Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqi Bayafandi Asaf Jah VII wanted a new warm blanket. He instructed his servant to buy it for him, adding that he should not spend more than 25 rupees, or about 30 cents today. The servant returned empty-handed. The new blanket cost 35 rupees or about 45 cents. Osman Ali Khan continued to cover himself at night with the old blanket. At the same time, he weighted the paper with a 185-carat diamond worth 50 million pounds. The last Nizam or ruler of Hyderabad, who in 1937 was on the cover of Time magazine as the richest man in the world, was full of contradictions and the history of his family is the story of the most famous downfall of this century.
Members of his family ruled the princely state of Hyderabad and its fifteen million subjects for seven generations, from 1720, when they were “enthroned” in a shepherd’s hut with Mir Qamuruddin Khan, until 1948, when Hyderabad was forcibly annexed by the Indians to their new state.
By 1911, when Osman Ali Khan came to rule a princely state the size of Italy, Hyderabad had long been synonymous with culture, intrigue and extravagance.
For example, his father Mahboob Ali Khan, the sixth Nizam who ruled from 1869 to 1911, was said to have had the richest wardrobe in the world. Among other things, he reportedly refused to wear silk stockings twice. He demanded new ones every time from Albert Abid Evans, the Armenian Jew who opened the first shop in Hyderabad and looked after the Nizam’s clothes. The crafty shopkeeper put the used socks back in the bags and sold them to him as new each time.
The sixth set noticed nothing. He was in principle a very giving and, unlike his son, a fairly honest ruler. For example, he put every single nizam into the state coffers. In fact, a Nizam was also an offering made by the subjects to the ruler: every time they visited him, they had to give him a gold coin. His son pocketed all these coins and, over time, simply turned the voluntary contributions into a compulsory tax. He was getting richer and richer.
But his country had already seen its heyday. It was home to mines that produced some of the world’s most famous diamonds, including the Koh-i-Nor and the Great Mogul diamond, and in the 18th century Hyderabad was even the sole supplier of diamonds to the whole world.
Toxic Mum
In 1911, all this wealth was concentrated in the hands of a man of whom Iris Portal, who worked in Hyderabad before Indian independence, said, “He was mad as a hen, and his principal wife was furious.”
Azmathunnisa Begum, the first of his seven wives, was apparently a real oddity. Reports say she was not very fond of her two sons. Although they were princes and one of them heir to the throne, she wanted to marry them off to her nieces, the “half-starved girls of Hyderabad”. She is said to have quarrelled violently with her husband, swearing profanely every time the subject of their marriage came up.
Her younger son, Prince Moazzam Jah, was fond of telling guests that his mother wanted to become regent after her husband’s death. How, he was asked, when his brother is still alive and both her sons are old enough to take the throne? The Prince readily explained, “Then neither of us will be here. Mum is always experimenting with poisons. There is not a single cat left in the royal residence.” In 1932, rumours spread that she had poisoned one of her advisers because he insisted that one of the princes should go abroad to study.
Osman Ali Khan married Azmathunnisa in 1920, aged 21. As a Muslim, he could have had four wives, but he had seven. But his sex drive could not be satisfied by them either, so he had a harem, which according to some accounts numbered 46 concubines and according to others 86. He is said to have kidnapped some of them, but he was consistently possessive towards all of them. They belonged only to him and were not allowed to be seen by other men, but as there were so many of them, his strength was slowly failing and he began to be addressed at court behind his back as his exhausted highness, rather than his exalted highness, as he should have been.
All the women together bore him at least 34 children, who gave him at least 104 grandchildren, although some sources claim that there were almost 150 illegitimate children living in his harem. The palace was thus in complete disarray. To make it easier for the guards to control it, all the wives, concubines and their children wore badges with numbers on them. This made it easier to identify them and follow their movements.
Azmathunnis’ first wife gave birth to two sons and one daughter. Despite her intrigues, the heir to the throne, Prince Azam Jah, married Durru Shehvar, daughter of the last Ottoman Caliph, and his younger brother, Prince Moazzam Jah, married Princess Niloufer, the Caliph’s niece. This was to unite the family that had money with the one that had spiritual power, even though the Caliph had already been expelled from Turkey by then.
In 1931, Prince Moazzam Jah married the then 16-year-old Niloufer Khanum Sultana, one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. Years passed, but no child was born. The prince was humiliated, his mother tried to humiliate him even more. It didn’t help that his brother already had two children, Prince Mukarrama Jaha and Muffakhama Jaha.
Princess Niloufer sought professional help in England, but the insecure Prince could not wait for the medical results that might have confirmed his infertility. He immediately had to prove that he was a fierce stud and quickly fathered a child. Since he had allowed himself to be deceived and not by his second wife with the consent of his first, which would have been in keeping with tradition, Niloufer immediately threw him out of the bedroom and never shared it with him again.
It was at this time that her personal maid died in childbirth. Niloufer, devastated by her infertility and the loss of her friend, pressured her father-in-law to open a paediatric clinic and maternity hospital in Hyderabad, attracting foreign specialists in return for generous payments. Princess Niloufer Hospital remains a valuable refuge for women even today, when Hyderabad is the fourth largest city in India with a population of eight million.
The seventh Nizam was very understanding towards his beautiful but sad daughter-in-law. He paid for all her charitable ventures, but he, like everyone else, was annoyed that she was breaking the basic rule of the court, which was for women to keep as far away from the public as possible and to be as invisible as possible.
Princess Esra, wife of the eighth Hyderabadi Nizam Mukarrama Jaha, later recalled how she joined the family in 1959 at the age of 22. She had studied architecture in Turkey and lived freely after Kemal Atatürk’s revolution, but in Hyderabad she was not allowed out at all and was even picked on by her friends.
Niloufer not only went to social events, she was also not disguised in public. Behind her was a big cloud of dust, behind her husband a much smaller one. In 1948, 17 years after their marriage, he took a second wife, in accordance with tradition. With her, he had three daughters in four years. In 1952, he and Niloufer finally divorced and the Princess moved to Nice, the seat of the Turkish aristocracy expelled from Turkey, where she married Edward Julius Pope, a former British diplomat, in 1963.
Valuable mouse euphoria
But while she was still in Hyderabad, she could see how all her father-in-law’s wives lived in their own part of the royal residence. The palace was built by the Hyderabadi aristocrat Kamal Khan for himself, but because he liked it, he sold it to the sixth Nizam. Osman Ali Khan moved in at the age of 13.
He liked it, but only one thing bothered him: because Kamal Khan had built it for himself, he decorated the main entrance, windows, doors and corridors with his initials. The young heir to the throne felt it was beneath him to have his home adorned with someone else’s abbreviation, but as soon as he became ruler, he issued a decree giving K.K. a new meaning: king kothi, or royal residence.
There was a curtain hanging over the main entrance. If the Nizam was at home, it covered the door; if he left the residence, it was raised. This way it was always clear when he was present and when he was not.
When he was, and he didn’t feel like dealing with any of his seven wives or his many concubines, he would pass the time with pornography. He reportedly had the largest pornographic collection in the world. He is said to have hidden cameras in the rooms of his guests and residents so that he could record their nocturnal activities.
But it was not his only “precious” collection. He also owned one of the largest collections of Islamic art. His library was filled with priceless Moghul and Deccan miniatures, painted Korans and the rarest and most esoteric Indo-Islamic manuscripts.
His collection of precious jewellery, guarded by eunuchs, was also the most valuable in the world. It contained diamonds from the 18th century onwards. It contained some 25,000 diamonds, Colombian emeralds, diamonds from the Golconda mines 11 kilometres from the present-day city of Hyderabad, Burmese rubies and pearls from Basra and the Gulf of Mannar. The diamonds weighed a total of 12,000 carats, two thousand emeralds 10,000 carats.
He owned more than 40,000 pearl necklaces, including the legendary Basra necklace called the Satlada, made of 465 pearls strung on seven linked chains. He reportedly had enough pearls to pave London’s Piccadilly Circus.
The jewels alone were worth around £400 million, with a further £100 million in gold and silver. In the 1940s, his fortune was worth $2 billion, or $34 billion today. At that time, this represented about 2% of the income of the US economy.
In 1955, when he heard that mice had feasted on the £3 million worth of banknotes he kept in containers in the basement of the palace, he just shrugged his shoulders.
During the India-China border clashes, he was asked by the Indian authorities to make a generous contribution to the National Defence Fund of India. Without hesitation, he announced that he would donate 5 tonnes of gold. He had no difficulty parting with the gold coins even just before now, but the cheap metal containers were a different story. “I am donating gold, not crates. Make sure they come back,” he ordered his staff in all seriousness. They returned in good order.
He had a completely ambivalent attitude towards money. He disciplined himself to live on £1 a day. He smoked only the cheapest cigarettes, preferably guests’ cigarette butts. He once took a cigarette from his adviser’s hand, broke it in half and gave him half back.
He was knitting his own socks and wearing a headdress that was completely worn out, while at the same time one of his “wardrobes” was half a mile or 0.8 kilometres long. His “wardrobe” was full of the finest fabrics, from silk and brocade to damask and muslin.
There were 60 cars in his garages, but only four were in running condition. Later, in 1967, a limousine that was supposed to bring a new set of cars to the palace from the enthronement broke down on the way. It still cost £45,000 a year to maintain these cars.
14,718 people were looking after Osman Ali Khan’s seventh string and its comfort. The main palace of Chowmahalla, the seat of the princely state, alone employed 6,000 people, half of them the Nizam’s Arab bodyguards. Twenty-eight were paid solely to fetch drinking water, 38 to clean dust from chandeliers, and many were on his payroll to crack nuts for him.
Quite a few of them worked in his distillery. He drank only the whisky that came out of it, while being entertained by his house jazz band.
His cars had to be modified so that the back seat was slightly raised. He found it highly inappropriate to sit at the same height as his subjects.
With his fluent English, he was a very attentive host. When the Prince of Wales visited him in 1922 – he was briefly King Edward VII in 1936 – he wanted to make him feel at home. When the Prince of Wales lifted the lid off the dishes in his room, the British national anthem was played.
Hidden treasures
One would find it so hard to believe that Osman Ali Khan had a keen sense for things that were not trivial. Almost all the important buildings of Hyderabad today were built in his time. He allocated about 11% of the state budget to education, set up a university and schools and introduced compulsory primary education, which was free for the poor. He created the Bureau of Translation. Although he did not care much for the vernacular, Urdu was dear to his heart. He himself also spoke English and Persian.
He has donated to various universities and cared for historical monuments. When the Ajanta and Ellora caves were discovered, he asked the archaeology department to take over the excavations and hired two other leading Italian experts to supervise the work, just in case. Today, the Ajanta caves, with their rock sculptures, are one of the most remarkable relics of Buddhist art, and Ellora is the largest rock-cut temple in the world.
“It was like living in France before the revolution. All power was in the hands of the Muslim nobility. Money was wasted like water. They were horrible, irresponsible landlords, but they could also be charming and sophisticated. They took us shooting and talked all the way about their trips to England or Cannes or Paris, although on many levels Hyderabad was still in the Middle Ages. The villages we rode through were often desperately poor,” Iris Portal later explained.
She was a friend of the sad Princess Niloufer. She once took her to see the treasures hidden in one of the palaces. They descended the many stairs and passed the guard. At the bottom, they landed in a huge vault full of ordinary and transport trucks.
They were all covered in a layer of dust and all had flat tyres, but when they discovered one, they saw piles of precious stones, pearls and gold coins under the cerrado. The Nizam feared that the people would rebel against him or that he would be attacked by the Indians, so he crammed his wealth into trucks so that he could get it out of the country in time. He soon forgot about it and let the trucks land in a state of disrepair.
Once Jackie Kennedy came to Hyderabad for a private visit. She wrote to her friend. Three classical musicians were playing in the moonlight and the nobles were talking about how everything was disappearing, that young people no longer appreciated the old culture, that the best chefs had gone to the Emirates … It was a really sad evening. The next day, my son John told me that the host’s sons took him to their rooms because they could no longer stand classical music – they offered him a tall glass full of whisky, they put a pornographic cassette in the Betamax and the Rolling Stones in the cassette player. They were dressed in tight Italian trousers and open shirts …”
By then, Hyderabad’s golden days were over. They ended in 1948, or a year after the British left India and it became independent. The seventh Nizam of Hyderabad was on extremely good terms with his colonial masters, the British.
During World War I, for example, he donated light bombers to the 110 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force. It became known as the Hyderabaska Squadron. During the Second World War, he helped the British with money and coal, he made all his military installations available to them, and his men fought on the British side. Even Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, thanked him in Parliament for his help.
For all the favours since the First World War, among the many princes, only Osman Ali Khan was allowed by the British to be addressed by his exalted Majesty and greeted with shots from twenty-one guns, not fourteen. He was even allowed to print his own money and, in 1942, to set up a state bank.
When Britain’s Princess Elizabeth announced her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947, the Hyderabadi Nizam told her that she could choose her own wedding gift from Cartier. She decided on a tiara, worth around £5,000, or £190,000 today, and a similarly expensive necklace, which went beautifully with the tiara. Both pieces of jewellery were made of platinum and set with diamonds.
Cartier made the necklace in 1935 and sold it the following year, but bought it back in 1937. He altered it slightly to make it more practical with two pendants and apparently lent it out a little, because it was photographed with the Countess of Warwick, Elfrida Greville.
When Princess Elizabeth took it with her, the necklace became known as the Hyderabaga Necklace. The Queen still occasionally wears it as it was then, but she has shortened it by eight rings, as she did with all her necklaces.
The tiara, which was adorned with three removable brooches, is no more. She wore it often for the first few years after her marriage, but when she became Queen, no more. In 1973 she finally had it destroyed. She kept the brooches and had the diamonds set in a new tiara called the Burmese ruby. It contained 96 rubies from a former necklace she had received as a wedding present from the people of Burma, or present-day Myanmar, because rubies are said to protect against disease and breakdown.
Farewell to the British, arrival of the Indians
They did, and the Hyderabaska family was already standing on the edge of the sinkhole. When the British withdrew from India in 1947, the former princely states had to decide whether to join Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan. The Seventh Nizam wanted neither the former nor the latter, but persuaded the British in vain to allow him to become an independent state within the British Commonwealth of Nations.
While he negotiated with all three stakeholders, his country was overwhelmed by violence. The nobility and 14% of Hyderabad’s population were Muslim, all others were Hindu. The Nizam wanted to remain independent, the nobility wanted to go to Pakistan, the people to India. And it rebelled. They were taken care of by the Razars, who were once the Nizam’s private police, but were now so powerful that they actually ruled the country.
In the rebel Hindu provinces, Hindus and even moderate Muslims have been killed. Women were raped and abducted. They forced opponents into dungeons and tortured them inhumanely. Unofficial estimates say that tens of thousands of Hindus and moderate Muslims were killed.
Meanwhile, the Indians have pressured the rich string-puller with economic sanctions. He complained to the UN Security Council and the Indians attacked him in retaliation. They overcame him in just four days and celebrated victory on 18 September 1948. Between 27,000 and 40,000 people paid with their lives.
The princely state of Hyderabad no longer existed. It became part of India, and its Nizam became its Governor. He was allowed to keep five palaces and received money from the state for his needs, but since the subjects no longer paid tax to him but to the state, his income was no longer sufficient to maintain his old lifestyle.
Osman Ali Khan, of course, has not changed it. True, he withdrew completely from public life, but the court remained unchanged until his death on 24 February 1967. Although most of his subjects were Hindus, the posthumous procession was reportedly the largest in India.
He skipped his sons, the ones their mother allegedly wanted to poison, in the succession because they were “morally perverse” and had “sadistic tendencies”. The eighth Nizam and heir to the still enormous fortune became his grandson Mukarram Jah, son of Prince Azam Jah and the cultured Princess Durum Shehwar.
“I was brought up to be a ruler, not an administrator”, he later explained why the reality he found himself in after his grandfather’s death at the age of 34 surprised him so much. Mukarram Jah, contrary to the Nizam’s wishes, spent most of his time abroad. He was educated at Harrow, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Political Science and trained at Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy. His sophisticated mother was annoyed by his obsession with car engines, but he had to study art and literature.
When he took over the succession, he brought his own guards to protect him, but they were unable to do so. More than a thousand heirs, from the many children of the Nizam to his relatives, competed for their piece of the pie. They all sued him in turn, led by his father and aunt.
His grandfather had divided his wealth into 54 trusts, but his descendants are now at loggerheads over their managers, so the assets have been more or less inaccessible. The family finances were in complete ruins and the family was deep in debt.
By 1973, the successors were at such loggerheads that they threatened each other with death, and on top of that, the Indian authorities stopped paying the former princes their annual “pocket money” and taxed them heavily. Mukarram Jah, who for some time had been selling family jewels to support the court and the more than 14 000 people who either worked or lived there, including his grandfather’s concubines and their descendants, lost ground.
Eighth string on the run
He fled to Western Australia and bought a 200,000-acre estate near Perth. In India, he fired 14,000 employees and far from the intrigue, kept sheep, repaired cars and drove bulldozers. Turkey’s first Caliph “was a shepherd, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t be one too”, he explained to the media, all calm. His neighbours called him Charlie. While his inheritance was being plundered in India, he was resting in Australia under the name Charlie Hyderabad.
He was happy, but not for long. He really had a remarkable talent for making the wrong choices. In India, his property was managed by either corrupt or incompetent people; in Australia, he changed estate manager after estate manager.
He has been separated from his wife for some time. Just nine days after she arrived in Australia, Princess Esra of Turkey was on a flight to London to see her two children. In 1976, after 17 years, she divorced her husband. Since then, neither she nor her children have seen him, and neither of them has been allowed to set foot on Hyderabadi soil.
It didn’t take the 8th string long to cry for his sophisticated wife, but it hurt him more that the £12 million he had to pay her went with her. But even that pain was not very deep, there was still plenty of money.
He soon met Helen Simmons, a former stewardess, now a secretary at the BBC, 15 years his junior. The marriage lasted long enough for the couple to have two sons, but then fell apart abruptly when Helen became involved with a bisexual lover. Not long afterwards, in 1989, she died of AIDS.
Her elder son, Prince Alexander Azam Jah, who was only 10 years old when his mother died, later became extremely close to Mukarram’s first wife Esra and to his half-brother and half-sister. His brother, four years younger, died of a drug overdose in 2004 aged 21.
But since Nizam Mukarram Jah could not do without his wife, he naturally had to get a new one immediately after another expensive divorce. Now he no longer wanted a westerner, even if she converted to Islam, as Helen Simmons had, but he sent Demir Bukey to Turkey with $100,000 and told him to find him a wife. Bukey chose Manolya Onur, a former Miss Turkey, 22 years his junior.
At the age of 57, Mukarram Jah married her in 1990, became the father of a daughter, Niloufer, a year later, and divorced for a third time five years later. This divorce was not cheap either, yet Manolya is still in court today claiming the properties he once promised to their daughter. She even moved to Hyderabad from Turkey with her daughter Niloufer because of the prospect of new earnings.
He also had a child with his fourth wife, Jameela Boularous, a Moroccan woman 38 years his junior, whom he married in 1993 at the age of 60. He divorced almost immediately afterwards and in 1995 he jumped into a fifth marriage, this time to Princess Orchedi of Turkey, 25 years his junior. Of course, even this relationship did not last, and although Mukarram Jah moved to Turkey in 1996 and settled in a modest two-bedroom apartment, it also cost him dearly.
Women were slipping through his fingers like money, and his Australian estate was declining as fast as his Hyderabadi inheritance. Threatened with foreclosure, he sold it before fleeing to Turkey.
Meanwhile, the Indian black market was flooded with his stolen jewels, priceless manuscripts from his grandfather’s library, and Louis XIV’s furniture and precious chandeliers from his palaces. These have been in ruins since the death of Osman Ali Khan in 1967. Some buildings were sealed by the courts, others were sold in his name and others forcibly occupied.
Between 1967 and 2001, Chowmahalla was reduced from 180,000 square metres to 49,000 square metres, and was once the official seat of the royal family. Begun in 1750, but not completed until 1869, the palace was built over a hundred years later and has been characterised by a variety of architectural styles.
It boasted two huge courtyards, fountains and gardens. The southern, older courtyard was home to four neoclassical palaces, while the northern courtyard was full of buildings in different styles. The heart of the palace and the seat of the dynasty was the Mhilwat Mubarak building. It also housed the marble dais on which the royal throne stood.
Now, a courtyard with palaces and ballrooms, including the famous 1.6-kilometre-long one, has been seized by investors. The historic 18th-century buildings were demolished and replaced by concrete blocks. The buildings in the second courtyard fell into disrepair, as did the Palace of Falaknuma, which stood on its own acropolis in the south of the city.
The windows and doors were sealed with red wax. Inside, Victorian sofas and armchairs were decaying, the precious upholstered seats were eaten away by white ants. The gardens were neglected, the fountains without water.
Warrior Princes
Princess Esra had no idea of the state of her husband’s fortune and her children’s inheritance. Since her divorce, she knew nothing about Mukarrama Yahu, and with 12 million in assets in her account, she felt no need to look back in time. But it soon caught up with her.
In 1994, Mukarram Jah suddenly decided to call his son after 18 years. Two years later, he came to his wedding and met his first wife again. Although he had not spoken to her for 20 years, he now asked her to return to Hyderabad and settle his inheritance. No, she said. And then yes. For his two children.
He signed a power of attorney for her to manage his assets and she got to work. She wanted to bring as many lawsuits as she could under one roof, to set up a fund to manage the jewels, and to restore the palaces and open them to the public. She decided to rent out Falaknum Palace to a hotel chain and to turn Chowmahalla Palace into a museum.
Now it has been sealed, and some rooms have not been entered since 1967, when the seventh Nizam died. In one of the underground rooms, the Princess has now found thousands of ancient curved swords, sabres, helmets, daggers and other pieces of combat equipment. Everything was rusted and scattered.
In another room, she discovered a stack of albums with around 8000 photographs showing the life of the Nizams. They were covered with a thick layer of dust. A box contained 160 photographs from the harem in 1915. On the walls, family portraits were falling out of frames.
One room was filled with clothes for princes, there were precious silk saris in drawers, and in a box there were only bow ties. She found a mass of court uniforms and harem dresses once worn by the Nizam’s favourite women. There were still nearly 8000 dinner services in the palace, one of them with 2 600 pieces.
The palace’s royal residence revealed the complete correspondence of the ruling dynasty from the mid-18th century onwards. When the archivists were sacked in 1972, all the correspondence, weighing 10 and a half tonnes, was stuffed inside and sealed. In another room there were crates full of French champagne.
At first glance, it seemed that it would be impossible to put the heritage in order. For three decades, no one had maintained the palaces. The monsoons caused them to deteriorate even faster than they would have elsewhere. If she had wanted to open them to the public, she would have had to install electricity and air-conditioning without destroying them. How?
She needed money to start with, and a good lawyer before that. Vijay Shankardass, Salman Rushdie’s lawyer, had a reputation for honesty and courage, but he refused her request for help. No other Indian princely family was as indebted as the Nizams and no other had assets in such disarray. He preferred not to think about the 2,740 or so claimants.
In the end, however, he agreed and spent the next two years in the company of a bodyguard who guarded him 24 hours a day. He was threatened and blackmailed before he persuaded the plaintiffs to agree on the jewels. The Hyderabadi mafia was after him, and there were princes who would have had no problem killing him themselves.
Once, the Indian government banned the export and public auctioning of Hyderabadi gems, claiming they were part of the country’s heritage. It was prepared to pay £43 million for them. Princess Esra agreed, even though the family estimated that they were worth at least £230 million. After paying the taxes and the claimants, she was left with £13 million in her ex-husband’s name.
She started renovating the palaces, her lawyer dealt with the 130 remaining lawsuits and paid off the debts, which totalled around £3 million.
The Princess was as lucky as her ex-husband was unlucky in her choice of consultants, but she found experts (architects, art and ceramics consultants, conservators, specialist carpenters, photographers, textile and antique restorers, historians, etc.) who did their work well, quickly and honestly. Two and a half years later, what had previously seemed impossible has become a reality.
Meanwhile, her ex-husband was living in Turkey, modestly in a two-bedroom apartment. His son Azmet is his official heir. For many years he was a cameraman in Hollywood. He worked with Steven Spielberg, Richard Attenborough and Nicolas Roeg. Now that his mother has forcibly arranged his father’s inheritance, he hopes that one day he will be able to take it over as the real Nizam, the ninth ruler of Hyderabad, even though he no longer exists. Years ago, the Indian authorities split it into three parts and annexed them to three other provinces on the basis of language.
The final solution is still a long way off
But his legacy lives on, and with it disputes, such as the one over who owns the £34 million that has been sitting in a bank account in England for almost 70 years. In 1948, when the seventh Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, was vacillating between independence and annexation to India and Pakistan respectively, the Finance Minister of Hyderabad transferred more than £1 million at the time to the National Westminster Bank in London for recognition.
The money ended up in the account of Habib Ihrahim Rahimtol, Pakistan’s envoy to the UK, and was reportedly intended to buy weapons to defend the country against the Indians. They had already occupied Hyderabad for two days at that time. When they learnt of the transfer, they forced the Hyderabadi Finance Minister to freeze the money. It was then converted into military bonds by the British Government, but later returned to its normal monetary role.
It is still sitting in this form in the bank today, as Pakistan and India argue over it. Pakistan claims it for itself because it was transferred to the account of its representative, India for itself because Hyderabad is its. The Indians also show that Nizam Osman Ali Khan demanded the money back a few days after it was transferred, but the British concluded in an attempted out-of-court settlement last year that he might not have done so of his own free will because the Indians were already occupying his country at the time. On the third side are the descendants of the Nizam, who are demanding that the two countries finally agree on who gets the money, because then they would get their share, however small. And since the golden days of the Hyderabadi family are long gone, each million is worth a hundred times as much as it used to be, especially since there are as many greedy hands that would snatch it up in a heartbeat as there were in days gone by.
