LONDON: Sixty years ago, four months after British rule had come to an end in India, the Nizam of Hyderabad, then the richest man in the world, was still refusing to join the new Indian union. Sir Osman Ali Khan saw no reason why Hyderabad should be forced to join either India or Pakistan. His state, which had remained semi-independent within the framework of the Raj, had an economy the size of Belgium’s, and his personal fortune was more remarkable still -according to one contemporary estimate, it amounted to at least $5.5 billion in today’s money, in gold and silver bullion and GBP400m in jewels. Many of these came from the Nizam’s own mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor and the Great Mogul diamond, at the time the largest ever discovered. He also owned one of the Islamic world’s great art collections – libraries full of priceless Mughal and Deccani miniatures, illuminated copies of Quran and the rarest and most esoteric Indo-Islamic manuscripts.

Partly because of this extraordinary wealth, the Nizam was always feted by the British as the most senior prince in India, and given precedence over his rivals. For more than three centuries, his ancestors had ruled a state the size of Italy as absolute monarch, answerable – in internal matters at least – to no one but themselves, and claiming the allegiance of up to 15 million subjects.

In the years leading up to the second world war, the Nizam was regarded by many as the leading Muslim ruler in the world. In 1921, his two sons had been sent to Nice where they married the daughter and the niece of Abdul Majid II, the last Caliph of Turkey. The Caliph had recently been expelled from the Topkapi palace by Ataturk, and sent into exile in France. As part of the marriage arrangements, the Caliph had nominated the Nizam’s son as heir to the Caliphate, so uniting the supreme spiritual authority of the Muslim world with its greatest concentration of riches. The dynasty seemed unassailable.

Yet by the late 30s, more far-sighted observers realised that the Nizam’s world could not last. “He was as mad as a coot and his chief wife was raving,” I was told by Iris Portal, sister of the British politician Rab Butler. She had worked in Hyderabad before independence: “It was like living in France on the eve of the revolution. All the power was in the hands of the Muslim nobility. They spent money like water, and were terrible, irresponsible landlords, but they could be very charming and sophisticated as well. They would take us shooting, talking all the while about their trips to England or to Cannes and Paris, although in many ways Hyderabad was still in the middle ages and the villages we would pass through were often desperately poor. You couldn’t help feeling that the whole great baroque structure could come crashing down at any minute.”

Portal became friends with Princess Niloufer, the Nizam’s daughter-in-law and niece of the Caliph. One day, the princess took her to see some of the Nizam’s treasure which was hidden in one of the palaces. They went down a flight of stairs, past a group of Bedouin guards, and there at the bottom was a huge underground vault, full of trucks and haulage lorries. The trucks were dusty and neglected, their tyres flat, but when the women pulled back a tarpaulin, they found that they were full of gems, pearls and gold coins. The Nizam, fearful of either a revolution or an Indian takeover of his state, had made plans to get some of his wealth out of the country if the need came. But then he lost interest and left the lorries to rot.

The disintegration of the state, and the dispersal of the wealth of the Nizam, the seventh in his line, is one of the 20th century’s most dramatic reversals of fortune. After months of failed negotiations, India invaded Hyderabad in 1948, replacing the Nizam’s autocratic rule with parliamentary democracy. Twenty-six years later, in 1974, India abolished the Nizam’s title - along with those of all the other princes - removed their princely state pensions and made them subject to crippling new taxes and land acts, forcing them to sell most of their property.

When the seventh Nizam died in February 1967, his grandson, Mukarram Jah, succeeded him, quickly finding himself enmeshed in debts and financial chaos. He had inherited a ridiculously inflated army of retainers: 14,718 staff and dependants, including 42 of his grandfather’s concubines and their 100-plus offspring. The principal palace, the Chowmahalla, alone had 6,000 employees; there were around 3,000 Arab bodyguards, 28 people whose only job was to fetch drinking water and 38 more to dust chandeliers; several others were retained specifically to grind the Nizam’s walnuts. Everything was in disarray: the Nizam’s garages, for example, cost GBP45,000 ($1.2m in today’s money) a year to keep in petrol and spare parts for 60 cars, yet only four were in working condition, and the limousine supposed to carry the new Nizam from his coronation broke down.Most debilitating was the legal wrangling initiated by the several thousand descendants of the different Nizams, almost all of whom claimed part of Jah’s inheritance. Jah’s father, who had been passed over in the will, and his aunt led the legal challenge. Even securing the smallest sum to live on proved difficult for the new Nizam: his vast inheritance had been distributed among 54 trusts, the control of which was disputed. From the beginning, he was reduced to selling jewellery and heirlooms to keep solvent.

Eventually, in 1973, disgusted by the weight of litigation and the bitterness of the family in-fighting, Jah relocated to a sheep farm in Perth, Australia. There, he donned blue overalls and spent his days under the bonnets of his cars or driving bulldozers. As his biographer, John Zubrzycki, put it in The Last Nizam: “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.”

Jah sacked most of the 14,000 staff he left behind in India, and divorced his first wife, the sophisticated Turkish princess Esra, who saw no reason why she should move to a remote Australian sheep station. — Dawn/ The Guardian News Service

(To be concluded)