The Secunderabad Club website boasts that M. M. Kaye, author of the acclaimed The Far Pavilions, painted the murals on the walls of its mixed lounge https://www.secunderabadclub.org/the-mixed-lounge-fresco/
Mary Margaret Kaye was born in 1908 in Simla. She has chronicled her life as a child of the British Raj in a memoir spanning three volumes: The Sun in the Morning, Golden Afternoon, and Enchanted Evening. In Enchanted Evening, she dedicates an entire chapter, titled Golconda, to her stay in Hyderabad. Although Kaye is nebulous with dates, I have attributed her visit to the late 1930s. She and her mother were guests of a gentleman friend who worked for the then British resident, Sir Duncan Mackenzie.
The Resident plays no part in her memoirs. Her first recollection is meeting his houseguest—writer Somerset Maugham. Kaye, then a budding novelist, told him of her frustration at getting stuck on a particular sentence for hours on end. The elderly Maugham peered over his tortoise-rimmed glasses and said: My dear young lady, that’s the only thing I have heard you say that makes me think you will be a writer one day. I do that. Kaye states Hyderabad had one of the grandest Residencies in all India. Hyderabad’s polo grounds hosted first-class polo matches and attracted A-list international visitors.
Another notable visitor to Hyderabad during Kaye’s stay was Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. According to Kaye, Sir Mackenzie wasn’t a social being and palmed off his visitors to Kaye’s friend, whom she refers to as Sandy, who palmed them off to her. When Hutton, then married to the Polish, Count Reventlow expressed a desire to buy jewelry. Kaye took her to Hyderabad’s old city. They entered an unpaved lane lined with tall houses and climbed up a fleet of steep stairs. The jeweler’s assistants guided them to a dark room, furnished with nothing but thin mattresses covered with white sheets. The white-robed, hookah-smoking owner of the shop rose when his guests entered and greeted them with a bow. With a clap of his hands, cups of coffee, bowls of halva, and other delectables emerged. Niceties completed, assistants carried in a tin trunk, the kind seen on railway platforms across the country.
The humble trunk, when opened, spilled out magnificent jewellery reminiscent of Ali Baba’s cave: pearls as large as pigeon’s eggs, carved emeralds, glittering rubies, and enormous table-cut diamonds. Kaye claims the sapphires, topazes, and turquoises were worthy of the Imperial Russian collection. Hutton bought a single flower bracelet made from diamonds, pearls, and emeralds while Kaye, a penurious writer, could only admire the jewels.
Another meeting that made a significant impact on Kaye was with Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III. She claims he remained an attractive man despite his advanced years. Rumour had it that in his youth, he’d fallen in love with the daughter of the British Resident. Given the high standing of the Salar Jung family in Hyderabad, the Nizam and his advisors denied him permission to marry. His paramour’s aghast father shipped her off to England. In a last clandestine meeting, the lovers promised never to marry another and, from all accounts, neither did.
Barbara Hutton coveted not the ageing Nawab but one of his possessions and wrangled a luncheon invite from him courtesy of the ubiquitous Sandy. Kaye describes Salar Jung’s palace as old, shabby, and crammed with dust-covered treasures. Their host, however, oozed charm and old-world hospitality. After lunch, the party moved to a flagged patio in the middle of the ground floor. Flowering creepers and brilliant sprays of bougainvilleas burst from earth-coloured pots. Hutton begged Salar Jung to show her his famous collection of daggers. A similar ritual to the jeweler’s shop in the old city played out. Servants carried out the daggers in tin trunks. Covering the marble tiles with a sheet, they presented each one in its velvet storage box. Kaye alleges their owners belonged to famous figures from history, but unfortunately doesn’t state who they are. Hutton took a fancy to one whose curved edge was shaped like a parrot’s head. The beak was carved from a single ruby and the head from an emerald. A pair of rubies made up the parrot’s eyes; a string of pearls dangled from a hole in its neck. Hutton thought it an Oriental custom for a host to give away an object his guest admired. Salar Jung proved not to be so gullible. He warned her she might cut herself on the sharp blade. When Hutton still didn’t place the dagger down, he ordered his servants to pack up the entire collection. My guess is that he wrangled the dagger from Hutton’s bejewelled hands himself.
When Hyderabad’s notorious summer set in, Kaye and her mother planned to leave for Ootacamund. A toothache derailed their plans, and she set off to see a German dentist equipped with cutting-edge gadgets from Europe. On taking an X-ray, the dentist told her a nerve was pressing against her wisdom teeth and needed to be cut. While tackling the offending nerve, the doctor broke her jaw. Many years later, Kaye discovered the man was neither a dentist nor a German. He was a Polish Jew who foresaw trouble in Europe. His intention had been to escape Germany and sell the equipment. Instead, he ended up masquerading as a dentist. Poor Kaye suffered discomfort for years on his account.
After spending the summer in Ooty, Kaye returned to Hyderabad and stayed as a paying guest with a friend in Secunderabad’s cantonment area. Again, she doesn’t mention the source, but someone commissioned her to paint murals on the walls of the Secunderabad Club. She says she used whitewash bought at a local market and coloured them with powdered dye to paint the walls and finished them in a month. Towards the end of her life, she was overjoyed to discover the murals still existed, and generations of Hyderabadis cherished them.
A mention in one of Charminar Collection’s articles about people mistaking Chinese vendors as German spies prompted this article. The British Residency in Hyderabad seems to have been quite the hotspot for ill-starred love affairs. Dalrymple’s White Mughals has immortalized one of them. Winston Churchill also fell in love with the British Resident’s daughter, Pamela Plowden, during his stay in Hyderabad in the 1890s.
Perhaps, an interesting topic to research for my next article?
(The Secunderabad Club website contradicts Kaye’s recollections. Her father had passed away before her stay in Hyderabad, and it was her mother who accompanied her, not her sister. I’m not certain if the original murals have been painted over in recent years. Readers can find further information on Sir Cecil Kaye and M. M. Kaye on the internet.)
Zeenath Khan is a Hyderabad born resident of Mumbai who often writes on the history and culture of Hyderabad
This post was last modified on January 19, 2022 8:57 pm