The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)

Hyderabad was also very beautiful, its founder having attempted to create in its minarets, palaces and gardens ‘a replica of heaven’

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day48

- By Mary Gladstone

The train maintained a steady 60mph instead of the usual 35mph of the standard Indian engine. Drivers and firemen of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway took a pride in their appearance and worked all day dressed in suits and sola topis. They saw to it that their locomotive was kept spick and span with well-polished brass and steel. As the passengers gazed from their window, they saw that the countrysid­e was flat and dusty.

For mile upon mile, they chugged along the even plains, passing oases of trees, houses and fields, and when they stopped at a station, monkeys gathered on the platform in the hope that passengers would throw them food.

There was little for Angus to do inside the stuffy compartmen­t but lie on his bunk, put up with the din of the whirring fans and sip soda water. Before they reached their destinatio­n, each officer brought out his best uniform and put on his kilt, red and white diced hose and spats in readiness for arrival.

For headgear Angus may have chosen a sola pith helmet. On the other hand, he might have erred on the side of tradition and settled for the Wolsey; wound round its crown, with exactly seven folds, was a khaki cloth called a pagri and on the left side a tartan flash with the letters ‘A & SH’ in yellow capitals, with a white hackle stuck in it.

Now Angus was ready for his new life, one in which a good heart and proper training are not a guarantee against malevolent forces beyond the horizon.

Beautiful

Hyderabad Terminus was crowded. But Angus was now no stranger to the crush of humanity, the lack of personal space, the noise and smells that assaulted travellers in the east. A delegation led by adjutant, John Tweedie, came to meet them.

Outside the station stood a row of horses with their driver, each beast harnessed to a tonga (a twowheeled carriage). Angus, accompanie­d by another officer, took one and set off at a brisk pace through Hyderabad, the principal city of the Deccan.

Of all the 550 princely states of India, this ancient Islamic province roughly the area of France was the largest. Hyderabad was also very beautiful, its founder having attempted to create in its minarets, palaces and gardens ‘a replica of heaven’.

They drove 5½ miles north to Secunderab­ad, past a man-made lake, the Hussain Sagar, which separates the two cities. Today the two settlement­s are one metropolis but previously Secunderab­ad was a separate town comprising the largest British garrison in India after Poona.

From a tiny tented encampment on the outskirts of the old city, Secunderab­ad, founded in 1806 and named after Sikander Ja, the third Nizam of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, grew into the home of the British army in southern India.

Tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Hyderabad, the garrison became self-sufficient with bungalows, open spaces, churches, race and golf courses, and the famous Secunderab­ad Club, founded in 1878.

Angus’s destinatio­n was Meadows Barracks at Trimulgher­ry Fort. In the 19th Century, as a response to the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 when the Hyderabad Residency was attacked, the army built this stout fortress, otherwise called ‘the entrenchme­nt,’ with a moat.

Accommodat­ion was in blocks but officers and married personnel lived half a mile outside the fort. As the party trotted towards their billet, they saw strange-looking trees like the pomegranat­e and banana, and native animals, and birds, that Angus had already met in children’s picture books or the Encycloped­ia Britannica.

Entering a new world, he still felt at home in this English military cantonment. Angus was on safe ground here. He and his peers understood each other, spoke the same language, and held similar beliefs.

Not a fresh-faced newcomer like some second lieutenant­s straight from Sandhurst, my uncle had already made a good impression in the 1st Battalion.

His arrival at Trimulgher­ry coincided with the 2nd Battalion returning from Waziristan where, towards the end of 1936, the Fakir of Ipi, ruler of the province in the North-West Frontier, had provoked a guerrilla war against the British.

In April 1937, the 93rd was sent to the region to sort out the Fakir’s band of armed tribesmen, but the real danger was in falling seriously ill, not death in battle; during the hottest part of the season, a sergeant had died of heatstroke and disease had killed several men.

On October 18, the battalion had departed Rawalpindi for its six-day train journey back to Meadows Barracks.

Angus had served with some of these men but, as newcomers and old-stagers congregate­d in the comfortabl­e two-storey officers’ mess, with its garden and tennis courts, they were aware of a difference.

There were those who had fought in Waziristan and officers like Angus who, to put it bluntly, had not yet been ‘blooded’.

Among Angus’s first responsibi­lities was as guard of honour for the Viceroy’s visit at Falaknuma Palace, to the south of Hyderabad. Built in 1884 in a fantasy European style, the residence was home to the 7th Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah.

His Exalted Highness, ruler of the province since 1911, was the richest man in the world with a fortune of $2 billion.

He owned hundreds of racehorses and dozens of Rolls-Royces. The prince had his own infantry regiment, currency and postal service, too.

Wealth

The Nizam’s private treasury held £100 million in gold and silver bullion and £400 million in jewels, including enough pearls to pave Piccadilly.

This wealth came from owning the world’s largest diamond mine, the source of the Koh-i-Noor, Great Mogul diamond, and the rare £60 million Jacob gemstone, which the prince used as a paperweigh­t.

Decked in full dress uniform, the Argylls provided an inner cordon of 17 sentries and a guard of honour of 230 men with pipes, drums and a military band for Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy.

The British had a special relationsh­ip with the Nizam; not only was he the highest-ranking Indian prince and therefore entitled to a 21-gun salute but following his financial contributi­on to the British war effort in the 1914–18 war, he was seen as the ‘faithful ally of the British Crown’.

The Argylls gave the royal salute for the Viceroy, and the band played soft music for the Mizaj-Pursi, a formal Islamic ceremony that welcomed the visitor and bade him good health, after which the soldiers returned to their tented accommodat­ion on the terrace.

The ritual was repeated for the Nizam’s arrival, only he received a general salute.

More on Monday

© 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallme­dia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all bookseller­s.

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