East Did Meet
West - 4
Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI, Chicago, IL
Had it not been documented
in ‘The White Mughals’*, it’d
have been taken for another Bollywood movie.
The year 1841 was crucial in the lives of Kitty
Kirkpatrick (in Torquay/Devon, England), her maternal
grandmother Sharafunnisa (in Hyderabad), and Sir
Henry Russell, the former paramour of her deceased
mother Khairunnisa, and a former assistant to
Kitty’s father (now retired in England).
That year they re-established contact with each
other, thanks to a letter about Sharafunnisa’s
plight, from William Palmer (son of Khairunnisa’s
best friend Fayze) in Hyderabad to Sir Henry,
the person most responsible for his ruination.
Russell promptly informed Kitty about her grandmother’s
dire needs. Kitty then wrote to her -- for the
first time in nearly four decades.
Dalrymple cites in his book some of the highly
emotional correspondence between them, obtained
from Kitty’s personal archives and from
her descendants: Kitty’s letters to Sharafunnisa
in English and her grandmother’s response
(dictated to a Hyderabadi scribe who put it in
ornate Persian, translated by Kitty’s British
intermediary in Hyderabad who knew Persian). Their
exchange continued for six years. In addition
to money, Kitty sent her eyeglasses (three different
pairs), medication, photographs, and in return,
received a lock of her dead mother’s hair
(Kitty had asked for it in her first letter),
illuminated manuscripts, calligraphic pieces,
and Persian poetry.
From Kitty to:
“My dear Grandmother, I received many years
ago, your kind letter of condolence with me on
the death of my beloved brother. I was very grateful
to you for it, tho’ by my not answering
it, I am afraid that you may have thought that
I little regarded it. But indeed I did, &
the more so, because I felt that you too mourned
for him I loved so well & that you too were
connected with him by the binding of blood ties.
Two years after his death I was married to a nephew
of Sir John Kennaway’s. My husband is of
my age & is Captain in the English army.
I have 4 children living, my eldest daughter is
11 years old. She is exactly like my husband.
I have a boy of 8 years & a half, then another
girl of 7 and a half who is exactly like my mother’s
picture & one darling infant of 19 months.
I have had 7 living children – 1 sweet boy
and two sweet girls are gone, but I am blest in
those that survive. My boy is so striking an image
of my father that a picture that was drawn of
my father as a little boy is always taken for
my boy. They have a good intellect & are blest
with fair skin. I live in a nice pretty house
in the midst of a garden on the seacoast. My dear
husband is very kind to me & I love him greatly.
I always think of you and remember you and my
dear mother. I often dream that I am with you
in India and that I see you both in the room you
used to sit in. No day of my life has ever passed
without my thinking of my dear mother. I can remember
the verandah and the place where the tailors worked
and a place on the housetop where my mother used
to let me sit down and slide.
When I dream of my mother I am in such joy to
have found her again that I awake, or else am
pained in finding that she cannot understand the
English I speak. I can well recollect her cries
when we left her and I can now see the place where
we sat when we parted, and her tearing her long
hair – what worlds would I give to possess
one lock of that beautiful and much loved hair!
How dreadful to think that so many, many years
have passed when it would have done my heart such
good to think that you loved me & when I longed
to write to you& tell you these feelings that
I was never able to express, a letter which I
am sure would have been detained& now how
wonderful it is that after 35 years that I am
able for the first time to hear that you think
of me. And love me, and have perhaps wondered
why I did not write to you, and that you have
thought of me cold and insensible to such near
dear ties.& nbsp; I thank God that he has
opened for me a way of making the feelings of
my heart known to you.
Will this reach you & will you care for the
letter of your grand child? My own heart tells
me you will. May God bless you my own dear Grandmother.”
Excited as any other grandmother would be upon
suddenly hearing from someone so dear, Sharafunnisa
began: “Fresh vigor was instilled into my
deadened heart and much immeasurable joy was attained
by me that it cannot be brought within the compass
of being written or recounted. My Child, the Light
of my Eyes, the solace of my soul, May God grant
you long life! ….” And, more in the
same vein!
In another letter, Kitty recalled:
“I have a distinct picture of you in my
memory as you were when I was a little child,
giving you I m afraid a great deal of trouble.
I remember one day when I supposed I had been
very naughty you whipped me with your slipper
& I was every angry. How often I have been
obliged to administer the same correction to my
children & then I tell them ‘when I
was little my grandmother was obliged to whip
me’.
“This they listen to with great attention
& ask me about my grandmother, so I tell them
all about you I can remember. I wish you could
see the darling faces of my children especially
of the one that I am sure is so like my mother,
only not near so beautiful. I have such a dear
merry faced little boy who would delight you,
in many things he is so like my dear brother.
Whilst my brother lived I could talk of you &
my mother to him & we could compare our recollections
of all we had left in India…”
In 1843, Kitty informed her grandmother that her
own niece (eldest daughter of Sahib Allum, i.e.,
Sharafunnisa’s dead grandson’s eldest
daughter) was to go to India, and might visit
her. Sharafunnisa was obviously excited but there’s
no record of Sharafunnisa meeting her great-granddaughter,
but clearly she never did get to see Kitty.
Quite apart from this, Russell was helpful in
resolving a couple of mysteries for Kitty.
In May, 1841 (i.e., before Palmer’s letter
to Russell), Kitty happened to be visiting one
of her childhood friends near Reading, who took
her to a neighbor’s mansion, Swallowfield.
Here, Kitty saw something she hadn’t in
36 years -- a portrait of her and her brother
(age 3 & 4), painted in Madras by George Chinnery,
and regarded as one of the masterpieces of British
paintings in India. Dalrymple describes the painting:
Two of them “in their Hyderabadi court dress,
standing at the top of a flight of steps….
Sahib Allum – an exceptionally beautiful,
poised, dark-eyed child – wears a scarlet
‘jama’ trimmed with gilt brocade,
and a matching gilt cummerbund; he has a glittering
‘topi’ on his head and crescent-toed
slippers. Round his neck hangs a string of enormous
pearls. His little sister, who is standing one
step from Sahib Alum, and has her arm around her
big brother’s shoulders, is discernibly
fairer-skinned, and below her ‘topi’
is a hint of the red hair that would be much admired
in the years to come. Yet while Sahib Alum looks
directly at the viewer with an almost precocious
confidence and assurance, Sahib Begum looks down
with an expression of infinite sadness and vulnerability
on her face, her little eyes dark and swollen
with crying.”
The lady of the house (actually, the second wife
of Sir Henry Russell) knew nothing, but promised
to get the information from her husband after
his return from London. Later, Russell wrote to
Kitty that the painting was given to him after
Khairunnisa’s death in 1813, but he, instead
of offering it to Kitty right away, promised to
put it in his will for her. Chinnery had borrowed
this painting from Khairunnisa but didn’t
return it. Russell got it back for her through
his father, who was then the Chief Justice of
Bengal. The painting did go to Kitty after Russell’s
death in 1852, but not without the Russell family
objections (see: ‘The Rose Goddess and Other
Sketches of Mystery and Romance’, by Lady
Constance Russell, London, 1910). Till 1960, it
remained in Kitty’s family, but after about
120 years in Britain, it now hangs in the boardroom
of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Another thing that troubled Kitty the most was
that she was regarded as an ‘illegitimate’
child. That was because in her father’s
will she and her brother were described as his
‘natural children’, a contemporary
legal term for the children of unmarried parents.
Her grandmother provided Kitty all she could,
but not a legal document confirming her parents’
marriage. When Russell heard of Kitty’s
concerns, he given his association with her father
and mother) felt morally obliged to fill in what
he knew. He went to see her in Torquay, but couldn’t
say much face to face. Instead, through his brother,
he conveyed to Kitty that: Though he heard nothing
directly from Kitty’s father about his marriage,
both Khairunnisa and Sharafunnisa had mentioned
it, which was independently confirmed by “Moonshee
Uzeez Oolah” (another assistant to Kitty’s
father) who was trusted by many including Russell
himself, and that “I [Sir Henry Russell]
am as firmly satisfied that the [marriage] ceremony
[of Khairunnisa & James Kirkpatrick] which
they described did take place, as if I had witnessed
it myself.” This must have greatly eased
Kitty’s mind.
This chapter closed when Sharafunnisa (over 80
then) passed away on 21 July 1847.
That was just about 10 years before the Indian
Rebellion (or what the British called, ‘Mutiny’)
that started in Meerut on 10 May 1857. Most of
the worst bloodshed occurred in the North, except
for a weak attack by a group of Rohilla horsemen
on the Hyderabad Residency. What happened after
is well documented. Those were perhaps the last
10 years of the ‘White Mughal’ culture,
which the British didn’t tolerate anymore,
and the White Mughals and their descendants faced
severe reprisals.
Kitty and her husband Phillipps had 2 son and
5 daughters. Kitty died in 1889, at the age of
87, some 25 years after her husband’s death
(and 42 years after her grandmother’s),
in her Villa Sorrento in Torquay (in Devon), a
beautiful resort on the southern coast of England.
Four years after her death, Sir Edward Strachey
(who was the son of Kitty’s cousin Julia)
wrote the first published account of James Kirkpatrick’s
marriage to Khairunnisa and of Kitty’s life
in the Blackwood’s Magazine of July 1893.
This article also confirmed Kitty telling her
own children how she and her brother desperately
wanted to see their mother, but could not because
of their grandfather’s strict orders. The
Strachey article ends with this touching note:
“She [Kitty] was ten years my [Strachey’s]
elder, but I remember her from girlhood to old
age as the most fascinating of women.” [Incidentally,
this Strachey was the grandfather of G. Lytton
Strachey, a British biographer, essayist and critic,
who was part of the ‘Bloomsbury group’
of intellectuals/writers].
The book covers quite a few other White Mughals.
It also describes old Hyderabad neighborhoods
(particularly the Residency, now Osmania University
Women’s College) in such rich details that
it’d be most nostalgic to those familiar
with the city (especially the Old City). How the
author researched this saga in the Indian and
British archives is itself an interesting story.
[* “The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal
in Eighteenth Century India” by William
Dalrymple; # ‘The Romantic Marriage of James
Achilles Kirkpatrick, Sometime British Resident
at the Court of Hyderabad’ published by
Sir Edward Strachey in Blackwood’s Magazine,
July, 1893]
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