[AjayKumar.Kataram]

This article will be of interest to those who hail from Hyderabad and also
others
who would like to know more about the Nizam of Hyderabad - easily the
richest
man of his times and one of the ten richest men ever in the history of the
world.

*The article is also a lesson that wealth and power are transitory and will
come *
*to an end one day - no matter what. *
* *
Time is supreme by the Will of the Creator.

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

*The lost world*

The rulers of Hyderabad, once the richest people in the world, were ruined
by politics and family feuds. Now their cultural heritage is being restored.

* By William Dalrymple.*

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 £100m
in gold and silver bullion and £400m 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 Qur'ans 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 Atatürk, 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 £45,000 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. 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." His initial response had been: " 'No way - it
sounds like a snake pit.' No other Indian royal family had this level of
indebtedness and financial chaos..." Then he met Esra and decided she was a
remarkable woman - "upright, straight, clear-headed and trustworthy. So I
agreed to help."

It was Shankardass' s amazing achievement to have persuaded all 2,740
claimants - legitimate and illegitimate descendants of the different Nizams
- to agree to a settlement of the jewel issue. In the process he was
regularly blackmailed and threatened, both by the Hyderabadi mafia and the
claimants them-selves. Several threatened to shoot him; on one occasion his
car was hijacked as he drove to the airport. "There were some extremely
rough men among the sahibzadas [princes]," he said. "Undesirable characters
- hollow, shallow and proud. I had to have a full-time guard for two years."

In the end, the Indian government banned the export and public auction of
the jewels, which they rightly regarded as a national treasure, but instead
agreed to pay around £40m for them - less than a quarter of the market
value, but much more than anyone had expected from the government. Of this,
just under half was to go to the Nizam.

Next, the 130-odd legal cases still outstanding against the Nizam were
settled, and debts, then standing at around £3m, were paid off.

All this still left a considerable fund for Esra to invest in the
restoration of the Nizam's properties. She has the same talent for picking
honest and effective people to work for her as her husband once proved to
have for employing crooks. To supervise the restoration of Chowmahalla she
chose Martand Singh, chairman and one of the founders of Intach, the Indian
National Trust: "The first time I saw the state the palace was in, I thought
it would be impossible to save," Singh remembers. "I thought it was
hopeless. After the Nizam sacked his 14,000 staff, it had gone to the dogs.
Decomposition can set in very quickly in India - one monsoon can do it - and
these properties had been neglected for 30 years. Most of the decay was
actually cosmetic. From the start, Esra was completely positive. She asked,
'How long is this going to take?' 'Three to four years,' she was told. 'Too
long,' she replied. 'I want it done in two.' And Rahul succeeded in two and
a half."

The first task was to restore a service wing of the palace, which was turned
into a scholars' retreat, where architects, urban designers, art and ceramic
consultants, conservators, specialist carpenters, photographic experts,
textile restorers, antique upholsterers and historians could be lodged while
they worked on the different collections. A conservation laboratory and
museum store area followed. By 2002, the largest team of restorers ever
employed on an Indian restoration project was at work. The collection of
arms, along with the best of the textiles, carriages and photographic
records - including the harem pictures, published here for the first time -
were ready for the recent grand opening of the Chowmahalla palace.

Fifteen Urdu and Persian scholars are currently sifting through the Nizam's
vast archives. Already they have stumbled across a major historical
discovery: the Nizam's negotiations in the early 40s with the Portuguese to
buy Goa and so provide his state with a port, and with it a real hope -
never realised, perhaps thankfully - of remaining independent from India
once the British finally quit India.

Last month, Princess Esra returned to Hyderabad from her base on an island
off Istanbul, to oversee progress. She swept in, sari-clad, imperious, a
flurry of energy, and as ever, everyone stood to attention. Long lines of
unframed canvases were laid out along the corridors and she walked past
them, giving an instant decision. "No, not that one. It's Venetian - I don't
like it. Not that, either. Now look at that - the sixth Nizam out riding
with the Kaiser - yes, send that off for restoration immediately. "

I asked if, looking back, she had any regrets. "Many," she said. "If I had
the head on my shoulders I have now a few years ago, I would never have let
things get into the state they did. But I was too young. At the time it all
seemed impossible - the law suits, the huge taxes, debts accumulating,
criminal cases, people abusing the trust we had put in them. We had no ready
cash, and the palaces seemed like white elephants. So we fled, and then
terrible things happened. So much just disappeared - jades, miniatures,
furniture, chandeliers. .."

"And the Nizam?"

"He had a brilliant brain when I met him," she said. "He'd had the best
education money could buy - Harrow, Cambridge, LSE, Sandhurst. But partly
because of his diabetes he went into decline, and in the end really, well,
disintegrated. Today he keeps to himself in Turkey. Lives simply, doesn't
love extravagance. Lives in a two-room flat in Antalya, and spends his time
exploring Roman ruins, going swimming... He's upset, of course - that he
didn't achieve what he had hoped, and he feels awkward he let so much go. He
wishes he had done things differently - but then that is true of most
people..."

Esra's 47-year-old son Azmet, heir to the eighth Nizam, Mukarram Jah, hopes
to come back to Hyderabad and take on what remains of the family role in the
city. Bin Laden and the assorted Islamist extremists who hope to bring back
the institution of the Caliphate are no doubt unaware that Azmet, the man
who has the strongest legal claim to inherit the title, was until recently a
Hollywood-based cameraman who has worked with Steven Spielberg, Richard
Attenborough, Nicolas Roeg.

"I am planning to spend much more time here," Azmet told me. "The death
threats and law suits that kept us away are cleared up now, and I have great
affection for this place." He paused: "I am determined to maintain what has
been saved. We'll not make the same mistakes again."

· *William Dalrymple latest book is The Last Mughal: The Fall Of A Dynasty,
Delhi, 1857 (Bloomsbury) .*

[mercury]

Nice article