The lost world of Hyderabad Deccan
The first instalment of this article was published in Tuesday’s Dawn
LONDON: Over the following two decades he married four more times. One of his wives, a secretary named Helen Simmons, died of an Aids-related illness in 1989, which led to intimate details of the marriage being splashed across Australian tabloids. All five of the marriages added to Jah’s growing pile of litigation, as each successive wife demanded fabulous sums in alimony.
In his absence, Jah’s unsupervised Hyderabad properties were looted and his possessions dispersed by a succession of incompetent, dishonest or unscrupulous advisers. When Jackie Kennedy came to Hyderabad on a private visit a few years later, she recorded her impressions of this collapsing and leaderless remnant in a letter to a friend: “We had an evening with the old noblemen of the court...” she wrote. “There were three ancient classical musicians playing in the moonlight, and the noblemen were speaking of how it was all disappearing, that the youth didn’t appreciate the ways of the old culture, that the great chefs were being taken by the Emirates... The evening was profoundly sad. My son, John, told me the next day that the sons of the house had taken him to their rooms because they couldn’t stand the classical music – and had offered him a tall glass filled with whisky and had put on a pornographic cassette in the Betamax, and the Rolling Stones on the tape deck. They wore tight Italian pants and open shirts...”
In 1997, when I first visited Hyderabad, the plundering of the Nizam’s property was nearly complete. The drawing rooms of the city were still buzzing with stories of how precious jewels, manuscripts, Louis XIV furniture and chandeliers from the Nizam’s palaces were available on the market, for a price.
Meanwhile, his various palaces were decaying – some sealed by order of court, some sold off or encroached upon. Between 1967 and 2001, the Chowmahalla estate shrank from 54 acres to 12, as courtyard after courtyard, ballrooms and stable blocks – even the famous “mile-long” banqueting hall – were acquired by developers, who demolished the 18th-century buildings and erected concrete apartments in their place.
I visited the huge Victorian pile of the Falaknuma Palace, just to the south of the city. The complex, which stood above the town on its own acropolis, was falling into ruin, with every window and doorway sealed by red wax. Wiping the windows, I could see cobwebs the size of bedsheets hanging from the corners of the rooms. The skeletons of outsized Victorian sofas and armchairs lay dotted around the parquet floors, their chintz upholstery eaten away by white ants. Outside, the gardens had given way to scrub flats, waterless fountains, and paint-flaking flagpoles at crazy angles. It was a truly melancholy sight: a derelict Ruritania.
In 2001, on another research trip to Hyderabad, I received a phone call from a friend. The first wife of the present Nizam, Princess Esra, had unexpectedly appeared in the city after an absence of three decades. With her, she had brought the celebrated Indian lawyer Vijay Shankardass. Esra, it seemed, had recently met her ex-husband at the wedding of their son, Azmet, in London. She was shocked to hear of the state of Jah’s affairs: he had been forced to sell his beloved sheep farm and flee his creditors. A partial reconciliation followed, and Esra was given the authority by Jah to try to save something for their son and daughter before what little remained in Hyderabad disappeared, too. It was her intention to settle the many outstanding law cases, open the palaces and lease Falaknuma to a hotel chain. She planned to turn Chowmahalla into a museum.
Chowmahalla, dating from 1751, was one of the finest royal residences in India. After some negotiation, I was allowed to accompany the princess on her visit, and so was there at the breaking of the seals of some rooms that had not been opened since the death of the previous Nizam in 1967.
What we saw was extraordinary, as if we were in the palace of Sleeping Beauty. In one underground storeroom, thousands of ancient scimitars, swords, helmets, maces, daggers, archery equipment and suits of armour lay rusted into a single metallic mass on a line of trestle tables. In another, album after album of around 8,000 Victorian and Edwardian photographs of the Nizam’s household was covered in a thick cladding of dust. A unique set of 160 harem photographs, dating from 1915, lay loose in a box. On the walls, dynastic portraits were falling out of their frames. In one room were great mountains of princely dresses, patkas, chaugoshia and salvars, drawers of Kanchipuram silk saris, and one huge trunk containing nothing but bow ties. There were long lines of court uniforms as well as sets of harem clothes once worn by the Nizam’s favourite wives. Almost 8,000 dinner services survived, one of which alone had 2,600 pieces.
In the King Kothi palace, the Nizam’s dynasty’s complete correspondence since the mid-18th century filled three rooms floor to ceiling. When the archivists had been sacked in 1972, the archive, all 10 and a half tonnes of it, had been stuffed into the rooms and sealed. Other rooms were stacked with crates of French champagne.
It looked an impossible task even to begin to sort out the mess and dilapidation. Yet remarkably, six years later, the Chowmahalla is now open to the public and 1,000 visitors a day are streaming through. A massive conservation project, unique in India, has restored and catalogued the best of what remains. The result is little short of incredible.
In the story of how the Nizam’s inheritance was saved, Esra’s lawyer, Vijay Shankardass, plays the most extraordinary role. An urbane figure, Shankardass is the only lawyer who has both chambers in Lincoln’s Inn and a practice in Delhi. He is renowned for being as clever as he is honest and, as the man who represents Salman Rushdie, he is also celebrated for his courage and tenacity.I met him in the largest suite of Hyderabad’s grandest hotel, which he has occupied intermittently since beginning work on the Nizam’s estate in 1996: “I was contacted by Princess Esra’s lawyers in England,” he told me, “and asked if I could intervene in trying to sort out the jewellery trusts which the last Nizam had set up.”
— Dawn/ The Guardian News Service