AFTER ALMOST TWO DECADES of being groomed in the finest British public schools, universities and military academies and being placed under the guidance of India’s foremost statesman, Jah was no better prepared for inheriting his grandfather’s mantle than when he was first carried through the gates of King Kothi as a six-month-old baby. He had few friends in Hyderabad, no idea of the extent of the estate that he was about to inherit and no interest whatsoever in maintaining his grandfather’s hallucinatory kingdom with its ageing concubines, khanazads, illegitimate offspring and fearsome-looking Arab guards. He was more at home listening to jazz at London nightclubs than to ghazals in the darbar hall of Chowmahalla. He spoke Urdu, the state language, but had only the vaguest notions about Hyderabad’s history. To his hundreds of relatives he was a stranger, to the hundreds of thousands of Osman Ali Khan’s followers he was revered more out of respect than for his reputation as a Nizam-in-waiting. Esra had grown used to Hyderabadi society but was more comfortable mixing with London’s A-list. Jah’s father was bitter about being overlooked for the throne. His uncles and aunts were insanely jealous of the immense wealth Jah was about to inherit.
Like Nizam ul-Mulk, the dynasty’s founder, Osman Ali Khan had tried to lay the groundwork for an orderly succession, writing letters to Nehru, restricting the proclivities of his eldest son and promoting his reluctant grandson. He believed in ruling by example, even when his kingdom was reduced to a weird and wonderful Neverland. Jah’s mother had also hoped that her son would rise to the challenge when he became the eighth Asaf Jahi. But by wanting the best education and training, Durrushehvar had also estranged Jah from his Indian roots. For her, Hyderabad’s society was never the equal of Ottoman culture. She had done the state a great service through her relief work during the war and her patronage of hospitals, educational institutions and welfare bodies, but even now many Hyderabadis feel that she looked down on them. That Jah felt more at home in England and then in Australia than he did in India owed much to his mother’s prejudices and her insistence on sheltering him as far as possible from the tradition-bound confines of palace life.
Even Jah’s handpicked guardians were not equipped to impart the arcane practices of medieval statecraft that still set the rules in the royal court. Whereas Osman Ali Khan rarely left the confines of the palace except to visit his mother’s grave and attend official functions, Jah would wander the world until he created his own kingdom of kangaroos and acacias. His grandfather composed couplets in Persian about unrequited love. To Jah’s ears there was nothing more poetic than the drone of a diesel engine.
For now, Jah had more immediate priorities to attend to. The day after his grandfather’s funeral he told a press conference that the stories about the late Nizam’s wealth were exaggerated. ‘I have not heard of any hidden treasure. My grandfather never seemed to keep track of his wealth.’ Jah also announced he had appointed a board to look into the question of how to maintain and run King Kothi palace with its several thousand employees. The entire set-up would be streamlined, depending on the amount of the privy purse he was entitled to receive. ‘I will, however, have to take care of my grandfather’s family and dependants.’1
Jah’s comments belied the complexity of the situation he had inherited and did not take into account the actions of rapacious relatives, corrupt advisors and a government bent on making princely privileges a thing of the past. Narrating the events surrounding his grandfather’s death to an interviewer a few months later, Jah described scenes of chaos as the Nizam lay dying and people helped themselves to jewellery and other valuables scattered around the palace in open boxes. Jah pitched a tent in the palace grounds, hired his own guards and had his own food brought to him. Fearing that the Nizam’s relatives would walk out with whatever they could lay their hands on as soon as the old man died, Jah asked the police superintendent to draft a document saying that he was temporarily removing keys to various safes that his grandfather always kept on his person because of the ‘condition of the patient’. ‘My next problem was how to prevent things from disappearing,’ he recounted.
Since regular police were not allowed in, my brother, a lawyer, came up with the idea that princes are always entitled to a guard of honour on their death. I got people I could trust dressed up as guards and had them move into the room as grandfather’s body was carried out. We had matrons, too, to search the women in saris, and we relieved all of them of quite a few ‘souvenirs’.2
The night before the funeral, Jah studied the floor plan of all five of his grandfather’s main palaces. When he gave the order, guards simultaneously entered all the main rooms and secured the valuables with Sandhurst-style precision.
Jah then undertook an initial survey of what was inside the palaces. Armed with a blowtorch, he opened dozens of safes containing everything from old papers to priceless pearls. Guided by his grandfather’s trusted valet, he was shown rooms, some of which had been sealed for 60 years. One contained 300 cases of French champagne from the 1930s, all of it undrinkable. Another was stacked from floor to ceiling with tins of ghee that the Nizam had bought from a shopkeeper he felt sorry for and then forgotten about. Another contained suits, bought for the same reason, then never worn. ‘The old valet then pointed to a cot in front of my grandfather’s window,’ Jah recalls. ‘He said: “I slept on that cot for 52 years” and then asked, “Can I continue to do so?” I said, “Of course”.’3
Jah’s biggest problem, he quickly realised, were the 14,718 other staff and dependants who, like the old valet, did not want anything to change. In addition to several hundred khanazads, 42 concubines and their 100 or so offspring, there were 6000 employees on the books at the Chowmahalla complex alone, 3000 bodyguards, 28 people whose only job was to bring drinking water to the Nizam and his immediate family from the traditional well outside the city (long since dried up), and 340 kitchen staff. ‘[The late Nizam’s] kitchens were feeding 2000 people a day. Every restaurant in the vicinity was being secretly supplied food from my grandfather’s kitchens.’4
There were other irregularities. After finding out that 4000 people on the books did not exist, Jah was able to bring numbers on his grandfather’s support list down to about 10,000. He then ordered that plans be drawn up to pension off most of the rest. The palace finances were just as shambolic. The royal garage, which was costing up to $US90,000 a year in petrol and spare parts for almost 60 cars, turned out to have only four in running condition. A photographer’s bill came in for $US25,000 and a $US6000 taxi bill for taking the khanazads to attend a religious ceremony with the Nizam was waiting to be paid.
As Jah struggled to sort out the mess, preparations were made for his formal inauguration as the Nizam. Although Jah’s succession was confirmed by the publication of orders by the President of India shortly after his grandfather’s death, the formal inauguration could not take place until the end of the 40-day mourning period. Responsibility for organising the darbar was given to Habeeb Jung. The Paigah nobleman was given a budget of 40,000 rupees, a three-week deadline and no precedent to follow.5 The installation of the Nizams on the musnud had always been done privately in the presence of a handful of nobles, close relatives, the British Resident and a couple of Muslim clerics who would read the relevant passages from the Koran to formalise the succession. The ceremony would be followed several days later by a grand darbar and procession through the city. What was being proposed for Jah was an all-in-one, Mughal-style darbar at the Chowmahalla palace complete with 1000 guests, guards of honour, gold and velvet carpets, recitals from the Koran, and Persian music to be followed by a banquet. It would be the last of its kind not only in Hyderabad but also in India.
With 3000 servants at his disposal, Habeeb Jung set to work preparing the darbar hall of the Chowmahalla palace for the event. The ancestral home of the Asaf Jahis – Chowmahalla or the Palace of the Four Pavilions – was once a massive complex spread out over 40 acres in the heart of the old city. It was the principal residence of the Nizams from 1750 until the late nineteenth century. Having surrendered their authority to the Resident, and having lost the will to rule, the Nizams would retreat to Chowmahalla,6 living out the rest of their days in ‘gloomy retirement and sullen discontent’, in the case of Sikander Jah, or opting for ‘a secluded life . . . associating with humble dependants’, in the case of Afzal ud-Daula.7
Architecturally the complex was a syncretic blend of Qutb Shahi, Persian and European styles, but it lacked the grandeur of palaces of much lesser rulers of princely India. ‘On entering the Nizam’s palace we were surprised by the plainness of its style, than which indeed nothing could be more commonplace,’ reported the Resident Richard Temple in the 1860s. ‘It consisted of a cluster of modern houses, built mainly in the European fashion, without the least attempt at architectural design. The cause is this, that originally in the days of the Mogul empire the Nizam was technically considered to be encamped in the Deccan and had not established in any permanent palace. His successors still cling to that tradition and never erect any palatial structures.’8
Each of the four pavilions was painted in a different colour: ruby red, pink, purple and green with matching coloured glass chandeliers and heavy silk curtains. The furnishing consisted mainly of French period pieces with the odd Queen Anne or Queen Victoria. ‘Harmony was farthest away from the mind of the interior decorator,’ writes D. F. Karaka. ‘If an article or a bibelot were beautiful in itself, it found a place in one of the reception rooms where it stood out of period, yet not out of place in the overall richness of its setting.’9
The darbar hall, known as the Khilawat, was built by the Seventh Nizam in 1915. Modelled on the Shah of Iran’s summer palace at Isfahan, the pearl-white, double-storey building is entered by a flight of steps that leads into a vast audience hall illuminated by several massive chandeliers. The Khilawat was used by Osman Ali Khan to receive noblemen and for special occasions such as his birthday, the Muslim festival of Eid, and Nowroze, the Persian New Year. Now it would be used to inaugurate Hyderabad’s last Nizam.
Grainy 16-millimetre footage shot by a German cameraman on 6 April 1967, the day of the darbar, shows Jah’s motorcade meandering through streets strewn with rose petals and decorated with flags, bunting and arches. Wearing a yellow sherwani and dastar, Jah looks stiff and uncomfortable as he emerges from a silver-blue Oldsmobile bearing the number plate ‘HYDERABAD 1’. Esra appears more relaxed, dressed in a pale green sari, her hair covered by a scarf. Inside the darbar hall male guests wearing dastars, fezzes and turbans sit patiently on a white cloth that covers the marble floor while the women watch from the gallery above the audience hall. Seated to the right of the throne are Jah’s father, mother, uncle and brother, together with other close relatives. Other notables are seated on the left.
The old Musyram Regiment, dressed in a peculiar mixture of red and blue French dragoon-style trousers and jackets and Arab headdresses set on fez hats, makes up the guard of honour flanking the entrance to the palace. The Hyderabad anthem is played, followed by prayers in Arabic and an inspection by Jah of the palace troops. Holding a ceremonial sword, Jah enters the darbar hall as verses are recited from the Koran asking Allah to forgive his sins past and present, to guide him along a straight path and give help and strength for the tasks ahead. More prayers follow, including the hymn of salutations as sung at the sacred shrine at Medina.
With the religious part of the ceremony concluded, Jah takes his place on the musnud, a white marble dais with a canopy of yellow velvet embroidered with pearls, gold and silver thread and an ochre-coloured backdrop embellished with the Asaf Jahi emblem. While seated, the President of India’s two gazettes acknowledging Jah as the successor of the Seventh Nizam and declaring him the ruler of Hyderabad and the sole owner of all movable and immovable property of Osman Ali Khan’s private estate are read out. From outside the palace come the sounds of a 21-gun salute and shouts of ‘Long Live the Nizam’ from the tens of thousands of people gathered in the streets.
After a round of speeches and an offering of prayers by representatives of Hyderabad’s Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Parsi and Buddhist communities, it is the turn of the nobles to offer their nazars – each coin touched but not taken by Jah. Finally, in accordance with Mughal customs, two farmans proclaiming him the new Nizam are read out and signed. Jah offers nazars to his father and mother and then walks to the front steps of the Khilawat, where he and Esra stand while the royal guard presents its arms in a royal salute and the anthem of Hyderabad is played.
The camera lingers on this scene for a long time, not because of its significance, but because the Oldsmobile meant to take the royal couple back to their residence has broken down. Esra looks bemused and Jah slightly bored as Habeeb Jung runs down the stairs and out of the frame to arrange for another much older car as a replacement. Uppermost in Jah’s mind at that moment, he would later admit, was not the significance of the ceremony or what he would do with his grandfather’s wealth, but why the imported V8 was refusing to start. As for the President’s proclamation making him the Nizam, Jah remains indifferent. ‘I think it was a case of someone dragging out some files marked “Succession” and saying, “Let’s use this one.” Officially I was the Nizam, but since 1948 there was nothing to rule over.’10
But Jah could not brush off the responsibility he now faced as the inheritor of possibly the largest private estate in the world. In the last decade of his life, Osman Ali Khan had projected the aura of being a rich ruler who had fallen on hard times by having to borrow money, sell property and eat into the corpus of some of the trust funds to pay off his son’s debts and maintain his vast household. But the caskets of Golconda diamonds, Burmese rubies, Colombian emeralds and Basra pearls were left largely untouched, even after setting aside some of the most valuable pieces in various jewellery trusts. The heirlooms of Mughal Emperors, the plunder of the Mysore wars, the State regalia, the robes of silk studded with precious stones, were still lying untouched in various safes and strongrooms.
Most experts doubt there was ever an inventory made of this collection. When the gemstones and jewellery set aside in two trust funds and acquired by the Government of India were finally catalogued, they comprised more than 25,000 diamonds weighing over 12,000 carats, more than 2000 emeralds and 40,000 chows of pearls. Yet this was only a fraction of the jewellery in Osman Ali Khan’s possession. The late Nizam once turned down an offer to value his hoard when told it would take six months. His acute memory was said to be the only list, and the dust which covered each tray, cabinet and chest its only protection.11
The inheritance did not stop there. Indian and European antiques, rare books and manuscripts, Mughal miniatures and old bronzes cluttered the dingy rooms of dozens of palaces, villas and bungalows spread across half a dozen Indian states. In addition to a privy purse of two million rupees a year, Jah received money from five different trusts including the ‘Grandson’s Pocket Money Trust’, which had a corpus of 215,000 rupees. He was the owner of a fleet of mostly broken-down cars including a 1911 Fiat, 1912 Rolls-Royce and two 1914 Napiers, a stunning collection of jade, a solid gold table-setting for 100 guests, the world’s largest coin – a dinner-plate-sized 12 kilogram gold mohur minted during the reign of Jehangir – a priceless collection of Mughal weaponry and a Holland and Holland Royal Grade 600 bore elephant gun.
Like the Seventh Nizam, Jah also inherited a state within a state. His grandfather created an administration that included departments of health, education and religious affairs, each with their own staff and offices looking after every aspect of his establishment. He had to shoulder the responsibility of being the chairman of more than 30 trusts and the custodian of around 500 mosques, temples and shrines. ‘Obviously, I have to put my house in order and find out my assets and liabilities,’ Jah told The Washington Post’s Warren Unna in August 1967. ‘They asked me, “Do you want this to drag on for five years? Or overnight?” I said overnight. But I now think it will take about a year.’12
Jah vastly underestimated the complexity of putting his house in order and finding people who were both experienced and honest enough to help him. He needed someone of the calibre of Salar Jung, but was surrounded by Chandu Lals. The coterie that had served his grandfather now began grovelling for his attention. ‘People would take his shoes off when he arrived, just like a servant would do, just to please him,’ says Basith Nawab, who was once a close confidant of Jah’s. ‘If it was night and he said it was morning, they would bow and say, “Yes sir, it is morning.” That I didn’t like. I was the only who would say, “No, this is wrong,” if it was wrong, and “This is right.” He would always say to me, “Go and get some others.”’13
Jah was determined to replace the grovelling old guard with a politically savvy and well-connected administrator who could keep the government off his back and the litigants at bay. Indira Gandhi’s newly elected government was toying with the idea of ridding the princes of their privy purses and sovereign rights and opposition politicians were using the government’s recognition of his succession to make a mockery of its socialist credentials. Within weeks of Jah’s inauguration the Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan, was caught up in a fierce debate on the floor of the Lower House of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. Opposition MPs directed a barrage of questions at Chavan about why the government had allowed a coronation ceremony that smacked of ‘colonialism and imperialism’ to take place in ‘a free democratic India’ and whether the succession was legal.14 Independent MP, Bakar Ali Mirza, asked whether any assessment had been made of the late Nizam’s movable and immovable property for the purpose of estate duty and wealth tax and if the minister was aware of allegations that the ‘Nizam is sending out jewellery through Britishers and Turks to some foreign countries’. As the debate got more heated, Chavan was also asked why the government had done nothing to help the ‘12,000 poor employees of the late Nizam’ Jah had allegedly sacked and those close relatives who claimed to have been evicted from their ancestral properties.
By the middle of 1967, the atmosphere was becoming so poisonous that Jah sent Esra and their two children back to England while he remained to deal with the growing queues of people offering advice on how to spend his money and the litigants wanting their share of the estate. Within a week of the Nizam’s death, Jah’s father Azam filed a suit challenging the deduction of 300,000 rupees from his 700,000-rupees-a-year allowance for the debts owed to Osman Ali Khan. He claimed there was no longer any obligation to repay the loan now that he was dead. Bitter at being left with little more than 200 pairs of shoes, 750 suits, a trunkful of neckties and several dozen race horses, Azam took out a public notice in the local press claiming that he was entitled to receive a share of the Nizam’s ‘considerable property, movable and immovable, jewellery, cash, etc.’ and that Jah had no ‘right about the property of the late Nizam’. Jah’s aunt, Shehezadi Pasha, was the next to move to the courts by suing the Government of India for recognising her nephew as the sole heir. Since the kingdom had become merely an estate, her lawyers contended it was subject to Islamic law and had to be divided among the immediate descendants. After some initial hesitation, Azam lent his backing to the suit.
In January 1968, the Andhra Pradesh High Court ruled in Shehezadi Pasha’s favour and ordered that all of the late Nizam’s private wealth had to be divided among his immediate heirs. Jah took the court’s decision, which could have left him with little more than his two million rupees’ privy purse and the money he was entitled to in his trust funds, in his stride. Quarrels between fathers and sons ‘are a tradition in our family’, he told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times.16 His father and aunt were mistaken if they thought their suit would make them wealthy. They would find themselves being sued by the several thousand descendants of the seven previous Nizams. ‘If they get 10 rupees in the end, they’ll be lucky.’ Shortly afterwards, Jah’s lawyers filed an appeal in the Supreme Court arguing that the inheritance was sanctioned by Article Four of the agreement the Nizam made with the government in 1950 that the usual Muslim law of inheritance and intestate succession would not apply and Jah would become the sole heir to the fortune. The appeal was upheld.
To sort out the growing legal and financial mess, Jah appointed Zahir Ahmed as his chief secretary and the chairman of his Private Estate. Ahmed had served as Hyderabad’s representative at the United Nations in the lead-up to the Police Action. He had been closely associated with Walter Monckton in negotiations between Hyderabad and the Government of India. After India’s invasion, Nehru appointed him to wind up Hyderabad’s affairs in London. He then represented India at the UN. He had good connections with the Nehru–Gandhi family, but it was his closeness to Durrushehvar that clinched the post of running the estate. Durrushehvar liked Ahmed’s Westernised manners and the fact that he had no connection to the late Nizam’s coterie.
Ahmed’s most urgent task was to wrest control of 18 of the 54 trusts set up by the late Nizam from Azam Jah. The trusts in question had all been established before Jah’s father had been formally disinherited by Osman Ali Khan and included the valuable Jewellery Trust and Supplemental Jewellery Trust. Ahmed feared that Azam would use his position as president of the trusts to stack them with his own appointees and then sell off the jewellery to meet his debts, which stood at around four million rupees and were growing at a rate of up to 10 per cent a month. It was a view shared by the government’s representative on the board of trustees, M. K. Venkatachalam: ‘[The Prince of Berar] seems bent on making attempts to wreck the structure of the Trusts and also probably, under the influence and advice of his “friends” to misuse the trust funds and divert them for liquidating the enormous debts he himself has been incurring in his life.’17
Ahmed enlisted the help of Jah’s brother Muffakham and began running a smear campaign against Azam to get bureaucrats in the Home Ministry on-side. ‘[Azam] is said to have a stud of horses for whose feeding a number of buffaloes are maintained,’ the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs M. V. Oak wrote after meeting with the trustees. ‘There are all sorts of other odd things. He is hardly ever sober. He is under the influence of a mistress and other hangers-on who exercise a sinister influence over him. Away from them he is quite a gentle soul, though without any judgement or will of his own.’18
Azam fought back, blocking a move by Jah, Muffakham, Ahmed and two other trustees to appoint an advisory committee to take over management of the trusts. In early February 1968, however, he was dealt a blow when the telephone and electricity supply at his residence were cut off for non-payment of bills. Later that month the city civil court ordered that the payment of his allowance from his trust fund cease until his debts had been cleared. Azam reacted by demanding an immediate inspection of the contents of the jewellery trusts, which were in a safedeposit box in the Mercantile Bank at Bombay on the grounds that they formed part of his assets. Ahmed’s fears, it appeared, were not unfounded.
The complexities of dealing with 54 trust funds were only one of the headaches haunting Jah. In August, 500 members of the newly formed Nizam’s Estate Dismissed Employees Association attempted to march on Chiraan Palace demanding severance pay and pensions. Twelve of the marchers were arrested, including two of the late Nizam’s bodyguards, a woman who once served water to the ladies of the zenana, a man who raised grass for his horses and the servant responsible for mixing his daily dose of opium.19 The khanazads were also staging protests over Jah’s plans to sell off the houses they had been given by his grandfather.
Jah defended the cutbacks saying that inheritance tax would eat up most of his privy purse. He was genuinely short of cash. The stories about his grandfather living on seven shillings and sixpence a week were not far from the mark. There were very few rupees in the kitty and the bills for wages and running costs of the estate as well as the taxes were mounting. Establishing a cash flow meant selling assets, and the most liquid of those assets were the jewellery, gold and silver lying in palace vaults, safes and boxes. Jah rarely wore anything more valuable than a gold ring, and according to one associate was unable to tell the difference between a diamond and a piece of glass. The one person Jah knew who did was Hashim Ali Javeri.
For Jah it was always a case of taking someone at face value without first checking their credentials. He had few friends in Hyderabad and very little basis for deciding whom he could and could not trust. His General Power of Attorney for more than 30 years, Asadullah Khan, was a 250-rupee-a-month accountant when he was given the authority to handle tens of millions of dollars’ worth of transactions. His main qualification was having attended the same school as Jah in the 1940s. At various stages over the next few decades, Jah handed over the management of aspects of his affairs to his valet, driver and bodyguard.
Javeri, unlike most of the other quislings Jah appointed, was well qualified. The Javeris had set up the first diamond-cutting business in Bombay and helped establish India as the diamond-cutting capital of the world. Hashim Ali Javeri, had worked as a jeweller for the late Nizam and the Aga Khan. The Javeri family had a string of jewellery shops in the US, UK and Europe as well as properties in London, Geneva and Australia. Now Hashim Ali Javeri was keen to prepare his son, Sadruddin, to take over the family business, and asked Jah to give him a job. Sadruddin became Jah’s financial advisor until 1977 and was then made the chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate from 1990 until 1995. Javeri would initiate the first break, Jah the last. From being the closest of friends, the two men would end up the most bitter of enemies. Jah would blame his former partner for precipitating his financial collapse. Javeri would hit back with a list of broken promises and double-crossings. The accusations and litigation would continue well after Javeri’s death in 2002.
For now, however, the involvement of Hashim Ali and his son was welcome. They had excellent contacts among gem dealers in Switzerland and advised Jah to move as much of his jewellery as possible to Geneva, where it would fetch a better price than in India. The problem was getting the gems and precious stones out of India without attracting attention.
From the middle of 1967 until the end of 1969, the Congress government was regularly questioned in the Lok Sabha about Jah’s jewellery and the value of his estate. Leading the charge was M. N. Reddy. The Independent MP from Nizamabad grilled Chavan on the number of foreign trips Jah had taken, whether the government had scrutinised the list of the late Nizam’s private properties and what it was doing about the thousands of sacked workers. The government took the line that the custody of the jewels was the Nizam’s responsibility. ‘They are his private property and are in his possession,’ Chavan told the Lok Sabha on 5 July 1967.20 The following April, Chavan’s deputy in the Home Ministry, Vidya Charan Shukla, said that details of the jewellery recognised as Jah’s private property or matters relating to the settlement of that private property were not matters ‘for public disclosure’.21 In November 1969, opposition politicians again demanded a probe into allegations that jewels were being surreptitiously taken out of the country. The Finance Minister, P. C. Sethi, told the Lok Sabha ‘information is being collected’.22
The Congress Party’s willingness to shield Jah from such attacks was losing momentum. Gandhi was wooing the electorate with a populist ten-point program which promised social control of banking, a check on monopolies, the nationalisation of the insurance sector, curbs on property and the abolition of princely privileges and privy purses. Jah responded by making his first and last foray into national politics. He told Gandhi there would be a ‘crisis in confidence’ if privy purses were abolished as the agreement with the princes was enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Jah was not alone in objecting to Gandhi’s brazen bid to attract electoral support. The 279 princes on the civil list received 50 million rupees a year between them. At the top of the scale was the Nizam of Hyderabad, followed by the maharajahs of Mysore, Jodhpur and Jaipur, who received around two million rupees a year. At the bottom of the scale was the Talukdar of Katodia who received around 400 rupees, worked as a clerk and travelled everywhere on a bicycle. The princes argued that all this was a small price for the government to pay considering what they had willingly given up at Independence. ‘It wouldn’t buy every Indian a postcard,’ scoffed the Maharana of Udaipur.23
At first it appeared Gandhi might have trouble getting the numbers for the constitutional amendment required to abolish the princely perks. There were 12 princes in Congress and several others in opposition parties including the formidable Rajmata of Jaipur who was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records for winning the largest majority in a democratic election when she stood for the Swatantra Party. The issue, however, failed to cut across party lines, nor was there a public outcry. In September 1970, Gandhi introduced a bill abolishing princely privileges in the Lok Sabha, where it sailed through by 339 votes to 154. On 21 December the bill went to the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, but was defeated by just one vote because ‘some fellow had diarrhoea and didn’t come’.24 The Cabinet held a special session into the night and the next day the President of India, V. V. Giri, was roused from his bed to sign an order that stripped the princes of their privileges and their titles. Though the princes won a sixmonth Supreme Court stay, the President’s signature on the 26th Constitutional Amendment Bill effectively consigned India’s royalty, Jah included, into history. Just as there would be no more maharajahs after the present generation died, there would be no more Nizams.
Looking back at those events, Jah remains philosophical. ‘It didn’t affect me as much as other princes because I am half-Turkish. If they can throw the Ottomans of out Turkey, what’s a few Indian princes?’25 His Turkish heritage, however, was not compensation for the loss of his privy purse and other privileges. The cut in his income worsened the cash-flow problems that plagued Jah from the outset and were becoming a breeding ground for corruption and intrigue. ‘When Jah was in Hyderabad he would spend one lakh of rupees per day. The actual expenditure was, say, only 30,000, but his people would take 70,000. They used to grab money,’ remembers Basith Nawab.26
As Jah began spending more time abroad, the firesale of his assets intensified. Mir Ayoob Ali Khan of The Deccan Chronicle recalls the free-for-all:
Jah was always short of cash. Even in those early years he was already running up debts and tax arrears. The order would come that he needed money and out came the jewels and antiques. If the offer was 10,000 [rupees] they would say take it, 2000 – take it, two rupees – take it. And these two rupees would be unaccounted for. How much of these two rupees went to Mukarram Jah nobody knows, how much went to the GPA [General Power of Attorney] nobody knows. But the property, the precious antiques and so on were vanishing from his palaces like snaps of his fingers. Lots of people were making money and the controlling authority was very weak. Whoever Jah put there was unable to check the slide. Within a couple of years there was a huge conspiracy against him at various levels and the advisors he had with him at the time, they were not up to the mark. They could not guide him properly.’27
Years later, after the downslide Jah had set in train had run its course, after his Australian assets were seized by the courts and after four failed marriages, Esra would be one of the few people willing to defend her former husband. ‘He wanted to be a mechanic or a military man. He found it hard. He couldn’t accept what was going on,’ Esra narrated at her family home on the island of Sedef, a photograph of her mother-in-law, Durrushehvar, displayed prominently on a cabinet behind her. ‘He had never received any training for this sort of thing. He thought he should rely on close friends – that was a big mistake.’ Esra also accepted partial responsibility for Jah’s dislike of Hyderabad. ‘I didn’t like India, I dampened his enthusiasm.’28
By the close of 1971, whatever little enthusiasm Jah may have had for being crowned the Eighth Nizam had all but evaporated. Jah never drank alcohol and until now his only vice had been the occasional cigar. He would remain a teetotaller, but he was starting to smoke heavily and have difficulties sleeping. He was obsessed about his security. He had visited Baghdad in 1958 just before his close friend King Faisal was assassinated in a coup that paved the way for Saddam Hussein to come to power. Taking a leaf out of Mahboob Ali Khan’s book, Jah spent hours sitting incognito in Baghdad’s tea shops. Sensing the public’s mood of dissatisfaction, he warned Faisal of the danger. Now he sensed that his own relatives were planning a similar bloody coup to get their hands on his fortune. He was worried about his children, fearing they could be kidnapped and held for ransom.
Outside his home, disgruntled employees were burning his effigy, the state administration had dishonoured their agreement to pay rent for properties his father had leased to them, and the court cases brought on by jealous relatives kept piling up. Esra was increasingly frustrated by her husband’s almost paranoiac concern about his privacy and security and the restrictions he placed on her movements in Hyderabad. Friends urged him to offer his services to Indira Gandhi and enter politics or accept an ambassadorship. ‘If you invite the Chief Minister to your home, he’ll frame your invitation card. You’ll become so powerful you’ll be able to change the government,’ his old friend Chandrakant Gir remembers telling Jah. ‘He was so hesitant when I told him that he didn’t even want to speak.’ Gir blames Zahir Ahmed for Jah’s reticence. ‘People would flock to the mosque at Banjara Hills to salaam him when he went to pray, but Zahir Ahmed did not want him to become popular. It would have made it harder to control him. But Jah also had an inferiority complex. He lacked knowledge of Hyderabad, he didn’t even know the history of the Nizams.’29
In December 1971, Jah assumed for the first time something of the role that was expected of him as a ruler. In the grounds of the Purani Haveli palace where his great grandfather, the Sixth Nizam, had lived, he presided over the opening of the Mukarram Jah Trust for Education and Learning. ‘Modern India is beset with myriad problems and if each individual chooses to devote himself to the solution of a problem in which he can be effective he serves all,’ he said in a prepared speech.
Democracy has absolved me from the cares and responsibilities of rulership borne by my ancestors; but I still share with them the urge to render service where most needed and where it can be most effective. With resources available to me, however, I can add to these by providing an Institute where the best minds of the country can gather and study and plan collectively . . . To lend concreteness to this proposed Institute I hereby agree to hand over my entire property known as ‘Purani Haveli’ and also a part of Chowmahalla . . . to form the corpus of a trust over which I shall preside.30
Today, the trust is the only institution in Hyderabad named after Jah, compared with the hundreds of trusts, institutes, charities and public works that bear the name of Osman Ali Khan. Jah’s style as the Nizam of Hyderabad was to be very different from that of his forefathers. When the affairs of state grew too complicated and tiresome, the Nizams traditionally retreated into their attar-scented palaces, drowning themselves in the ‘vicious pleasures’ of the zenana, surrounding themselves with cringing courtiers and obsequious servants. Jah sought refuge in his workshop. The only pleasure he got from going to Hyderabad, he told an American reporter after becoming the Nizam, was tinkering with the 56 mostly broken-down cars in his grandfather’s garage. ‘I inherited a scrap yard. I have a lifetime’s work before me.’31
In early 1972, Jah decided to look up George Hobday, his old friend from Harrow and Cambridge, who was working as a country doctor in Western Australia. He did not realise it at the time, but the trip would mark a new beginning, one that had very little to do with being the Nizam, staying in Hyderabad or pursuing a military career. His Exalted Highness, the Rustam of the Age, the Aristotle of the Times, Ruler of the Kingdom, Asaf Jah VIII, the Conqueror of Dominions, the Regulator of the Realm, the Administrator of the State, Nawab Mir Barakat Ali Khan Bahadur, the Victor in Battles, the Leader of Armies, Faithful Ally of the British Government, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, was about to become plain Mr Jah, the proprietor of Murchison House Station.