East Did Meet
West - 3
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI, Chicago, IL
With James Kirkpatrick buried
in Calcutta and Khairunnisa in Hyderabad, the
story turns to their children in England and the
friends and relatives of the deceased on both
continents.
Their first born, Mir Ghulam Ali Sahib Allum,
was particularly dear to his father because he
bore strong resemblance to his own father, ‘the
Handsome Colonel’. The young boy (about
4) and his younger sister, Noor-unnisa Sahib Begum,
both were sent to England for training and education,
with an entourage of four (including two Indians,
one Ayah and one male servant). The six-month
voyage took them around Cape Town, South Africa
(Suez Canal was to be completed 60-plus years
later; in 1869). They were taken to their paternal
grandfather (‘the Handsome Colonel’)
in London’s Fitzroy Square, an area then
popular with the ‘returning nabobs and old
India hands’. There, the children met their
uncle, William (their father’s older half
brother) whose proficiency in Urdu came in handy
as their bilingual guardian (Mrs. Ure) departed.
A month after the children arrived in England,
they were baptized on 25 March 1805 at St. Mary’s
Church, Marylebone Road as William George Kirkpatrick
and Katherine Aurora ‘Kitty’ Kirkpatrick.
That’s how was cut perhaps the last bond
with their Hyderabadi past.
When their father James died (October 1805) they
must have been still at sea, but their mother
was alive for another eight years or so. Their
mother and her family made numerous appeals for
them to return to Hyderabad, all to no effect.
It’s not that the children didn’t
long for their parents or Hyderabad, but it seems
their grandfather forbade them to contact anyone
in Hyderabad. The children grew up in their grandfather’s
big house near Keston (Kent), with occasional
visits to their uncle William in Exeter (Devon)
and their cousins in the West Country. Their life
in England wasn’t all fun and games -- the
tragedies were to follow.
First, their progressively invalid uncle William
committed suicide (August, 1812) at the age of
58, with an overdose of labdanum he had been taking
for his rheumatic gout and chronic bowel complaints.
Lt. Col. William Kirkpatrick (1756-1812) was also
their father’s immediate predecessor as
Resident at the Nizam’s court, and later
was chief political advisor/military secretary
to Lord Wellesley, the Governor General. His house
in Exeter was a mini red-brick version of Hyderabad
Residency, with twisted old palm trees at the
entrance -- the only Indian flourish in the staid
and remarkably English environs. He was also a
Persian scholar and a linguist. He had selected
a library for the East India Co., wrote about
his travels [‘An account of the Mission
to Nepaul’ (1793), now in Oriental and India
Office Collections in the British Library], but
what he seemed obsessed with was Tipu Sultan.
Before William returned to England, James gave
him a wagonload of documents from Tipu’s
Chancellery in Seringapatam. Selectively translating
them in his book, “Select Letters of Tippoo
Sultan” (1811), he portrayed ‘Tippoo’
as ‘intolerant fanatic’ and ‘oppressive
ruler’, quite unlike the softer image (in
‘a reasonable guise’) presented by
others. He was particularly interested in Tipu’s
astronomical and astrological system, and believed
that Tipu had “correctly forecast the time
of his own death by a series of esoteric astrological
calculations.” From his friend Mark Wilks
(then Resident at the Mysore court) he even obtained
Tipu’s exact birth date, which, according
to the Mysore calendar, was “in the year
Angeera on the 17th of the month Margeser; Angeera
is the 6th of the cycle and corresponds to 1752-53.”
From William’s final letters, it appears
that he, ‘in the haze of opium addiction’,
may have been trying to make calculations for
predicting his own death.
Second, a month later, the 11-year old William
George Kirkpatrick, or former Sahib Allum, accidentally
fell into a ‘copper of boiling water’
and consequently, one of his limbs had to be amputated.
His grieving grandfather’s letter to Kitty
(12 September 1812) is still in the archives.
Disabled for life, the young William George withdrew
from public, and became interested in poetry (obsessed
with Wordsworth and Coleridge). Six years later,
their grandfather and guardian, having survived
the deaths of his two of his own three sons, died
at the age of 89. After this, Kitty and her disabled
brother began living, in turn, with their three
different married cousins (daughters of their
dead uncle William). The disabled poet got married
at 20, and had three children before his death
in 1828 at the age of 27.
That left Kitty! Despite tragedies and unhappiness
in her early life, she did enjoy a long comfortable
family life. Her own share of inheritance from
her parents was considerable -- estimated at 50,000
pounds (a substantial fortune then), plus her
mother’s jewelry (then valued at 12,000
pounds). Kitty was also supposed to have received
part of the family’s real-estate across
Nizam’s dominion that her grandmother, Sharafunnisa,
had set aside, but it had been confiscated earlier
by Minister Rajah Chandu Lal, following the death
of Nizam Sikander Jah.
Kitty didn’t just live in the oblivious
affluence of British life. She was also written
about and became part of the English literature.
In 1822, while living with her cousin Barbara
Isabella (wife of Charles Buller, MP, in whose
Calcutta house her own father had died years ago),
Kitty met a young struggling Scot, Thomas Carlyle,
who was to later become famous as a writer and
philosopher. Carlyle, hired as a tutor for Barbara’s
children, was quite taken by Kitty (then 20).
Their romance grew, helped particularly by Julia
(Kitty’s other cousin), but while a marriage
between a woman of considerable means and a struggling
tutor was thought at that time out of the question,
Carlyle carried the flame to a great extent and
for quite some time. Years later in his ‘Reminiscences’
(1887), Carlyle wrote about his first impression
of Kitty:
“That first afternoon ... is still very
lively with me…. A strangely complexioned
young lady, with soft brown eyes and floods of
bronze-red hair, really a pretty-looking, smiling,
and amiable though most foreign bit of magnificence
and kindly splendor, who [was] welcomed by the
name ‘dear Kitty’. Kitty Kirkpatrick
[was] Charles Buller’s cousin …. Her
birth, as I afterwards found, an Indian romance,
mother a sublime Begum, father a ditto English
official, mutually adoring, wedding, living withdrawn
in their own private paradise, a romance famous
in the East…”
He even wrote about her to his then-girlfriend
(later wife) Jane Welsh. Quite predictably, this
made the latter very jealous, resulting in quite
a few bitter exchanges between them over Kitty.
For instance, Carlyle wrote to Jane: “This
Kitty is a singular and very pleasing creature,
a little blackeyed, auburn-haired brunette…
Tho’ twenty-one and not unbeautiful, the
sole mistress of herself and fifty thousand pounds,
she is as meek and modest as a Quakeress …Good
Kitty, would you or I were half as happy as this
girl. But her mother was a Hindoo princess (whom
her father fought for and scaled walls for); it
lies in the blood, and philosophy can do little
to help us…”: ‘Love Letters
of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh’, Alexander
Carlyle, ed., 1909 [By ‘Hindoo’, Carlyle
may have been referring to Kitty’s ‘Indian’
origin, not her religion; Kitty’s wealth
was a recurring focus of Jane’s comments].
The Carlyle-Kitty romance didn’t go far.
A year after her brother’s death, she married
Captain James Winslowe Phillipps of 7th Hussars
(on 21 November 1829 at the age of 27). Her husband
was a nephew of John Kennaway who had preceded
her uncle William and her own father as Resident
at Hyderabad; he was also a close friend of William.
After Kitty’s marriage, Carlyle started
his enigmatic novel ‘Sartor Resartus’
(‘The Tailor Retailored’) about Professor
Teufelsdorckh’s relationship with a Zahdarm
family and his fascination with ‘Blumine’
who made the Professor “immortal with a
kiss” but then “resigned herself to
wed some other.” Blumine’s identity
was subject of much speculation. Several candidates
are mentioned in published accounts, including
one by G. Strachey (‘Carlyle and the Rose
Goddess’, in ‘Nineteenth Century’
Vol. 32, July-December, 1892, pp. 470-486). However,
to those who knew, the identity of the characters
was not a mystery: The Professor was Carlyle himself,
the Zahdarms were the Bullers (Kitty’s cousin,
Barbara Isabella and her husband Charles) and
the heroine ‘Blumine’ was none other
than Kitty herself (“a many-tinted radiant
aurora – this fairest of Orient Light bringers”).
It isn’t hard to see Carlyle’s obsession
here, and Kitty had no doubt either about who
‘Blumine’ was supposed to be. Many
years later (after her husband had died), Kitty
did go to see Carlyle in his Cheyne Row house:
about the visit, he quoted this from Virgil, “Agnosco
veteris vestigia flammae” (‘I feel
the traces of an ancient flame’).
Then he also wrote a nice letter to her, saying
among other things: “Your little visit did
me a great deal of good; so interesting, so strange
to see her who we used to call ‘Kitty’
emerging on me from the dusk of an evening like
a dream become real. … All around me is
the sound of evening bells, which are not sad
only, or ought not to be, but beautiful also and
blessed and quiet. No more today, dear lady: my
best wishes and affectionate regards will abide
with you to the end.”
Meanwhile, Kitty’s life in England couldn’t
have been in a more glaring contrast to her grandmother’s
in Hyderabad. Sharafunnisa suffered greatly at
the hands of Mir Alam when he, after exile and
humiliation, resurfaced as Nizam’s Minister.
Mir Alam was Sharafunnisa’s uncle (her father’s
first cousin; both of the Shushtari family), but
a sworn enemy of Khairunnisa and James because
he believed Khair’s behavior brought disgrace
to his family name. He wreaked his revenge by
having the Diwan, Rajah Chandu Lal (his protégé
and successor), confiscate Sharafunnisa’s
property; this included a share for both Kitty
and her brother.
After this loss, Sharafunnisa sold her jewelry
and other possessions, and then had to live off
charity from William Palmer, the once-successful
banker son of Khairunnisa’s best friend,
Fyze. William Palmer, soon to go bankrupt himself,
asked his former business partner Henry Russell
(now Sir Henry), comfortably retired in England,
to help Sharafunnisa and at least have Kitty get
in touch with her now destitute grandmother. It
must have been quite traumatic for Palmer to contact
the person most responsible for his own ruination.
Henry Russell, before he resigned from East India
Co., in disgrace, against looming charges of bribery,
corruption and even manslaughter, had managed
to save 85,000 pounds in nine years in India on
an annual salary of 3,400 pounds (quite an achievement!).
Quite apart from what he did to Khairunnisa, this
time, however, Sir Henry did come through for
her grandmother -- but, as usual, not without
asking something in return. He provided Rs. 2,000
for Sharafunnisa, informed Kitty of her grandmother’s
dire situation, and asked Palmer if he could buy
back for him a ‘teeka’ (a forehead
jewel) that Sharafunnisa may have sold; his lover
Khairunnisa used to wear it some four decades
earlier.
That ‘teeka’ was never located, but
this exchange did help establish contact between
Kitty and her grandmother Sharafunnisa in Hyderabad.
And, it also created circumstances for Kitty to
claim back from Henry Russell what he owed her.
Though Kitty never saw her grandmother again,
the correspondence between them, emotional as
one can imagine between such close relatives who
last saw each other some 36 years ago, continued
over the next six years. Some of it is cited in
Dalrymple’s book.*
[* “The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal
in Eighteenth Century India” by William
Dalrymple; ISBN: 0-670-03184-4, hardcover; 0 14
20.0412 X, paperback] (To be continued)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
