by the Nizam’s capitulation. For him it was further proof that the British were needed to preserve the Raj in power. ‘There can be no doubt that it [Hyderabad] owes its very existence to the British connection,’ he wrote in 1926 in a cable that the Indian Government would use 22 years later to justify its invasion of Hyderabad.

The Asafia Family had not taken strong root in the Deccan in 1800; in point of fact, it may be said that it has never ceased to be foreign. Without the British, it must have relied on the handful of Muslims domiciled in the State; a forlorn hope against Maratha resurgence. Left entirely to himself it is doubtful if the present Nizam would be able to maintain himself for any length of time.⁵⁴