The Last Nizam of Hyderabad, who fled India to work on an Outback sheep farm
In the 1980s locals at Gil Gai Tavern in Kalbarri, a parched town on the western coast of Australia, invented a nickname for a slim gentleman with a well-trimmed silver moustache who dusted his boots at their watering hole every week: ‘‘The Shah.’’
The man usually wore a blue boiler suit, braces and an Akubra hat, so it was not immediately obvious that he was the 8th Nizam of Hyderabad, once the largest princely state in British India, and heir to millions of pounds worth of jewels that were once held by Persian kings, Mughal emperors and Ottoman sultans.
In reality, the nickname paid tribute to his spending habits.
Mukarram Jah may have moved to Western Australia to escape the whispers of the durbar, the mounting court cases from rapacious relatives and the relentless cashflow problems, but old habits die hard, and he was rapidly squandering what fortune still remained.
Murchison House Station, his 200,000-hectare sheep farm a few miles from Kalbarri, was running at a loss (the ground was so dry it was virtually infertile) and he was refusing financial advice to invest in bonds or shares to keep the creditors off his back. Another extravagant venture saw him buy a gold mine near Perth which he named after his grandfather, the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Majeed Mine also never turned a profit.
Jah cherished the anonymity of life in the Outback, wandering into the scrub with a rifle slung across his back to shoot wild pigs. ‘‘Abu Bakr was a shepherd, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t be one,’’ he reasoned, in reference to his ancestor, the first Caliph of Islam.
He had succeeded his grandfather to become the 8th Nizam in 1967 – his father was cut out – but since India had gained independence from Britain in 1947 Jah inherited a fiefdom which no longer existed. ‘‘Democracy has absolved me from the cares and responsibilities of rulership borne by my ancestors,’’ he later remarked.
After he moved from India to Australia in 1973, once-grand palaces were left at the mercy of the elements and looters. He had smuggled most of his jewellery into a bank vault in Geneva and was selling off pieces at a fraction of their market value in order to pay his workers on the farm.
As John Zubrzycki noted in his biography, The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback, Jah was impulsive and generous, and he was often taken advantage of, but he could also be irascible and instinctively suspicious.
He was born Mir Barkat Ali Khan Siddiqi Mukarram Jah in Nice in 1933, the eldest child of Azam Jah, whose father, Mir Osman Ali Khan, was the 7th Nizam of Hyderabad. Princess Durru Shehvar, Jah’s mother, was the daughter of the last Sultan of Turkey and deposed Caliph of the Ottoman Empire.
While his mother was imperious and unaffectionate, Jah’s father was an idle and unauthoritative man who enjoyed gambling and drinking. Jah was sent to a string of private schools in India. He was bad at maths but ‘‘keen on carpentry’’.
The family owed much of its wealth to the mines of Golconda, which produced the Kohi-noor diamond.
When the Raj was dissolved in 1947 Hindumajority Hyderabad was one of three states, of 562, to initially refuse allegiance to the Indian union. A year later, Hyderabad was annexed by the Indian army, and the 7th Nizam became no more than the constitutional head. He declared his ‘‘voluntary’’ accession in exchange for five palaces and an annual allowance of £250,000.
A few days before the invasion, Jah had fled to London with his brother and mother, where they lodged at the Savoy hotel. He was sent to Harrow, where he was driven every day in a chauffeured Bentley, and in 1952 went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to study English and history. He spent most of his time refashioning old boats from shipyards and he graduated with a third.
On holiday in Turkey he met his first wife, Esra Birgin, the daughter of a research chemist, whom he secretly married in 1959. When he succeeded his grandfather in 1967, he inherited a fortune of at least £100 million in gold and silver bullion and £400m in jewels, in addition to palaces, art and antiques, but the family finances were in a parlous state, and the responsibility was crippling.
In 1968, 500 former workers marched to the palace demanding severance pay after cutbacks. Meanwhile the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was promising to abolish princely privileges, which came into effect in 1971. A year later Jah decided to move to Australia. ‘‘I love this place,’’ he mused on an early trip; ‘‘miles and miles of open country and not a bloody Indian in sight.’’
Esra refused to move to the Outback and they divorced. He married four more times and is survived by four children.
By 1996 Jah’s sheep farm had gone into liquidation. One evening he told his secretary he was going to pray at the local mosque in Perth but instead secretly boarded a flight to Turkey. His final years were spent living as a recluse in a two-bed apartment in Antalya (before eventually moving to Istanbul, where he was looked after by carers).
He had asked for his body to be taken back to Hyderabad and laid to rest next to his father.
The family owed much of its wealth to the mines of Golconda, which produced the Kohi-noor diamond.