EVER SINCE NIZAM UL-MULK asserted his independence, the annals of the Asaf Jahi dynasty had been entirely written in India. Never had a Nizam left the shores of the sub-continent, rarely had he even travelled outside his own Dominions. To preserve the wealth and purity of the dynasty, sons of the royal family would only marry girls from the Paigah nobility. Administrative posts were jealously guarded by the landed gentry. By remaining loyal and subservient to the British, the ruling class remained intact, unlike many other parts of India where they had been uprooted and replaced. Although the British Resident kept a close watch on the affairs of the largest independent state in the empire, life within the palaces and their zenanas conformed to traditions developed over seven generations of introspective and conservative rule. Hyderabad remained the last bastion of the Mughal court in India. But by the 1920s the winds of change were coming, not from the politically charged cities of India, where the march towards independence was gathering pace, but from the laid-back, champagne-soused shores of the French Riviera.
In 1925 The New York Times reported that the Riviera around Nice had a Shah ‘bound heart and soul to a charming French actress’; a ‘very-ex Khedive’ who was deposed at the outset of the war and therefore ‘has almost ceased to be of interest’; the maharajahs of Kapurthala and Pudukkottai, ‘the latter married to an Australian girl’; as well as a ‘whole troop of Egyptian and Siamese Royals’. The most pleasure-bent bunch in the whole of Europe assembled on this coast to purr in the sun, the paper observed, ‘and these Orientals love to laze in the middle of it’. Occupying the highest rung in this cacophony of uprooted royalty were the Ottoman Turks. In a cactus-sheltered villa just across the Italian border in Bordighera the last Sultan of Turkey, Mehmed VI, could usually be found in a ‘lounge suit and spats’ with a small retinue of wives and attendants. Reported The Times: ‘He exists plentifully on an income derived from money invested long ago by a predecessor known as The Damned and never enters the social whirl.’1
Just two years earlier Mehmed VI had fled Turkey on a British battleship with only the clothes he was wearing after Mustafa Kemal ordered the National Assembly to abolish the Ottoman Empire and to ‘put a stop to these usurpers’ who had ruled by force for six centuries.2 Kemal had become the first President of the Turkish Republic after leading a successful nationalist uprising against the foreign powers that had annexed Turkey following its defeat in World War I. The Ottoman monarchy, which had ruled Turkey since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror, was an obvious target for Kemal, who despised its autocratic power.
At its height the Ottoman Empire encompassed much of northern Africa, the Middle East and could have included most of Europe had the Turks not been turned back at the gates of Vienna in 1529. The Topkapi and Dolmabahce palaces in Istanbul, with their huge harems, ornate audience halls, throne rooms, pleasure gardens and treasuries are testimony to the empire’s influence and wealth. But by the outbreak of World War I, the Ottomans were losing their grip even over Turkishspeaking areas of their domain. The decision of Sultan Abdulhamid II to proclaim a jihad against the British and ally with the Germans was to prove disastrous. Apart from the successful defence of Gallipoli, led by Kemal against a combined force of Australian, New Zealand and British troops, the Turks were no match for the Allies.
In August 1920, three emissaries from the Sultan attended a ceremony at the Paris suburb of Sevres where they signed a pact drawn up by the Allies that reduced the Turkish state to a virtual nonentity. The Greeks were given the coastal lands of Asia Minor, the British controlled the zone around Istanbul, while the French and the Italians carved up most of the south between them. The Turks were left with an inhospitable tract of land in central Anatolia. ‘Turkey is no more,’ the British Prime Minister Lloyd George announced triumphantly.3
The harsh terms of the treaty, and the willingness of the Sultan to acquiesce so readily, spurred Kemal and his followers to rebel against the occupying powers and the old order. Seized with revolutionary fervour they poured out of their mountain fastness at Angora, driving the Greeks into the sea. The French capitulated without a fight, followed by the British. By 1922 Kemal had succeeded in seizing back the lands that had been taken from them and had effectively torn the Sevres Treaty to shreds. In November 1922, still savouring the fruits of victory, Kemal took the unprecedented step of ordering his rubberstamp National Assembly to abolish the Sultanate. Mehmed went into exile and almost 460 years of Ottoman rule came to an inglorious end. The Allies were delighted. Kemal had done what they never dared to do.
Kemal, however, was not prepared to abolish the Caliphate. Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Sunni Muslims had regarded the Sultan of Turkey as the spiritual and temporal leader of Islam and paid him the same homage Roman Catholics accorded the Pope in Rome. The Caliphs were revered by Muslims as successors of the Prophet and upholders of the Holy Law. They were given the titles ‘Shadow of God on Earth’ and ‘Commander of the Faithful’. Whoever served as Caliph was a governor and a leader in battle as well as in prayer. The Mughal Emperors of Delhi and the Nizams of Hyderabad styled their courts on those of the Caliphs and aspired to recreate their spiritual and political influence. To Westerners brought up on tales of the Arabian Nights, the Caliphs became synonymous with scheming viziers, harems, nautch girls, palace intrigues and blood-soaked successions.
The rise of the nationalist movement in Turkey eroded the Caliphate’s political influence, but the office retained its importance as a symbol of spiritual unity. On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly passed legislation separating the Sultanate from the Caliphate, and appointed Mehmed’s cousin, Abdul Mejid Efendi, to the post. Fluent in Turkish, Arabic, French and German, Abdul Mejid had kept a low profile. He preferred painting in Parisian style, composing music and writing poetry to engaging in politics or spiritual pursuits. He was also suspicious of Kemal’s motives and agreed to accept the post only after being assured that he would have a proper inauguration with full Islamic rites. For his part Kemal gambled that Mejid would give his new independent national government – the first in the Muslim world – a veneer of legitimacy as it struggled to establish itself.
Mejid took up residence in the Dolmabahce palace on the shores of the Bosphorus, but his reign would be short-lived. Citing foreign intervention and attempts by Turkish monarchists to use Mejid to revive the Sultanate, Kemal, in the words of the British ambassador in Istanbul, ‘completed the revolution’. On 3 March 1924, just 15 months after Mejid’s appointment, the National Assembly voted to abolish the Caliphate. Britain’s Daily Telegraph called it ‘one of the most astonishing acts of suicidal recklessness in the history of modern and ancient times’ and predicted, correctly, ‘the inevitable stirring of the Muslim world’.4
That night troops surrounded Dolmabahce Palace and the chief of Istanbul police told Mejid to have his bags packed by 5.30 a.m. the next day. At the appointed hour, several cars drove up to the palace to collect Mejid’s immediate family and servants. He was handed £2000 in cash, driven to Chatalja and then put on the Orient Express to Switzerland.
Despite rumours that the eunuchs accompanying Mejid and his family into exile had concealed several kilograms of gold, diamonds and precious stones beneath their cloaks as they left Istanbul, the ex-Caliph struggled to make ends meet. A Swiss businessman with interests in Turkey found lodging for the family at the Grand Hotel des Alpes at Territet on the shore of Lake Geneva. But just one month after arriving in Switzerland the financial position of the ex-Caliph ‘and half a dozen other Princes and Princesses of the ancient House of Osman, has become most serious’, The Daily Mail reported. ‘The ex-Caliph spends his days in prayer, painting and composing music. Partly for reasons of economy and partly because of their timidity and strange surroundings, the ex-Imperial wives all sleep in the same “dormitory”. They never show themselves to anybody.’5
The Red Crescent Society found that the family was living in ‘absolute penury’. In a letter to King George V asking for help, it drew attention to the ex-Caliph’s wives and daughters who through no fault of their own found ‘themselves faced with beggary in a strange country’ and appealed for the king to intervene. ‘If these exiles are left without means of support they will starve or die; such a consummation would justify the insolent boast of Trotsky, the head of communist Russia, that “Islam is a rotten fabric ready to disappear at the first puff as was already demonstrated by the easy abolition of the Caliphate”.’6
Today ‘His Imperial Majesty the Caliph Abdul Mejid II’, as he styled himself, barely rates more than a footnote in histories of the Ottoman Empire. But Mejid never gave up his belief that he was robbed of the Caliphate and that he alone had the right to appoint the successor to the Prophet himself. After his death in war-torn Paris in 1944, British officials were shocked to find when they read his will that he had nominated his grandson Mukarram Jah, at the time a shy schoolboy in India, as the next Caliph.7
In 1924 news of the ex-Caliph’s precarious condition made it to Hyderabad, where Ali Imam, the President of the Executive Council, discreetly suggested to the Nizam that bailing out Mejid might enhance his standing among Muslims and fortify his claim for Berar. As well as spiritual concerns, Osman Ali Khan was motivated by a sense of guilt. Just ten years earlier he had been persuaded by the Resident to issue an appeal supporting the British against Turkey even though it meant abandoning the Caliphate. But with the war over, supporting the last in line of the Ottoman monarchy carried none of the geopolitical complications it had a decade ago. Accepting Imam’s advice, the Nizam proposed paying a monthly allowance of £300 towards the upkeep of Mejid and his family and asked the British Resident to seek the Viceroy’s approval.
Although approval was forthcoming, the Government of India suspected more than just charity was involved in the Nizam’s desire to bail out a fellow Muslim leader. The question of who among the rulers of the Muslim world would succeed Mejid as Caliph and therefore command the allegiance of millions of Muslims had far-reaching geopolitical implications. After the outbreak of War World I, Indian Muslims under the leadership of Shaukat Ali, whom the British branded a Syrian ‘adventurer’, started the Khilafat Movement, which objected to the use of Muslim troops against their ‘spiritual leader’. When the Treaty of Sevres effectively erased Turkey from the map and with it the control of the Caliph over the holy places of Islam, the movement gathered strength. Realising the importance of the issue as means of bringing Muslims into his movement for selfrule, Mahatma Gandhi organised a program of non-cooperation that saw schools and government institutions boycotted. Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate raised fears among Indian Muslims that the office of Caliph would be given to a ruler under British influence and used to further its imperial aims. Britain’s favoured candidates for the post were believed to include King Abdullah of Transjordania, King Faisal of Iraq and Ali Haider Pasha, the former Sherif of Mecca.
Following the abolition of the Caliphate, Shaukat Ali together with Marmaduke Pickthall, a British national who had been employed by the Nizam to translate the Koran into English, began working behind the scenes for Osman Ali Khan to be made Caliph and be given the title of King. With the fall of the Ottoman monarchy and the additional honours accorded to him by the British, the Nizam now considered himself to be head of the largest and most influential Muslim state in the world, even though his subjects were overwhelmingly Hindu. Inevitably, some Muslim leaders began urging him to assume the office of the Caliph. Although he rejected their calls, he did not abandon the idea outright.
The Nizam’s generosity meant that Mejid and his family could move from their cramped hotel room on the damp shores of Lake Geneva to the more conducive climate of the French Riviera. Comfortable in his nineteenth-century villa in the fashionable suburb of Cimiez overlooking Nice and the Côte d’ Azur, the monocled Mejid devoted himself once more to the arts. Surrounded by a high stone wall, the villa afforded the family much-needed privacy. While Mejid could be regularly spotted on the beach ‘attired in swimming trunks only and carrying a large parasol’, the women of the house were kept in strict seclusion. There was a ‘tedious absence of feminine laughter and chatter’, remarked one visitor to the double-storey villa surrounded by cypress pines and cedars. ‘They just sit around all day on cushions and divans and read poetry and eat sweetmeats. Sometimes they play the piano or violin. They smoke and sip coffee. That is all. They never go out.’8
Mejid’s only child, Durrushehvar, was only 11 years old when the family was sent into exile. It had been a traumatic time for the young princess whose name means ‘great pearl’. When the prefect of Istanbul’s police told the family that life in the West would offer them freedom, a tearful Durrushehvar said: ‘I don’t want that kind of freedom.’9 Durrushehvar would later confide to one of her Indian companions, Kumudini Ramdev Rao, that when her mother finally removed the scarf she had worn during her flight from Turkey her hair had turned from auburn brown to white.10
But even greater changes were imminent for the now tall and slender teenager. In the summer of 1931, the reservations clerk at the Negresco, Nice’s most fashionable and expensive hotel, received a booking from Hyderabad for two entire floors in the names of Azam and Moazzam Jah and their entourages. Durrushehvar had never been to the Negresco and had never met the Nizam’s sons, but within six months she and her 15-year-old cousin Niloufer would be boarding a steamer from Marseilles to Bombay with their new Indian husbands.
It was not the first time Azam and Moazzam had been to Europe. The British had always taken a close, almost intimate, interest in the upbringing of the heir apparent and his brother and considered visits to the West an essential part of their training. With their father’s encouragement an Englishman named Hugh Gough had been given the job of guardian. From then on the boys had very little contact with their father and were housed in separate palace complexes. Gough’s duties included teaching them ‘table manners, how to dress, how to hold a knife and fork, how to enjoy their whiskey and how to pee’.11 One Resident thought Gough was ‘utterly senile and refused to admit that his geese were anything but swans’.12 W. G. Prendergast, the Australian-born, ex-British-Army drill sergeant appointed as their senior tutor, was not held in high regard either. In a report submitted to the Nizam when they turned 16, Prendergast wrote that they were well-versed in literature, English and Indian history. He praised their ‘lofty principles of reverence, self respect, truthfulness, clean living and clear thinking’. The princes possessed ‘a well informed and well trained intellect, a keen and alert mentality, a healthy and well developed body; in a word mens sana in corpore sano, and the simple manly and moral character which constitute the finished product of a liberal education’.13
Unfortunately, much of Prendergast’s pompous report was imagined or greatly exaggerated. It was more intended to impress the Nizam and the Viceroy, Lord Reading, who read it with interest, than to provide an accurate picture of the boys’ development. The Acting Resident, Stuart Knox, was not fooled by Prendergast’s account of the princelings, or sahibzadas as they were known. ‘They are very seldom seen at any function, except the few palace dinners, and get little opportunity of acquiring any polish or courtesy whatsoever,’ he reported to the Viceroy’s secretary J. P. Thompson. ‘Their manners are not good, and one can hardly expect them to be when their tutor is an ex-Sergeant – a very worthy fellow indeed but who cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called a gentleman.’14
In March 1925 Azam wrote an extraordinary letter to the Resident Charles Russell, in which he called on the British to depose his own father. ‘Here I am more than eighteen years old and allowed no money, no motor car and no liberty; I am never allowed to go the Residency; it is all so different from the way Father was treated by Grandfather,’ he complained to the Resident. ‘I am old enough to be installed as Nizam; but I am having no experience of State business. Father tyrannises over me as he is tyrannising over everybody else . . . Surely the Government of India will either check my Father or depose him.’ And in case the Resident did not get the hint, he added:
I see that the Viceroy is going to England and I believe that he will then discuss this question with the Secretary of State. Lord Reading has already deposed many Ruling Princes. The way Father behaves towards the British Government is disgraceful. Every morning he abuses them. He seems to forget that our ancestors fought side by side and that but for the British Hyderabad would not exist.15
Russell’s response was to ignore Azam’s complaints and instead put the onus on the heir apparent to alter his behaviour. ‘If the Sahibzada learnt self-control and self-reliance he would no doubt in due course be able to do a great work in the State.’16
Russell’s replacement, William Barton, was similarly unimpressed by Azam and Moazzam. In the absence of a proper education, he feared the boys were developing the Nizam’s money-grabbing habits. ‘The son need not be as the father if given a chance, although people feared it would be so,’ Barton concluded gloomily.17
Barton believed the Nizam was largely to blame for his sons’ behaviour by keeping them in virtual captivity and giving them a meagre allowance of just 500 rupees a month. Barton’s solution was to pay the sons directly from the state’s funds rather than the Nizam’s personal estate. But the Nizam at first rejected the idea, pointing out that his personal estate, or Sarf-i-Khas, was the traditional source of payment for heirs to the throne. In the end, however, the Nizam caved in and agreed to increase their allowances to Rs 20,000 for Azam and Rs 15,000 a month for his younger brother. He also agreed that the money would come from the state’s coffers rather than his own pocket.
In 1928, when they were reaching adulthood, the princes were packed off to Europe to provide them with what was officially termed ‘training in administrative work on the friendly advice of the Government of India’.18 ‘The Nizam was very serious in cultivating his boys to take on the responsibility of marrying highly educated ladies and cut out for themselves an international platform,’ recalls Habeeb Jung. ‘Unfortunately they squandered the opportunity.’19
No sooner had they landed in Europe than the temptations of shopping on the Champs-Élysées and trying their luck in the casinos of Monte Carlo took precedence over their administrative training. The network of informants the British nurtured in the princes’ entourage reported that Azam devoted himself to polo and driving expensive cars, while Moazzam spent most of his time with tailors and haberdashers ‘being manicured and scented’ and attending nightclubs. Moazzam also developed ‘an unerring flair for selecting approachable women, and, within a few minutes of entering a restaurant where all sorts were congregated, had made his choice and never made a mistake’. The only thing Moazzam could talk of was ‘the night life of Berlin and Paris which he much prefers to London’. Word also leaked out from one of Moazzam’s dancing partners that the heir apparent and his brother wanted ‘to get away from their controllers and marry anyone they took a fancy to in Egypt or Europe’.20
The same information quickly reached Osman Ali Khan, who confided in Barton in January 1930 ‘that he feared there was a danger of his heir-apparent falling in love with someone in Europe’. He asked Barton for his assistance ‘in the shape of giving his son a hint that the match should be one of his [father’s] selection but one acceptable to him’.21 A few years earlier the Nizam had put the word out among fellow Muslim leaders in India that he was interested in finding suitable brides for his two sons, but with only a handful of Muslim rulers in British India the choice was limited. The Nizam’s next preference was an arranged marriage with relations of his already considerable family. In a letter to his sons he argued that such a marriage was necessary ‘so that the elephant which carries the standard at the head of the procession should be the pick of the train’. After that, he added, ‘you can marry as many outsiders as you like’.22
But even among his relations eligible brides were scarce. When the Nizam presented two young female relatives of his first wife Dulhan Pasha to Barton’s successor, Terence Keyes, for his assessment and approval, he was taken aback by the reaction. ‘They were uneducated, undersized, unattractive little things, and most obviously the matches would have been distasteful to the Sahibzadas,’ Keyes wrote in a secret cable to his superiors in Simla, the summer capital of British India, in August 1931. ‘His Exalted Highness seemed very disappointed at my opinion and twice tried to persuade me to see them again in the hopes that I would change.’23
Aside from this negative judgement regarding the Nizam’s taste in women, Keyes was much less critical of Osman Ali Khan than Barton had been. ‘Barton’s “Frontier attitude” was illadapted to the atmosphere of courtly Hyderabad and to what Barton saw as the Nizam’s “characteristic oriental mentality”,’ writes historian Lucien Benichou.24 In one of his last cables, Barton had described the Nizam’s dominant motive for getting back his old tyranny as ‘loot, pure and simple’.25 Keyes was less critical. Just a few months into his posting in May 1930 he described the Nizam to the Viceroy Lord Irwin as a ‘queer little creature’ with ‘distinct powers for good . . . a quick sense of humour, an unexpected capacity for friendship . . . [and a] pathetic craving to be liked and understood’.26 Added Keyes: ‘He never seems to bear malice, takes every setback with good humour and, within his limitations, I really believe he means to do well.’27
The difficulty in finding a suitable match for the young princelings did not escape the attention of Shaukat Ali, who had begun working on a plan that involved marrying Azam to Mejid’s only child, Durrushehvar, the piano-playing princess with a fondness for sweetmeats. Shaukat Ali told the Nizam that she was ‘aged about 17 . . . attractive and very well-educated’ and that Mejid was in favour of the marriage.28 Moreover, Prince Ahmad Tevhid, the ex-Caliph’s nephew, had a sister called Niloufer who was of marriageable age. If a marriage was fixed between Azam and Durrushehvar, Moazzam could complete the arrangement by taking Niloufer as his bride. To drive his point home, Shaukat Ali reminded the Nizam that such a match with the family of the ex-Caliph would ensure that he became the predominant Muslim leader not only in India but in the Islamic world.
Shaukat Ali’s description of Durrushehvar hardly did her justice. Mejid had devoted nearly all his time in exile to his young daughter’s education. She dominated the Turkish microcosm that existed inside the villa in Nice where she was nicknamed ‘Sultan’ but always formally addressed as ‘Her Imperial Highness’. ‘She is extraordinarily well educated and has an excellent style in English and French,’ observed one of her early admirers. She contributed poetry to French magazines, spoke fluent English and Turkish and showed promise as a musician. ‘She is beautiful, has great dignity and savoir faire and a very strong character.’29
Niloufer attracted even greater compliments. When writing his autobiography, Conrad Corfield was so taken by Niloufer’s ‘violet eyes and blue black Circassian hair . . . her perfect features, her creamy complexion and the dimples in her cheeks’ that he devoted almost half of the chapter on his term as Political Secretary in Hyderabad to describing the hold she had over men.30
Even if the Nizam took notice of such flattering remarks about his future daughters-in-law, it did not allay his fears about forging ‘too close an alliance with a numerous and impecunious family with a royal etiquette which may prove very burdensome’.31 His preference, he told Keyes, was still for matches ‘from certain respectable local families – Hyderabadi girls not independent and advanced like those of Turkey and Persia’.32 Marrying into the Sultan’s family also went against ‘the traditions of the House’ which had never sought a matrimonial alliance with royalty from overseas.33 Moreover, the Nizam feared it would ‘certainly be embarrassing as the entry of one member of the Sultan’s family will be followed by an influx of the many descendants of the Sultans of Turkey of which there appear to be many residing in France and Syria’.34 There was, however, another reason that the Nizam was loath to admit to, but the British were well aware of. His wife, Dulhan Pasha, was furious at being overruled in her choice of whom her sons should marry and at the prospect of losing what little influence she had over them.35
As the Nizam dithered, a bidding war broke out among three other royal families for Durrushehvar and Niloufer. King Faud of Egypt, King Faisal of Iraq and Shah Reza of Persia lobbied hard to obtain the hands of the girls in marriage for their sons or relatives, believing that an alliance with the spiritual head of the Muslim world would strengthen their thrones. Press reports spoke of vast sums of money and fabulous dowries for the princesses.36 It was a high-stakes game. On the death of the ex-Caliph, the world’s 300 million Muslims would look to the male offspring of his daughter as the new ‘Pope’ of Islam if none other had been chosen. But in the end what mattered to Mejid was not the money but the Nizam’s long-standing generosity. By 1931 the Nizam was keeping at least seven of Mejid’s relatives clothed and fed. Nothing that Faud, Faisal or Reza could offer was enough to offset the personal debt that Mejid felt he owed to the House of Hyderabad. Finally, in the summer of 1931, the Nizam mustered enough courage to take on Dulhan Pasha and ordered that his sons would marry into the ex-Caliph’s family. As usual, the Nizam then asked the Resident to seek the Viceroy’s permission for the match. As soon as that approval was forthcoming he sent a team of officials to London, headed by his Finance Minister, Akbar Hydari, to negotiate terms for the dowry and trousseau with representatives of the brides’ family. Whatever charitable streak had motivated Nizam to help an exiled fellow Muslim evaporated as soon as the talks began. Updated daily by his informants, Keyes watched in disbelief as the marriage was nearly derailed by the Nizam’s pettiness and the proposed treatment of his future daughters-in-law.
Throughout October 1931 Keyes relayed each unseemly bargaining point in secret cables to the Viceroy’s office in Delhi. To save money the niggardly Nizam firstly insisted on a double wedding with one trousseau and that the funds should come from the state’s funds rather than from his own personal fortune. Twice he called the talks off owing to the ‘unacceptable conditions’ put forward by the ex-Caliph. The Turks wanted a trousseau worth 20,000 rupees. The Nizam was only willing to give 10,000, but eventually compromised on 15,000 rupees.37 Keyes then reported that the Nizam was against providing his eldest son’s future wife with a decent allowance as this would enable her to ‘maintain a large alien establishment, jeopardise her relations with her husband and upset seriously the tenor of Hyderabad society’.38 He also objected to the demand that Durrushehvar be allowed to return to Nice ‘every hot weather’ with her husband in tow. ‘The Nizam is convinced this would end in the extinction of his dynasty.’39
A clearly exacerbated Keyes urged the British Government to inform the ex-Caliph ‘that unless he and his daughter are prepared for her to throw in her lot unreservedly with her husband’s State, he should give up all idea of the match’.40 Azam Jah should be reminded ‘that to marry a Turkish Princess whose heart and interests lie outside India would be fatal to his future career and happiness’. As for the Nizam, he was ‘disgustingly above himself at having got the better of the bargain and at being treated like an equal by the Khalifa’.41
Keyes was also outraged at being told that ‘two mean little zenana quarters’ had been built in the grounds of Eden Gardens to house the ‘two poor little creatures’ after their marriage. Moreover, the quarters were to be next door to their mother-in-law ‘who hates the Turkish alliances and who is hated by her sons’. ‘I foresee that I am going to have a difficult time seeing that these two Turkish princesses are suitably treated and in preserving the peace between the Nizam and his sons,’ Keyes predicted at the end of October 1931. ‘I hear that they have got very badly above themselves and never cease to blackguard their father.’42
When the negotiations were eventually finalised, largely in Hyderabad’s favour, wire services flashed the news that the Nizam had sealed the contract with gifts of US$200,000 in cash and jewels worth US$1 million. Durrushehvar was described as ‘the epitome of Oriental beauty’, fluent in six languages and a ‘thoroughly modern woman’, while Azam was billed as ‘the heir to more wealth than that held by all the Fords, Rockefellers and Morgans’.43 The event was described as the merger of ‘the mightiest houses of Islam’.44
The civil service was set for 12 November 1931, the Nizam’s birthday, but Osman Ali Khan was content to send emissaries to Nice rather than attend himself. Durrushehvar was 17 and her cousin Niloufer had not yet turned 16. The signing of the marriage contract was held at the ‘down-at-the-heels’ Palais Carabacel in the suburb of Cimiez. Six officers of the royal bodyguards wearing rose-coloured tulip-shaped turbans accompanied the two princes, bejewelled and covered with garlands of flowers, into the marriage hall. For half an hour the princes prayed, kneeling before full-length portraits of their brides-to-be who remained in a room upstairs. The British Consul Wiseman Kehoe then legalised the wedding and asked the couples and their entourage to assemble in the drawing room where 30 photographers were waiting.
Wedding photographs published in Nice’s L’Eclaireur du Dimanche Illustré show two unsmiling brides in day dresses with hands clasped and feet crossed while their grooms stand behind them wearing traditional Hyderabadi sherwanis, their faces almost concealed by their elaborate head-dresses.45 According to The Washington Post’s reporter, the ex-Caliph, having served the guests ‘temperance drinks’, retired to his library. ‘His snowwhite beard clutched in both his hands, he meditated over the business just completed.’46
A week later a much more lavish religious ceremony took place, officiated by the ex-Caliph before ‘beturbaned Oriental dignitaries arrayed in white and wearing scimitars of gold studded with diamonds’.47 The Nizam sent Mejid a message extolling a ‘most happy and auspicious day for the Asaf Jah dynasty because it is the day when alliances by marriage have strengthened the bonds of friendship and cordiality between the House of Asaf Jah and the House of Osman . . . Thus an alliance has been established between the two ancient and historic Dynasties which, it is hoped, has prospects of a bright future.’48
The Muslim press in India took a different angle. It reported that the alliances foreshadowed a restoration of the Caliphate and gave front-page coverage to Shaukat Ali’s calls to give the royal couples an enthusiastic reception when they landed in Bombay. From Bombay the couples travelled by train to Hyderabad, where Osman Ali Khan broke with protocol and greeted his sons’ new wives by kissing them on the cheek and presenting ‘them to their chief mother-in-law, of whom they will have several’. Press reports said the princesses appeared nervous as they rode to the harem ‘in a closed car with black robes or charshafs covering their faces’.49
The British Resident, meanwhile, had other pressing matters to attend to. Without elaborating, Keyes wrote to the political secretary in Delhi on 7 December regarding Azam, that there had been ‘some unpleasantness in Nice over the ceremony of consummation of marriage and I am afraid we should be prepared for Khalifa trying to insist on his wife accompanying her daughter’. Of more immediate concern was Moazzam, whom Keyes described as being ten times smarter than his brother but nevertheless ‘sulky, malevolent and the most amusing and convincing liar’. Keyes was particularly outraged that Moazzam had already neglected Niloufer by indulging in what he called ‘night life’ during their stopover in Bombay and then by ignoring her in Hyderabad.50
Keyes put his concerns to one side at a state banquet held at the Chowmahalla palace on 4 January 1932 to welcome the newlyweds. Proposing a toast, the Resident said that it was the first time since the Mughal conquest of India that the heir of the ruling prince had sought a bride ‘from a royal house beyond the seas’.51 In his speech he also discounted suggestions of any ‘deep-seated plan’ behind the alliance.
Celebrations, however, soon gave way to more sinister designs. Within weeks of Durrushehvar and Niloufer’s arrival the ex-Caliph’s private secretary Hussein Nakib Bay began hearing rumours that Dulhan Pasha wanted to poison the young brides and immediately alerted Keyes. The absence of stray cats at the King Kothi palace, Moazzam boasted, was the result of his mother’s experiments with various deadly potions. Her aim, he started joking to his friends, was to poison himself and his brother and take over the throne after the Nizam died.52
Poisoning had always been a Hyderabadi pastime and a preferred way of eliminating one’s opponents. Keyes took the stories seriously enough to place spies in the kitchens of Bella Vista palace where the royal couples were residing, but the Resident had a different theory. ‘I am more inclined to think that if there were any poisoning the greater danger would be from Moazzam Jah,’ he cabled Delhi. ‘The bitterness of the enmity between these two brothers, who used to be such good friends, is most distressing. It has reached such a pitch that the elder firmly believes that his brother is trying to poison him.’53 Moazzam Jah was:
. . . entirely without scruple; the temptation to clear his way to such wealth and position must be enormous, and, apparently, his mind runs on poisoning. The friendship between these two brothers was always remarkable for an Oriental family, but it has not stood the test of their travels in Europe. Azam Jah is now disgusted with his brother and ashamed of his conduct in Europe and here. He would like him pensioned off and persuaded to live out of India.54
But far from meeting the same fate as the cats of King Kothi or falling victim to other evil schemes conjured up by a mad mother-in-law or capricious brother-in-law, Durrushehvar and Niloufer adapted remarkably well during their first year in Hyderabad. The Ottoman culture they had grown up in prepared them for the routines of palace life and the duties expected of them as princesses. Instead of going into purdah as their father had feared, they exchanged their French chiffon for expensive silk saris and plunged into the hectic social life of Hyderabad.
A little over a year after marrying Azam, Durrushehvar became pregnant and returned to Nice for her confinement. On 7 October 1933 L’Eclaireur du Dimanche Illustré carried a public notice announcing the birth one day earlier of a son to the heir apparent of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Overnight the number of potential kings and Caliphs residing on the French Riviera rose modestly in size, but monumentally in stature.