Mukarram Jah, heir to throne, dies
On April 6, 1967, Mukarram Jah was fabulously, and unhappily, thrust into the past.
He was a privileged global citizen in a very modern way: born in France, educated at some of Britain's best schools, with a taste for jazz, Westerns and cars.
But on that April afternoon he found himself performing rituals left over from India's Mughal Empire, which had collapsed more than a century earlier. Jah was crowned the nizam of Hyderabad.
The title made him the ceremonial monarch of a territory in South India about the size of Italy, and it vaulted him atop a social order that belonged more to “Arabian Nights” than to the 1960s. He now bore responsibility for a court whose roll of staff members and dependents listed more than 14,700 people, including about 3,000 bodyguards, 42 concubines and employees with specialties as specific as dusting chandeliers and grinding walnuts. He later discovered that about 4,000 supposed beneficiaries of the royal purse did not actually exist.
As nizam, Jah commanded great prestige — the Indian government granted him an allowance and official recognition as a prince — and extraordinary wealth: He controlled a fortune that in 1935, The New York Times estimated, included $250 million in gold ingots and $2 billion in precious stones (more than $48 billion in today's money).
Yet by 1996, Jah — whose coronation also came with the titles Rustam of the Age, the Aristotle of the Times, the Ruler of the Kingdom, the Conqueror of Dominions, the Regulator of the Realm, the Victor in Battles and the Leader of Armies — was a sheep farmer fleeing creditors in Australia.
“The disintegration of the state, and the dispersal of the wealth of the nizam,” historian of India William Dalrymple wrote in The Guardian in 2007, was “one of the 20th century's most dramatic reversals of fortune.”
Jah died Jan. 14 at a hospital in Istanbul. He was 89. His first wife, Princess Esra Jah, who later managed the remnants of his estate, said by phone that the cause was kidney failure.
Mukarram Jah began his life as a symbol of the strength of his royal line, one that could be traced to the 17th century. The nizams ultimately ruled over some 15 million people, and their lands included the Godavari delta, which was long thought to be the world's only source of diamonds.
As the Mughal Empire waned and the British came to control India in the 18th and 19th centuries, the nizams cooperated profitably with their colonial overseers.
Jah's predecessor as nizam, his grandfather Osman Ali Khan, saw an opportunity to expand the authority of the royal family in the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern-day Turkey, overthrew the Ottoman caliph, Abdul Mejid, considered by many to be the leader of global Islam. The nizamate was Muslim, too, and Khan used his wealth to support Mejid's family.