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]


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
© 2004 pakistanlink.com . All Rights Reserved.