Eastern Hospitality at Hyderabad.
At the proper hour, Sundargaj rolls up to the palace where we are to breakfast, and deposits us. Forty years ago Hyderabad, may have been a turbulent city into which Europeans could not enter without insult or injury, and where lawlessness and recklessness of life were the laws of the land, but the progressive measures of an enlightened Minister had completely changed the condition of things; still, popular and official opinion, whose watch is always an age or two behind the time, refused to admit the change. "You come from a place where you may be murdered at any moment," was the address of a late Viceroy to an Englishman who had taken service under his Highness the Nizam; and yet, during the last thirty-five years, I am assured that not a single European has been murdered in the Moslem dominions, and the only one that was wounded suffered the consequences of his own fault. Nothing was done here by the enraged peasantry to the gentlemen sportsman, who took the liberty of shooting the Prince's tame deer; yet when we returned to Bombay, friends said to us, "Of course you had a large escort?" We had nothing of the kind, nothing but a single mahaut; but it is not easy to dispose of prejudices. Murray has said that Hyderabad is one of the filthiest cities in India; I tell you it is the cleanest. All I can say is that, so far from "insult and personal injury," we were most pleasantly received by what Bevar quotes as "the most disorderly, turbulent, and ferocious set of ruffians within the limits of India." I can only say that of all the visits paid to various parts of India, it is the one that has left the most lasting, the most happy, and the most romantic impression upon our memories.
The cream of all was going to Golconda—a most interesting place, which in 1876 no European had ever been permitted to enter, and as Sir Salar Jung and the Nizam himself had never done so, we could not ask or hope for such a favour. We supposed that this great event happened when the Nizam came of age.
We dismounted and remained there for a long time, inspecting everything outside the walls. The prevailing style of the Golconda tomb is a dome standing upon a square; the cupola of a steeple is of the orange shape, and is arabesqued. The finials are of silver; they are single-storied and double-storied; some have floriated crenelles like spear-heads, and balustraded balconies. The lower portions are arcades of pointed arches, resting on a terrace of cut stone, ascended by four flights of steps. The colours are white, picked out with green; each has its little mosque flanked by minarets. We were very sorry when it was time to leave the Tombs of the Kings. It is a high and healthy site; the wind is strong and cold. A sanitarium would do well there, and we wished that picnickers from the European services would have the grace to erect a travellers' bungalow, and cease to desecrate poor Thana Shah's tomb.
The tombs are the prettiest toys in the world; the material is the waxlike Jaypur marble. They look as if carved in ivory, some Giant's Dieppe, ready to be placed under a glass case; the fretted and open work is lovely lacery in stone, and the sharp shadows of the dark green trees set off their snowy whiteness.
Golconda is the first and the most famous of the six independent Moslem kingdoms, which, in A.D. 1399, rose on the extinction of the Toghlak Delhi dynasty, and it survived till 1688, when Aurungzeb brought all India under one sceptre. In it is the state prison in which the sons of the Nizam used to be confined. We found all the works which we had read upon it very unsatisfying, but we read the "French in India" (London, Longmans, 1868) with pleasure and profit. The four white domes denote the Tombs of the Kings, are visible from most parts of Hyderabad, and form the main body of a line here scattered, there grouped, which begins immediately beyond the faubourgs, and runs up the left side of the river valley.
The Main Building of Golconda.
Each burj carries from one to three guns. The defences are strong towards the east, and on the south they are doubled. There is a glacis, a moat, and a covered way. The mixture of oasis and desert is truly Arabian; Arab also are the pigeon-holes and dove-cotes of the walls, while the song of the water-wheel reminded us of Egypt and Syria. The throne-hall towers over the river valley, and the double lines of defence show to the best advantage.