SYDNEY: The Last Nizam by Australian journalist John Zubrzycki hits the stands on Wednesday even as fresh claims for maintenance are made against the Eighth Nizam of Hyderabad Mukkaram Jah by his third estranged wife, Manolya Onur.
The first complete account of the intriguing life and times of Nizam Mukkaram Jah, the book traces the rise and fall of a dynasty, and the strange fate of the last Nizam, who leaves behind the opulence and intrigue of his Hyderabad palace for a 200,000 hectare dusty sheep station in the Western Australian outback.
It was during his stint as The Australian newspaper’s India correspondent in 1995-98 that Zubrzycki first filed stories on the Nizam. “It was the time the Nizam was getting into financial trouble in Australia. It’s an extraordinary story in Indian history and I would have written this book even if there was no Australian connection”, says the author.
With vivid detail and anecdote, Zubrzycki charts how at the age of 35, the Nizam inherited the throne from his grandfather, who had disinherited his own son for being a “moral pervert” with “sadistic tastes”. It unfolds how the Nizam, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst in the United Kingdom, is a man caught between his inheritance and the forces of modernisation.
In 1972, the Nizam came to Australia to visit an old friend from Cambridge, who was a country doctor near Perth. “He immediately fell in love with the outback as it was as far removed from the incestuous atmosphere of Hyderabad, where his own father was taking him to court”, says Zubrzycki.
In 1996, the Nizam left Australia for a solitary existence in Turkey and Zubrzycki claims to have been the only journalist, who has met him in the past decade. Zubrzycki spent three months in Hyderabad and Delhi and then in Nice (Southern France), where the Nizam was born, and London. “I found a wealth of information at the British library and it was in the Harrow register that I found an address in Chelsea, next to the Nizam’s name. It was the Nizam’s personal secretary”, says Zubrzycki.
After six months of trying and obliging the many conditions put forth by the Nizam’s personal secretary, the author finally met him in Turkey. “He lives as a recluse in a modest flat and his advisors keep everyone at arm’s length. Over cups of Turkish tea, he told me that he had no bitterness or regret. I found him humble with none of the trappings of wealth one would accept from the sole air to one of the richest dynasties and his maternal Turkish grandfather was the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire”, says Zubrzycki, who won the Asia Link grant to write the book.
