¹ Yazdani, Zubaida, Hyderabad During the Residency of Henry Russell 1811–1820: A Case Study of the Subsidiary Alliance System (Oxford: by the author, 1976), 4Google Scholar; Webster, Anthony, The Richest East India Merchant: the Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta 1767–1836 (Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press, 2007), 103.Google Scholar

² For treaty texts, see Aitchison, C. U., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India, and Neighboring Countries vols. 9 and 10 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1929–1933).Google Scholar

³ Peter Wood, ‘Vassal State in the Shadow of Empire: Palmer's Hyderabad, 1799–1867’ (Ph.D. thesis, History, University of Wisconsin, 1981), 235–238. This unpublished dissertation is the most thorough investigation of Palmer and Company, and I follow his dates and other details in preference to others. Wood died in 2005 and I would like to dedicate this paper to him.

⁴ Nizam ul Mulk Asaf Jah I, the first Nizam, began as Mughal governor of the Deccan in 1724 and he and his successors established Hyderabad as independent of the Mughal empire. The second Nizam, Nizam Ali Khan, ruled first from Aurangabad and then from Hyderabad as the military aristocracy was succeeded by a Mughal-style bureaucracy based on the collection of land revenue.

⁵ For 1773, 13 George III; for 1797, 37 George III, cap.142, sect. 28, both cited in Yazdani, Hyderabad, 65, and many other sources.

⁶ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 171.

⁷ Many Residents were there only a few years, and some were censured for their closeness to local affairs and resigned: James Grant, 1781–1784, Richard Johnson, 1784–1788, and Thomas Sydenham, 1806–1810. Temple, Richard, Journals Kept in Hyderabad, Kashmir, Sikkim, and Nepal (London: W. H. Allen and Company, 1887) I, 62.Google Scholar

⁸ For Russell, see Temple, Journals, I, 62; also 119, where he comments that Russell's woman, Lutfunissa, was a relative of Kirkpatrick's woman, Khairunissa, and that Chandu Lal's wife regularly visited these ladies. The fullest account of Kirkpatrick's relationship with Khairunissa (and the assertion that they married) is in Dalrymple, William, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins, 2002), pp. 254–258Google Scholar.

⁹ These titles are mentioned in The Chronology of Modern Hyderabad from 1720 to 1890 A.C. (Hyderabad: Government of Hyderabad, 1954): for Kirkpatrick (also titled, here, Fakhruddaula and Motaman ul Mulk Bahadur), index p. 14, and for Russell and Metcalfe, 163.

¹⁰ Yazdani, Hyderabad, 40–41; Wood, ‘Vassal State’,195–201 for more details.

¹¹ Cadell, Patrick, ed., The Letters of Philip Meadows Taylor to Henry Reeve (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), xiv–xxGoogle Scholar, gives a genealogy showing that William was General William Palmer's son by a begum of the Oudh royal family and mentions that General Palmer was military secretary to William Hastings and had been Resident at three Indian states. General William Palmer died in 1816.

¹² Thompson, Edward John, Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1937), 192Google Scholar; Bullock, H., List of Local Officers of the Nizam's Army, 1807–1853 (Rawalpindi: British Museum, 2nd. ed, 1938), 31.Google Scholar

¹³ Berar was nominally under the Nizam's suzereignty from 1724, but the Marathas had more often controlled the region and its land revenues until 1803–04, when Wellesley's army and the Nizam's cavalry under William Palmer defeated them and a treaty gave most of Berar back to the Nizam. Then Raja Chandu Lal displaced the rebellious Mohipat Ram (formerly vakil of the Nizam's French officer Monsieur Raymond and sent to Berar as ‘governor’ or taluqdar for Mir Alam, Diwan 1804–1808), with the insistence of then Resident Sydenham and the military help of Palmer and put his own brother Govind Baksh in charge of Berar in 1806. Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 91–92.

¹⁴ Palmer was the first English-origin officer to serve in the Irish Colonel Finglass's Brigade, from 1800. See Edward Palmer [grandson of William Palmer], ‘The Palmers of Hyderabad’ [1934], Commonwealth Relations Office, London, Mss. Eur. D443, 3. William Palmer's older brother John, fully English and son of General Palmer's first wife, founded the agency house Palmer and Company in Calcutta slightly earlier: Webster, The Richest East India Merchant.

¹⁵ According to some versions, Benkati Das helped Palmer in 1814 and then became a partner: Davies, C. Colin (ed.), ‘Correspondence of William Palmer with Sir Henry Russell, Formerly Resident of Hyderabad, 1836–1847’, Indian Archives, vol. 13 (1959–1960), 58, 60Google Scholar; Khan, Ghulam Husain, Tarikh-i-Gulzar-i Asafiyah (Hyderabad, 1890–1891 [written in 1842–1843/1258 Hijri]), 629Google Scholar; Briggs, Henry George, The Nizam: his History and Relations with the British Government (London: B. Quaritch, 1861) II, 167–168Google Scholar. However, Wood, ‘Vassal State’, shows that the East India Company recommended ‘Bungkuttee Doss’ from Benares to Resident James Kirkpatrick in Hyderabad in 1805: 137; see also 138, 141. Wood cites various letters mentioning ‘Banketty Dass’ as Palmer's ‘most active Partner, the one most generally known to be associated with his House,. . .his trusted adviser [sic]:’ 145. An original contract, undated but because of the inclusion of William Rumbold as a partner probably 1815 or 1816, was in the private papers of Raja Vallabh Das, Hyderabad, viewed by me and my daughter and xeroxed in 1983.

¹⁶ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, Appendix II, iii.

¹⁷ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 141, 169.

¹⁸ Other firm affiliates included Henry Dighton, sometime revenue contractor for the Nizam, who split off and founded a rival firm; Raja Kandaswamy Mudaliar, who later served as Diwan Salar Jang I's vakil to the Resident; and Sir William Rumbold (from about 1815), whose wife was a ward of Governor-General Hastings (see Thompson, Life, 193). For George and William Rumbold, Crofton, O. S., List of Inscriptions on Tombs and Monuments in H.E.H. the Nizam's Dominions (Hyderabad: Government of Hyderabad, 1941), 5–6Google Scholar, 8, the former thought to be an earlier partner of Palmer (he died in 1820) and the latter said by Crofton to have joined the firm in 1817 (others say 1815 or 1816). For Dighton, Cadell, The Letters, 19, and Gribble, J. D. B., History of the Deccan (London: Luzac and Co., 1896), 11Google Scholar, 191. For Mudaliyar [sic], Temple, Journals, I, 146, says he was the son of the supervisor of buildings for the Hyderabad Residency in the early nineteenth century and began as a clerk for Palmer and Company, later gaining official positions. Some Residency officials were also affiliated with the firm: the Chief Assistant Resident, Sotheby, and the Residency Surgeon, Dr Currie: Thompson, Life, 201. Dr Currie, although fully British, was allegedly permitted to be a partner in the firm because of his low income as Court physician (Rupees 1,000 per month): Thompson, Life, 194.

¹⁹ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 145. Wood lists Henry and Charles Russell, the Residency Surgeon Currie, and Samuel Russell (an engineer employed by the Residency) as partners, citing letters of 1814 which I have not seen: 136. Both Yazdani and Wood view the Russells, and William Rumbold a few years later, as fortune-seekers and secret partners of Palmer. Both Henry and Charles Russell deposited sums with Palmer, whether as partners or constituents is unclear. Adherents of the conspiracy theory view them as illegal partners because they were British subjects, but even if partners (denied by Henry Russell repeatedly), whether or not they were loaning money to the Nizam (see the 1797 Act details above) is certainly questionable. Palmer and Company did not begin loaning to the Hyderabad government via Chandu Lal until 1812, and Wood states (152) that details of capital employment and its sources ‘cannot be fully traced’. Samuel Russell withdrew his capital and Charles Russell noted that he would withdraw his capital in 1814. Wood talks of Charles and Henry withdrawing their capital but ‘reinvesting’ elsewhere; nonetheless he terms them ‘erstwhile partners’ of Palmer: 167, 169.

²⁰ The firm engaged in general trade, qualifying for the term ‘portfolio capitalist’ introduced by Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Bayly, Chris: ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988), 401–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It exploited the Godavari forests, harvesting logs for shipbuilding and using the Godavari and Wardha rivers to float Berar teak and cotton to the sea: Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 190–191. ‘The Palmers’, 4–5, mentions navigation of the Godavari for commercial enterprises based on English principles and then the rendering of ‘monetary assistance’ to the Nizam's government. Palmer and Company first lent money to the Hyderabad government in 1816, according to Thompson, Life, 194; but see Crofton, who says 1814, and Wood, ‘Vassal State’, who specifies the first big loan as 1818 (to pay the Hyderabad Contingent).

²¹ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, repeatedly cites contemporary British sources to establish that this was the usual rate at that time in Hyderabad: 141–143, 165, 339, 342.

²² See note 15, above, where Company officials in Benares recommended him to Resident Kirkpatrick in Hyderabad.

²³ Sirajuddaula's capture of Calcutta in 1756 is too early for this story; perhaps a more minor event is the basis of this ‘memory’.

²⁴ Raja Vallabh Das gave the name of Jagmohan Das's grandfather as Govardhan Das. He also told of the family's origin in Ahmedabad: ‘we came down with the daughter of King Karan Videla, in the time of Alauddin Khilji [1296–1316]; she hid in the Ajanta caves and we stayed away in Devgiri, and therefore we ended up in Aurangabad’. Raja Vallabh Das, interview, 29 August 1983. On 7 January 2008, descendant and head of the family, Krishna Kumar, gave a variation when interviewed in Hyderabad by the author and Alka Patel: Jagmohan Das was subahdar or collector of Aurangabad and knew about the Tipu Sultan attack, so his son Benkati Das ran away to Calcutta; Kumar dated the troubles in Calcutta to 1785 and said that Benkati Das, later, was walking in the bazaar in Hyderabad when seen by an English lady whose life he had saved in Calcutta. William Rumbold's having come to Hyderabad only in 1815 is a problem for the version above in the text (but perhaps it was his brother George, in Hyderabad earlier).

²⁵ I and my daughter observed these objects in 1983 in the home of Raja Vallabh Das.

²⁶ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, shows that the old and new concerns overlapped: see Appendix II, iv–v, and 184–185. He reports that the Nizam's government owed the Old Concern some 14 lakhs, or 1,400,000 rupees, in 1814: 182.

²⁷ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, dates the formal contract including Rumbold as a partner to April 1815, when Rumbold first came to Hyderabad, with the other partners being William and Hastings Palmer, Banketty Dass, William Currie, and Hans Sotheby: 185–186. This conforms to the undated contract found in 1983 with Raja Vallabh Das.

²⁸ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 193–194; Yazdani, Hyderabad, 65. The firm was ‘sanctioned’ by the Company in 1814 and ‘licensed’ by it in 1816, according to Thompson, Life, 193.

²⁹ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 218–219, 228–229, and note 1, 219, stating that this opinion was reversed in 1822 and was used against Rumbold and Palmer and Company.

³⁰ The troops in Berar were paid through the agent in Aurangabad, Captain George Sydenham, who had first proposed this plan to Palmer (according to Henry Russell): Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 192. Palmer's brother Hastings was deputed by the firm to Aurangabad, and Govind Baksh, who continued to play a (declining) role in Berar, also resided in Aurangabad. The then-Resident Henry Russell found this arrangement advantageous to both the Nizam and the Company. Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 197–214.

³¹ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 222–226. Wood painstakingly analyzes the available financial records in his Appendix ii, ii–xxxiv.

³² Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 230–233.

³³ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 249–257.

³⁴ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 260, appendix II, x–xi.

³⁵ In July of 1822, the Nizam's debts to Palmer and Company were over 83 1/2 lakhs, (8,350,000 rupees) whereas the Nizam owed only 17 lakhs (1,700,000 rupees) to other moneylenders or sahukars: Thompson, Life, 211.

³⁶ Sutherland, J., Sketches of the Relations Subsisting between the British Government in India and Different Native States (Jaipur: Pulications Scheme, 1988), 67Google Scholar. The firm did not directly collect the revenues; this was its tankha, the charges against the land revenues that guaranteed the loan.

³⁷ Crofton, List of Inscriptions, xi–xii, for a brief account of the firm. For the 1824 bankruptcy, Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 351, correcting Kaye, John William, The Life and Correspondence of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858)Google Scholar, I, 228–229 who says 1828, and Crofton, who also says 1828, List of Inscriptions, xii, 19.

³⁸ A banker of Shorapur told Cadell that Resident Fraser had advanced funds to the Contingent in December of 1845: Cadell, The Letters, 202. A prominent Gosain, Lachman Gir, was banker to Shorapur in the 1940s: Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, The Story of My Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1920 (2nd edn, ed. by his daughter, with a preface by Henry Reeve, and introduction and notes by Henry Bruce), 183–186.

³⁹ Leonard, Karen, ‘Bankers in Nineteenth-Century Hyderabad State Politics’, Modern Asian Studies 15:2 (1981), 177–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for details; the charts of bankers there should have gone back to earlier decades and included Palmer and Company and Pestonji.

⁴⁰ See the treaty text in Briggs, The Nizam, I, 312–316. The financial records of Berar turned over to the British in 1853 were those kept by Pestonji, the banker who succeeded Puran Mal, who succeeded Palmer and Company in managing the Contingent pay and the revenues of Berar: India Papers, ‘Nizam's Territory, Copy of all Papers relative to Territory ceded by His Highness the Nizam, in Liquidation of Debts alleged to have been Due by His Highness to the British Government (1954)’, 13. The ‘Return of Berar’ was sought henceforward: it was assigned to the British to pay the troops in 1853, taken in trust in 1860, and finally leased in perpetuity in 1902. In 1936 the British accepted the Nizam's suzerainty over Berar and his heir-apparent was titled Prince of Berar.

⁴¹ Thompson, Life, 194–195, a biographer of Metcalfe, discussed the relevant Acts of Parliament and noted that Palmer was not full-blooded or an English subject and that the 12 per cent interest limit applied only to British India.

⁴² In April 1821, Metcalfe proposed to open, in Calcutta, a 6 per cent loan, under British government guarantee, to pay off the Nizam's debt: Thompson, Life, 207. Wood, ‘Vassal State’, notes that Metcalfe specified private sources, not the Company, for the loan: 282.

⁴³ For Metcalfe's view of Russell, Thompson, Life, 186, and for his view of Chandu Lal, 189; for the latter, also Sutherland, Sketches, 59. Chandu Lal pitted Palmer and Metcalfe against each other, according to Thompson, Life, 215–216.

⁴⁴ Thompson, Life, 203–204.

⁴⁵ Dalrymple, White Mughals. The next Resident W. B. Martin returned to Henry Russell's system of communicating directly with the Minister Chandu Lal and Martin defended Palmer and Rumbold and Chandu Lal. Thompson, Life, 229–230.

⁴⁶ D'Ewes, John, Sporting in Both Hemispheres (London: G. Routledge & Co., 2nd edn, 1858), 66–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Cadell, Letters, xvii, D'Ewes was a subaltern in the Madras Army who went to Aurangabad with his regiment in 1824.

⁴⁷ Meadows Taylor knew Hindustani, Telugu, and Marathi, and he wrote novels and histories as well as serving in many capacities. He was uncovenanted, not being in the East India Company's service but in that of the Nizam, and after his death his daughters were given 60 pounds a year by the Diwan Salar Jang I from his own purse. Finally they were awarded by the Viceroy of India 100 pounds each a year at the urging of Meadows Taylors’ admirers: Meadows Taylor, Story, 483–484 (final note by Henry Bruce).

⁴⁸ Taylor, Meadows, Story, 46 (quote), 73Google Scholar. He also stated that Palmer was ‘a first-rate Persian scholar’, 166.

⁴⁹ Kaye, Life, I, 380–381;Thompson, Life, 202–203;Temple, Journals, I, 62.

⁵⁰ These come from Thompson, Life, 210–211 quoting a letter to the Governor-General dated September 1821, and then, 224, Metcalfe's letter of 20 December 1822, to the Governor-General and the Nizam.

⁵¹ Palmer, ‘The Palmers’, 6.

⁵² Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 293-et passim provides a blow-by-blow account from 1822 to 1824, tracing the conflicting claims of Metcalfe, Chandu Lal, Palmer, and Governor-General Hastings as Hyderabad's officials and bankers fought against greater and greater East India Company control over the state, with Hastings invoking the sovereign rights of the Nizam according to the Treaty of 1800.

⁵³ Douglas Kinnaird, Remarks on the volume of Hyderabad Papers printed for the use of the East India Proprietors [Palmer & Co], London, 1825. British Museum T.1151(5); Anonymous, ‘On the Papers relating to the Loan, Hyderabad, Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature, vol. 3 (1824), 368–382Google Scholar; Anonymous’, ‘Further Development of the Transactions at Hyderabad’, Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature’, vol. 4 (1825), 471–502. Wood notes that Rumbold and Hastings won an important victory in 1828 when a ruling was handed down by a full bench of judges appointed by the House of Lords that Hyderabad as an independent state allied by treaty lay beyond the scope of British law; this led to the 1833 Writ of Mandamus from the Court of King's Bench ordering the Court of Directors in Calcutta to treat Palmer and Company as directed by the Board of Directors in London (i.e. more sympathetically). Rather than addressing specific issues relating to Palmer, this really addressed the Company's accountability to Parliament and the Upper House in Britain: ‘Vassal State’, 383–385.

⁵⁴ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 329–330, 385.

⁵⁵ Thus Sarojini Regani, despite a Ph.D. from Osmania University in Hyderabad, was limited by her sources in Nizam-British Relations 1724–1857 (Hyderabad: Booklovers Private Limited, 1963), using adjectives like ‘vicious’ and ‘unscrupulous’ to describe the firm and its members as she uncritically cited opponents of the firm in her chapter on The Hyderabad Contingent and Palmer & Co. Similarly, Panigrahi's, D. N. published London Ph.D, Charles Metcalfe in India: ideas & administration 1806–1835 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 39Google Scholar, relied on English sources to discuss Metcalfe's achievement in Hyderabad, ‘where he exposed the underhand dealings of the Palmer Company and Raja Chandu Lal. . .thus saving the Nizam's government from financial ruin. . .’.

⁵⁶ For a comment on these source-influenced perspectives, using William Palmer's banking firm as an example, see Leonard, Karen, ‘Reassessing Indirect Rule in Hyderabad: Rule, Ruler, or Sons-in-Law of the State?’ Modern Asian Studies 37:2 (2003), 367–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁷ Chandriah, K., Hyderabad 400 Glorious Years (Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1996), 150–153Google Scholar. Despite the title of this brief coverage, Chandriah mentions ‘Bunketty Doss’ and is essentially positive about the firm and its defenders.

⁵⁸ Leonard, Karen, ‘Mulki-non-Mulki Conflict in Hyderabad State’, in ed. Jeffrey, Robin, People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 65–108.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Begum Yazdani was an Anglophile. Her father received an Order of the British Empire in 1936, her two sons moved to Britain in the 1960s, and she and her husband retired there in the 1970s: interview (with Aziz Ahmed and Ziauddin Shakeb), with Zubaida Yazdani and her husband Yasin Ali Khan, 3 September 1991, London.

⁶⁰ Yazdani, Hyderabad, 12, 48.

⁶¹ Yazdani knew nothing of Benkati Das or other Gujarati bankers like Kishen Das, son of Benkati Das's sister and head of his own firm.

⁶² Yazdani, Hyderabad, 42, 49, 50.

⁶³ Ibid., 134.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 114, 116.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 48, 137.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 136. This kind of conspiracy theory is posited by many, not least by R. Frykenberg, whom Yazdani approvingly cites here (as R. Frykenbery, note 2, 136). Frykenberg, R. E., author of Guntur District, 1788–1848, a History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar was the dissertation advisor for Peter Wood, whose unpublished thesis meticulously ascertains facts whilst going along with the general conspiracy interpretation.

⁶⁷ Green and Webster are cited here to illustrate the problem caused by work previously published on Palmer and Company, not to denigrate their achievements on their major topics (Sufism in the Deccan and John Palmer of Calcutta's Palmer and Company).

⁶⁸ Yazdani, Hyderabad, writes about Metcalfe, 103: ‘To introduce the necessary changes into the Nizam's Government it was essential to embark upon the policy of extended interference in the internal administration which Metcalfe and his School advocated at this time’. Her view of the Nizam's rule is totally negative, seeing ‘shameless corruption practiced by William Palmer, Chandu Lal, and their Indian subordinate officers:’ 56. Green, Nile, Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, books and empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006), 84–85Google Scholar, states that ‘the Nizam's finance minister, Chandu Lal, handed over control of Awrangabad's revenues to Palmer & Co. It was only after the intervention of the British Resident Charles Metcalfe that the grip of the company over the finances of the Deccan was released and the ‘House of Palmer (Pamar kothi) in Awrangabad was closed in 1236/1820’.

⁶⁹ Webster, The Richest East India Merchant, 35–36 et passim.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 104. It was actually 1816 when the firm secured permission from the East India Company's Bengal Council to operate in Hyderabad with William Rumbold as a partner.

⁷¹ Ibid., 105.

⁷² Wood's language sets the tone in the preface, where Palmer ‘abandoned his military career’ for ‘an almost unique opportunity for profit. Using his innate ability to exploit such a situation’, Palmer's ‘mercantile adventures were characterized by a level of public notoriety in England unequalled since the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings. . .’. Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 7, 9.

⁷³ Ibid., 22.

⁷⁴ Karen Leonard's article on Hyderabad's nineteenth century banking firms published in 1981 (‘Banking Firms’) noted the presence of Gujarati partners and employees of Palmer and Company and the presence of English partners and employees in other indigenous Indian banking firms; interviews with descendants of Benkati Das's and other banking families had not yet been conducted.

⁷⁵ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 77, 79–80.

⁷⁶ Leonard, Karen, ‘Family Firms in Hyderabad: Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari Patterns of Adoption, Marriage, and Inheritance’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53:4 (October 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁷ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 384, 416.

⁷⁸ Dalrymple, White Mughals, 317–23, 482–483 (quotes from 320). I am doubtful about his conclusion that, at the end of his life, Palmer ‘ended up opting for the British’ and was ‘defiantly a Christian:’ 498–499. And Dalrymple is certainly wrong about Henry Russell having set in motion Palmer's downfall (483–484) and probably wrong about Russell's having ‘failed to come to Palmer's defence (486)’. See Wood, ‘Vassal State, 416, and note 81 below.

⁷⁹ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, sees Palmer moving ‘across the interface of two cultures’, 391, being steadily absorbed ‘into the society of his adoption’, 393, 419; Dalrymple writes that he was ‘one of the last’ who tried ‘to bridge both worlds’, 498. Anthropologists recognize that then, as now, cultures are not bounded entities.

⁸⁰ The politics within the East India Company are pursued by others with zest; here I examine the aftermath of the bankruptcy in Hyderabad.

⁸¹ Perhaps this anonymous defender of Palmer was Henry Russell: ‘A Short Examination of the Hyderabad Papers as far as they relate to the House of William Palmer and Company in a Letter by an [anonymous] enemy of oppression, in Kinnaird, Douglas, Remarks on the volume of Hyderabad Papers printed for the use of the East India Proprietors [Palmer & Co], London, 1825. British Museum T.1151(5), 207.Google Scholar

⁸² These are cited in note 53 above.

⁸³ Martin also reinstated Russell's system of direct communication with Chandu Lal: Thompson, Life, 229–230.

⁸⁴ Dalrymple, White Mughals, 484; see 484–486 for more from Conte Edouard de Warren, L'Inde Anglaise en 1843–1844 (3 vols., Paris: Comon & cie, 1845).

⁸⁵ Ali, Mahdi Syed, (ed.), Hyderabad Affairs (Bombay, 10 vols., 1883–1889), IVGoogle Scholar, 4–5 for activities of Kishen Das and Dighton in 1839 and 40; Kishen Das's munshi Azim Ali left him for Dighton when the two split up. Kishen Das is referred to as a talukdar here, collecting revenue from districts conferred in payment of government debts to the bankers. See Khan, Gulzar-i-Asafiyah, 630, for Hari Das's connection to Kishen Das and the Palmers.

⁸⁶ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 158, 159. In both instances Palmer's head clerk, Sultan Hussain Khan, played a role.

⁸⁷ Ibid, 181; Rumbold wrote that the head of this firm was an old family friend.

⁸⁸ ‘The Englishman’, 17 November 1849, in Ali, Hyderabad Affairs, IV, 290–291.

⁸⁹ Fraser, H., Memoir and Correspondence of General J. S. Fraser of the Madras Army (London: Whiting and Co., 1885), 389–391Google Scholar; see also Ali, Hyderabad Affairs, IV, 22–26.

⁹⁰ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 384.

⁹¹ Ibid., 416.

⁹² Ibid.,187.

⁹³ Ibid.,390, 380–382.

⁹⁴ Chronology of Modern Hyderabad, 226 (Pestonji was the prominent Parsi banker who took over loaning money to pay the Hyderabad Contingent after Puran Mal, who had succeeded Palmer).

⁹⁵ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 387, note 1; ‘The Englishman’, 17 November 1849, in Ali, Hyderabad Affairs, IV, 290–291.

⁹⁶ Temple, Journals, I, 111.

⁹⁷ Wood’, Vassal State’, 384–385, 370–371’.

⁹⁸ Palmer, ‘The Palmers’, 7–8.

⁹⁹ Edward was the son of James Edward Palmer (below), and Edward was the founder and managing director of Veerasawmy's restaurant on Regent Street in London, a ‘rendevous of the elite:’ Palmer, ‘The Palmers’.

¹⁰⁰ Memorandum dated 24 June 1859, on behalf of Salar Jang to William Palmer, Andhra Pradesh State Archives, Private Secretariat, A5/a9, installment 37, list 1, no. 4, 111–116.

¹⁰¹ Briggs, The Nizam, II, 223–237; Briggs is certainly the best published account of the Palmer affair: II, Chapter V.

¹⁰² Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 417, concluded this. See Crofton, List of Inscriptions, 18–19, for the text on William Palmer's grave monument in St George's Cemetery, Chaderghat, and some details of his career and family.

¹⁰³ Information about the family is scattered and incomplete: see Palmer, ‘The Palmers’, Crofton, List of Inscriptions, various entries; Briggs, The Nizam, 226–227, Cadell, The Letters, xiv–xx, and Thompson, Life, 214–215.

¹⁰⁴ Palmer, ‘The Palmers’, 8.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid, 2. Dalrymple, White Mughals, mentions five smaller tombs and reports that they are those of William Palmer's Muslim wives; he found the mosque and tomb had become a motorcycle repair shop but that the Hindu owner maintained the tomb and garlands it every week: footnote, 483.

¹⁰⁶ Briggs, The Nizam, 226–227, where Palmer identifies his nephew Edward as the ‘medical man’.

¹⁰⁷ This was Thomas George Adam Palmer, Eurasian barrister at law and a grandson of William Palmer, born in 1832, who died 11 January 1904. The grave is in the Protestant Cemetery at Narayanguda. Crofton, Inscriptions, 26. Thomas was very close to the Peshkar, Raja Narendra (grandson of Raja Chandu Lal), in 1884: Geary, Grattan, Hyderabad Politics (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Press, 1884), 5.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁸ She was able to advise Henry Bruce, editor of the second edition of Meadows Taylor's Story, about various matters: Story, 139, 450. Another daughter, Elizabeth, married Captain Page of the Nizam's Army. The two older sons, William and John, were officers in the Nizam's service, and William served as Meadows Taylor's assistant from 1855: Meadows Taylor, Story, 325, 340. James Edward was the third son, and a fourth son, Hastings, died unmarried in Kanpur in 1857: Palmer, ‘The Palmers’, 8–9.

¹⁰⁹ Bruce Cox, email from Melbourne, Australia, 2 February 2008; see also Leonard, Karen Isaksen, Locating Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 115Google Scholar, 237, 319 note 27, 353 note 54.

¹¹⁰ Wood, ‘Vassal State’, 383–384.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 81–2, 129.

¹¹² Ibid., 409.

¹¹³ See Leonard, ‘Banking Firms’.