Last Nizam (9781742626109) by John Zubrzycki Page B

grandfather Abdul Mejid, the last Caliph of Islam, who was unceremoniously sent into exile in 1924. To one side was a soft-toned study of Mejid’s daughter and Jah’s mother, Princess Durrushehvar, and on the other was his aunt, Princess Niloufer, who was described as one of the most beautiful women of her time.
    The most poignant photograph showed a child in royal garb bending backwards in fright as an elderly man in spectacles and a long coat held him by his shoulder. The man was Osman Ali Khan, who, as ruler of India’s largest princely state, was being honoured with a customary 21-gun birthday salute. The young boy was Jah. He had been so scared by the salvo that the Nizam ordered a sword-waving horseman to risk life and limb by galloping in front of the cannons and ordering the gunners to cease firing. ‘It was probably the first time a 21-gun salute has ever been stopped,’ quipped my host as I paused in front of the photograph. ‘I think they got to the seventeenth gun.’ 1
    Such moments of intimacy were rare. The rigidly observed rules of etiquette in the royal household were not conducive to grandfatherly affection. Jah spoke to his grandfather directly on only a handful of occasions. All conversations were through courtiers and chamberlains. But, ultimately, it was Jah who would become the next Nizam. Osman Ali Khan broke withtradition and decided to nominate his favourite grandchild rather than Jah’s father, Azam, as heir. The world’s richest ruler was not about to entrust his money, jewels and properties to someone with passion for little else than polo, gambling and dancing girls, even if he was his eldest son.
    It had been almost a decade since the man who inherited that fortune told his office secretary he was going to the local mosque to pray, secretly boarded a flight out of Perth and left Australia for good. And it was around that time that, as a correspondent based in New Delhi, I first came across stories in the Indian press about a pauper prince bled dry by his advisors, barred from entering his palaces, blocked by the courts from claiming his inheritance and, strangest of all, being forced by debt collectors to sell the half-million-acre sheep station in Australia that had been his home for more than two decades. Since then his family, lawyers and few remaining friends had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect Jah’s privacy; and it was on the basis that I would never reveal his whereabouts that I was finally meeting him now.
    Jah had always disliked the press. When The Times ran a 1000-word obituary portraying the Seventh Nizam as a miser who ‘shuffled around his palace in a battered fez, worrying about the grocery bills for his three wives, 42 concubines, 200 children, 300 servants and ageing retainers, including his private army armed with muzzle-loaders’ 2 , Jah shot back an equally long letter to the editor. It was ‘unjust . . . to conjure up the image of a shabby man shuffling through his dream world,’ asserted Jah. ‘If he shuffled it was because he was a frail man advanced in age. But in that frailty and in that stoop there was the nobility and the dignity of character of a man who had done as he had considered best throughout his long life, and who felt that now he need answer only to God.’ 3
    After spending several days interviewing Jah, walking aroundhis favourite Roman ruins, sipping tea in vine-covered cafes and talking about why even in his old age a man needs to feel the heartbeat of a woman next to him at night, I began to understand why he had turned his back on Hyderabad. Jah certainly inherited some of his grandfather’s eccentricities, but he also had the nobility and dignity that came with being part of a remarkable royal family. And although Jah became the ruler of a kingdom that had ceased to exist, his life was in many ways more extraordinary than that of many reigning or titular monarchs in modern