MUJEEB YAR JUNG HANDS me a double-edged shamsheer from Persia cast sometime in the seventeenth century, that he has picked up from a pile of tarnished steel lying on a large wooden table. There are enough swords, scimitars and daggers in this vault of the Chowmahalla palace to kit out a small army. Old muskets, gunpowder flasks and shields are piled up in the darkened recesses of the room. I remember how the nineteenth-century historian Mark Wilks described the Second Nizam’s ‘motley crowd’ of warriors facing the forces of Tipu Sultan armed with ‘sabres of every age and nation, lances of every length and description’. It feels as if I have found their final resting place. ‘I get bad dreams after coming here,’ says the old nobleman as he examines a particularly deadly looking punch dagger with a jade handle.1
When I first interviewed Mujeeb Yar Jung in 1998, he was lying on his sick bed in a decaying bungalow near King Kothi. The son-in-law of the Seventh Nizam and one of the few people still alive who had worked for Osman Ali Khan and Mukarram Jah, he had seen Hyderabad in its heyday and then watched it fall. ‘We’ve been cursed. Our heritage, our culture, everything is ruined now,’ he told me then.2
Time and neglect has erased much of Hyderabad’s unique Mughal past. During my stay in 2005, newspapers reported that one of the few remaining Paigah palaces in the old city had collapsed in the monsoon rains. Falaknuma has been stripped of most of its valuables. The gardens that once surrounded Nazari Bagh are now full of shops and businesses such as ‘Good Habit Motors’, ‘Splash Fashion House’ and ‘Baghdad Tours and Travels’. The words of one of Jah’s associates kept coming back to me as I travelled around the city. ‘He had become a pauper, but his servants had become millionaires.’3
Seven years on, Mujeeb Yar Jung is too frail to walk, but insists on being driven to Chowmahalla every day to document the artefacts that are still being pulled out of the palaces of the Nizams. Contrary to people’s worst fears, not everything found its way to antique dealers and private collectors. Osman Ali Khan was a hoarder and always bought in bulk. In the last few years, 8000 mostly incomplete dinner services, trunk loads of bow ties and whole sets of clothes once worn by the Nizam’s favourite wives have been discovered in cellars and strongrooms.
Six giant safes made by E. Stiwell & Sons London stand in one of the Chowmahalla’s courtyards, unopened. Easily transportable high-value articles such as jewellery, curios and miniature paintings were the first to be sold off or stolen. Less lucrative items such as textiles and photographs were largely ignored. Mahboob Ali Khan appears in an old platinum print with riding boots, tweed jacket and billowing sideburns. There are hand-painted prints of Durrushehvar holding Jah as a baby in white socks and knitted booties, photographs of Osman Ali Khan wearing the jewels of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, and group portraits of the shy-looking women of his zenana.
The sheer volume of treasure accumulated by the Nizams thwarted even the most determined looters. Before showing me around the sealed rooms of Nazari Bagh, the new chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate, Dr Aminuddin Khan, points to an old unframed canvas of a European army officer that archivists found a few days earlier buried under a pile of documents. The unsigned oil painting is probably a portrait of one the mercenaries employed to train the Nizam’s troops in the late 1700s. He says that no one is sure what lies buried among the ten and a half tonnes of undocumented archival material stored in Nazari Bagh’s zenana quarters. But for the first time in almost 40 years there is a good chance that it won’t be lost forever.
In January 2005, Jah flew to Hyderabad from Turkey to open the Chowmahalla to the public. The fountains were working, the weeds had been cleared from the gardens and the main buildings painted and repaired. The ‘misunderstandings’ with the Taj had been sorted out and Hyderabad’s dignitaries came in their hundreds to pay their respects to the much humbled returning heir of the Asaf Jahi dynasty. Now reconciled with their father, Jah’s eldest children, Azmat and Shekhyar, were also there. US-based Azmat, a successful cinematographer and Shekhyar, a London fashion designer, posed for photographers on the front steps of the palace. Jah’s Australian-born son, Azam, had also flown in from Perth, but not his younger brother Umar, who had died a year earlier. Dressed in a traditional Hyderabadi sherwani, Jah told the audience: ‘My objective is to open the palaces up . . . [so that] the cultural heritage of my people is better understood.’4
The restoration of the Chowmahalla, and the opening of a small museum in the darbar hall where Jah was made Nizam, has been the initiative of his first wife, Esra. Determined to give something back to the city that made her a princess in 1967, Esra hired a team of restorers and museologists to repair, document and preserve the palace and its contents.
Work has also begun on converting the Falaknuma into a luxury hotel to be operated by the Taj Group. There are plans to restore Nazari Bagh and turn some of its buildings into shops. Chowmahalla may one day become a centre for researchers seeking to unravel the story of the Nizam dynasty. In 2001 the Nizam’s jewels finally went on display in New Delhi and Hyderabad under tight security. In New Delhi more than 200,000 people saw the collection. One family of jewellers from Jaipur came to view it 25 times.
Esra has also encouraged a reconciliation between Jah and his children and helped him sort out his financial affairs. She has legal charge over his assets as power of attorney, along with David Michael. A new legal team, headed by London-based lawyer Vijay Shankardass, handles all litigation including the lingering dispute over the disposal of Jah’s Australian assets and the twenty-million-odd pounds sitting in the National Westminster account. Shankardass was appointed in 1997 to resolve the legal deadlock over Jah’s share of the proceeds of the Nizam’s jewels. In an out-of-court settlement in June 2002, Jah agreed to distribute his share, which had swelled to 1.13 billion rupees (A$45 million), among his immediate family, 476 legal heirs of the Seventh Nizam and 1945 descendants of the Sixth. Under the settlement, Jah received 540 million rupees (A$22 million).
Not everyone, however, is happy with the outcome. Several hundred of Jah’s relatives are pressing for more handouts on the basis of a clause in the Supplemental Jewellery Trust that provides for financial relief to ‘distressed’ family members. Their lawyers are arguing the clause applies to anyone forced to have to work for a living rather than merely surviving on handouts from the Nizam’s Estate.
Nor are many people impressed with Jah’s belated interest in reviving the legacy of the Nizams. Begun in 2002, work at the Chowmahalla proceeds at a snail’s pace. Only one of the four pavilions has been restored, and even when finished the palace will be only a shadow of its former glory. Illegal constructions have swallowed up almost three-quarters of its grounds. Chiraan has been less fortunate. In March 2006, after telling friends he did not want to live in Hyderabad again, Jah sold the 1960s palace he helped build with his own hands to the state government, closing yet another chapter in his long and eventful life.
In Hyderabad, debate on Jah’s legacy still rages. ‘If he had put the sort of money he spent on himself into any Muslim country, imagine what his status would have been today. Instead he is living in a small flat on the coast of Turkey,’ says one close associate, who asks not to be named.5 ‘Now even his close friends won’t talk about these things,’ adds The Deccan Chronicle’s Ayoob Ali Khan. ‘Look at the inbuilt treachery in the minds of these people. They don’t even want to talk about what went wrong. Forget about owning up to their responsibility. They are living very happy lives because they have made good money out of him.’6 Hyderabad historian, Rajendra Prasad, believes Jah squandered a unique opportunity. ‘He could have come to the forefront of the nation. Far lesser figures had become ambassadors, governors and politicians. Even the presidentship was within his reach.’7
Sucking on peppermints between cigarettes while sipping tea in his favourite cafe, Jah waits for what Kismet will bring next. ‘The Conqueror of Dominions’ now counts Turkey as his home, but Jah still has a glint in his eye as he talks about Australia. He would like to return one day, he says wistfully, maybe even buy back Murchison House Station. ‘I made the most important part of my life there.’8
Going under the hammer for A$850,000, the station was not able to pay off all of Jah’s creditors in Australia. Its new owners have set up a small museum in von Bibra’s original hut and filled it with Jah memorabilia, such as his old saddle and the metal spikes he wanted buried in the dirt tracks to deter trespassers. Scratched into the old plaster wall is an intriguing piece of graffiti: ‘Gardeners see all. Work as they please. Know more than they let on.’ For A$45 tourists get a half-day tour that features a description of every tank, truck and bulldozer that Jah left behind, as well as a drive down some of his now famous ‘straight-as-a-die’ tracks. In Kalbarri, ‘The Shah’ is talked about in the same breath as his once not-too-distant neighbours – the eccentric Prince Henry and Princess Shirley who in 1970 ‘seceded’ from Australia and established Hutt River Province.
I doubt if any of the Turkish waiters realise that the customer in the blue chequered shirt they are serving is the last Nizam of Hyderabad – the man his Ottoman grandfather wanted to be the next Caliph of Islam. Jah clearly prefers it that way, as he always has done ever since he started pulling apart and putting back together diesel motors when other children of his age were playing with Matchbox cars. He thrives on the anonymity of being in Turkey, of being able to hop in his old Mercedes and drive for days through the backroads of Anatolia or to the slopes of Mount Ararat. His privacy, jealously guarded by Esra, Michael and Shankardass, is absolute.
As the waiter brings us a second cup of tea, I try to draw him back into talking about his reasons for being here and not in Hyderabad, for leaving Australia when he did and whether he has any regrets. ‘I remember getting a call one day in London,’ he starts, watching me note down what I realised much later was as close as I would ever get to the definitive answer.
It was from my old friend Harry Pound at Portsmouth. He said: ‘Come on down, Jah, I’ve got something for you, but I can’t tell you what it is until you see it.’ I drove my Jeep down to the end of the wharf and there it was, a World War II submarine that he’d raised off the rocks. I said: ‘What did the crew look like when you opened her up?’ He answered: ‘Thin.’ I asked: ‘Have you got anything else?’ ‘Two destroyers, one of them hit a mine on its starboard bow off Venezuela.’ I said, ‘I’m interested.’ 9