India Under Ripon: A Private Diary. Blunt Wilfrid Scawen
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at Hyderabad at daybreak. We found Seymour Keay’s carriage waiting for us, and a very amiable note from Mr. Cordery, inviting us to stay at the Residency. The note was forwarded by Keay, so we accepted both the carriage and invitation, and are now at the residency. I am glad of this, for when we were in England we had made a kind of half promise to stay with Keay and his wife, but since then Keay has brought forward several charges against the Indian Government, which, though they may be true, I do not wish to identify myself with, and I wrote from Madras to tell him so, and that I could not, under the circumstances, just now stay with him, all my movements being reported in the papers. I was advised, too, at Bellari, to go to the Residency, as it would give me a better position with the Hyderabad authorities. Now it would seem that Keay has squared his difference with Cordery, and is not offended at our declining his own invitation. So all has happened for the best.
“This is a splendid house, built early in the century in the Palladian style, extremely handsome and extremely comfortable. We have a wing of it to ourselves, and could not be better lodged. The grounds, too, are fine, with great banyan trees, on one of which there is a large rookery of flying foxes. In the afternoon we called on the Keays, and Cordery has been good enough to invite them to dinner. Their position is rather a doubtful one at Hyderabad. Keay is a banker, and made himself useful in many ways (being a very clever fellow) to Salar Jung, helping him to draft his political claims on the British Government, especially in respect to the Berar Provinces. But he quarrelled with the late resident, Sir Richard Meade, and accused him openly of receiving bribes. Now the Government at Simla is a bit afraid of him, and he has been received back into favour. Keay’s presence at dinner has served to break the ice of politics, for he brought up all the most burning public questions.” N.B. Keay’s connection with Salar Jung had made him acquainted with all the ins and outs of the scandalous persecution to which that great native statesman had been subjected by the Indian Government, nor did he scruple to make use of his knowledge as occasion served in native interests. This made him a thorn in the side of the Calcutta Foreign Office. In 1885, having made a considerable fortune, he returned to England, and was elected to Parliament by a Scotch borough as an extreme radical. I had made his acquaintance in England in connection with a very able pamphlet he had published, called “Spoiling the Egyptians.”
“29th Nov.– Our host here, Mr. Cordery, is a man of about fifty-five, who distinguished himself, I believe, as a young man at Oxford, and is considered one of the lights of the Indian Civil Service. He is agreeable, and easy going, and fond of the good things of life. At first he was very official and reserved, but, as I have spoken my own views with very little disguise, he has now become more natural, and I find him a man of considerable information, some wit, and by no means unsympathetic. As our host, he is all that a man should be, but it is evident we are under surveillance here, and I suspect our entertainment at the Residency is designed to keep us out of mischief. It reminds me of our hospitable entertainment by the excellent Huseyn Pasha at Deyr, when we wanted so hard to make acquaintance with the Bedouins. I have made up my mind, however, to talk quite freely to every one I meet, whether my speech is reported or not. We have received two visits to-day at Mr. Cordery’s invitation, for such is the etiquette, the first from Ghaleb Jung, an official of Arab descent, who came accompanied by the Munshi of the Residency, deputed, I suspect, to listen to our conversation. But we talked Arabic, of which the Munshi knew little, and told the whole history of the Egyptian War, and our hope of Arabi’s return to power. Ghaleb is by origin related to the Sultans of Lahaj near Aden, but his family has been settled here for some generations, and he did not speak Arabic with any ease.
“A more interesting visitor was Laik Ali, the young Salar Jung, who has succeeded to his father’s title. He is only twenty-two, but has already an extremely dignified and at the same time quite natural manner, just the manner, in fact, of our best bred Englishmen. This, and his height, which is considerably over six feet, remind me vaguely of Pembroke, though Salar Jung has no remarkable good looks to recommend him, and seems likely to grow fat, which Pembroke never will. He talked well, and with very little reserve, said he thought the English Government had made a great mistake in Egypt, and seemed delighted at the prospect of Arabi’s return. I told him about the letter I had from Sheykh Jemal-ed-Din for the Nawab Rasul Yar Khan, and he said that the Sheykh had been a friend of his father’s, and invited us to breakfast with him for Saturday, promising also to invite the Nawab, so that we might talk without official listeners. I am immensely taken with this young man, and it consoles me for not having found his father still alive here. Salar Jung, the father, was a standing reproach to our Government, and, according to Lytton, a standing menace. Salar Jung, the younger, ought to play a leading part in the history of Indian emancipation.
“With Cordery at the Residency there is one Trevor, a younger, but, according to my friends at Bellari, a more dangerous, man. He is a good type of Indian civilian, decidedly clever, and a good talker, and under him again Melville. They looked on me at first with great suspicion, but since I have told them plainly that I should like to see the Covenanted Civil Service, to which they belong, abolished, we have got on friendly terms.
“After luncheon Major Clerk, the Nizam’s tutor, came to take us through the town on elephants, which pleased us much. The town is most interesting, being after Cairo the most gay and busy in the Mohammedan East. Compared with Madras, it is as Paris to a decayed watering-place. Instead of the squalid back streets and the pauper population of native Madras, Hyderabad is like a great flower bed, crowded with men and women in bright dresses and with a fine cheerful air of independence, more Arab than Indian. Many of the men carry swords in their hands, as they do in Nejd, and one sees elephants and camels in the streets, besides carriages, and men on horseback. It is impossible they should not be happier here than in the mournful towns under English rule. And so I am sure it is. We went to-day to the Palace of the Bushir-ed-Dowlah, from the roof of which there is one of the most beautiful views in the world. Hyderabad lies in a sort of elevated basin, surrounded by low granite hills, picturesque and bare, the town half hidden in green trees. It has thus something of the effect of towns in Arabia, of which it in other ways reminds us. It covers a very large space on account of the gardens inside the walls, and is in truth an immense city, containing, with its suburbs, 250,000 inhabitants. From the Palace we went on to Salar Jung’s tank, a beautiful sheet of water of a thousand acres, with a dam, which seems at first sight too weak for the mass it sustains as it is very high, and only a foot and a half thick at the edge, and the water brims over, so that as you sail about on it, you look down upon the city. But the dam is really a strong one, being constructed on the principle of an arch, the better to uphold the water. Passing on, we were taken to what had been the French barracks a hundred years ago when the French garrisoned the city.
“30th Nov.– Out before breakfast to see the Nizam’s stables, a number of ungainly Walers, and another stable full of Arabs. These last were very nearly all small horses, and may likely enough have been bred in Nejd. Mohammed Ali Bey, the Nizam’s master of the horse, is of Persian descent, an admirable horseman and a good fellow.
“After breakfast another Arab visitor called, brother of the El Kaeti who made himself Sultan of Makala in Hadramaut with English help, also Seyd Ali Bilgrami, a Mohammedan from Delhi, one of those brought here by Salar Jung – ‘a great pity’ in Cordery’s opinion – to wake up public opinion. He has had a partly English education, and has an appointment as civil engineer. His brother, Seyd Huseyn,3 was old Salar Jung’s private secretary. He explained to us the state of parties here. At Salar Jung’s death the Minister’s son, Laik Ali, was appointed with the Peishkar, a local Hindu nobleman, to a joint commission of Government, the Nizam being a minor. The Peishkar paid little attention to business, and young Salar Jung was kept as far as possible in the background, the principal influence being exercised by a third official, Shems-el-Omra, an enemy of Salar Jung’s. And thus affairs had got into a bad state. This was encouraged by the Residency, whose policy it was to show that the native Government was unfit to keep order in the country. Under old Salar Jung the Hyderabad State had been as secure as any part of India.
“We drove in the afternoon through Secunderabad and the English cantonments to Bellarum, where the Resident has a country house.
“1st Dec.– To breakfast with Salar Jung. He showed
Seyd Huseyn Bilgrami, now member of the Indian Council in London.