How the British groomed Salar Jung III of Hyderabad

Among the Hyderabad nobility, Yousuf Ali Khan was easily the most well-read, widely travelled and most sophisticated noble.

Hyderabad: The Salar Jung Museum this week launched its platinum jubilee and the birth anniversary celebrations of Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, aka Salar Jung III. The celebrations began with a play, “Salar Jung III: The Man Who Collected the World,” presented by Mohammad Ali Baig on the life of the man in focus. The play, which I watched while in the city, is a hagiographic account of Salar Jung’s early life and his passion for artefacts, many of which were collected by his grandfather Mir Turab Ali Khan (Salar Jung I) and father Mir Laiq Ali Khan (Salar Jung II).

Among the Hyderabad nobility, Yousuf Ali Khan was easily the most well-read, widely travelled and most sophisticated noble. When the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, named him the Diwan in 1912, it brought back memories of the tenure of his grandfather, Salar Jung I, and people rejoiced. However, Yousuf Ali Khan lasted as the Diwan for less than three years.

From then on, he concentrated on the management of the Salar Jung estates, which included not only jagirs, farmlands and palaces, but also heirlooms and masterpieces such as the Veiled Rebecca and rare manuscripts.

Yousuf Ali Khan came under the care of Mir Mehboob Ali Khan, the sixth Nizam, after the passing of his father barely three weeks after he was born in Poona in 1889. He spent his initial years with his mother in the zenana quarters of the palace of the Salar Jungs. The education and upbringing of the young noble became a contentious issue between the British, on the one hand, and the Nizam and the widow of Salar Jung II, on the other.

The British insisted on imparting secular and modern education to Yousuf Ali Khan, along with modern care for him as he faced several health issues.

British designs on the Salar Jung heir

Declassified secret records of the period show that the British went all out to groom the grandson of Salar Jung I, who in his lifetime had been their staunch ally. “I believe that by many people who still venerate the memory of Sir Salar Jung I, the neglect to take proper steps to give his grandson a suitable education is regarded with great dissatisfaction,” Chichele Plowden, Resident at Hyderabad, wrote to the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, in October 1897, when Yousuf Ali Khan was eight.

He felt it would be in “the best interests both of the Salar Jung family and of the Hyderabad State” to ensure proper education of the boy and give him “a fair chance of making the best of his life.”

Until this time, Yousuf Ali Khan was home-schooled. Sarvar Jung Bahadur, peshi secretary to the Nizam, in a 1895 memo to the ruler, suggested that Mir Rahmat Ali, working in the Educational Department, be appointed as the first tutor. This was because he was “not only an experienced teacher of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic, but also an excellent penman in those languages.”

The second tutor, he said, must be a Shia gentleman to give religious instruction to the boy.

As for an English tutor, Sarvar Jung recommended one Mr Flynn of the Grammar School. At the same time, he said, there was no immediate necessity for one. “The home education which the boy receives at the hands of his governess, Mrs Bourillion, is ample at present so far as instruction in the English language goes. The other day, I was surprised to hear the boy talk excellent English for his age,” Sarvar Jung Bahadur wrote.

The British were not satisfied with the arrangement. Plowden suggested that an English gentleman be appointed the boy’s tutor, and that the boy be removed from the zenana to a house in Chaderghat, where he could reside with the tutor and be properly looked after. The details of the boy’s daily life were to be worked out by the tutor in consultation with the Nizam’s government.

The Resident suggested a net salary of British rupees 1,000 per mensem for the tutor, with a free house and the use of a carriage.

The Resident felt that “so long as the boy is allowed to remain in the palace, his mother will, through ignorance, strenuously resist every effort that may be made for securing the boy’s health and education.” In this regard, complaints were received from Surgeon-Colonel Lawrie as well as from Siddi Amber, the boy’s caretaker. On her part, Salar Jung’s mother, Zenab Begum, sent her pleader, Mr O’Brien, to the revenue secretary, AJ Dunlop, with a series of complaints regarding restrictions placed on herself and her son.

An ‘object lesson’ for the future Nizam

The plan for European-style education for Yousuf Ali Khan had another motive for the colonial administration, as amplified by the Deputy Secretary in the Foreign Department, OV Bosanquet. “I thought of the possibility of utilising the Salar Jung boy as an object lesson for the Nizam with his own son. I thought, too, whether it might not be possible to get the two boys brought up together with the same tutor,” Bosanquet wrote, referring to the education of the future Nizam, Osman Ali Khan.

The Resident in Hyderabad then suggested that Egerton, a European tutor, be appointed for Yousuf Ali Khan, since “it was high time to remove him from the influences by which he is now surrounded,” and that this might serve as an example to the Nizam for his own son.

As a first step, Yousuf Ali Khan was admitted to the kindergarten section attached to the Nizam College, and teachers were instructed to send daily attendance reports to the Resident. But soon it was found that his attendance at the kindergarten had dropped, and that he was not being sent there regularly.

In January 1898, the Resident reported to the Government of India that Yousuf Ali Khan was suffering from a serious form of hernia, and that Resident Surgeon Dr Edward Lawrie, in consultation with Dr Hatch, who was called down from Bombay, had advised that an operation be performed. When the boy was sent to the kindergarten school, he had to wear a truss that Dr Lawrie had procured from England.

In the end, the British prevailed, and Salar Jung was educated by English tutors, along with lessons in oriental subjects by Hyderabad teachers. His deep interest in Asian and European art and culture, reflected in his vast collection of artefacts, was a net result of his exposure to the liberal arts in his younger days. The collection he built was later declared an Institution of National Importance by an Act of Parliament in 1961, and today forms the heart of the Salar Jung Museum.

(The writer, Dinesh C Sharma, is the author of “Beyond Biryani: The Making of a Globalised Hyderabad.” He is based in New Delhi)