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sources had ever been translated into English, and so were virgin territory for those unfamiliar with either nineteenth-century Deccani Urdu or the heavily Indianised Persian that the manuscripts were written in—which meant virtually everyone bar a handful of elderly Hyderabadi Islamic scholars.
    One night I visited the tomb of Kirkpatrick’s great rival, General Michel Joachim Raymond. Raymond was a Republican French mercenary in the service of the Nizam who had, like Kirkpatrick, adopted the ways of Hyderabad. Just as Kirkpatrick’s job was to try to ease the Hyderabadis towards the British, Raymond had tried to persuade the Nizam to ally with the French. After his death, he was buried next to an obelisk, under a small classical Greek temple on the hilltop above the French cantonments beyond the city, at Malakhpet.
    While Raymond had definitely abandoned Christianity—something that seemed to be confirmed by the absence of any Christian references or imagery on his tomb—his Hyderabadi admirers were uncertain whether he had turned Hindu or Muslim. His Hindu sepoys Sanskritised the name Monsieur Raymond to Musa Ram, while his Muslims knew him as Musa Rahim, Rahim being the personification of the merciful aspect of Allah. The Nizam, who was as uncertain as everyone else, decided to mark the anniversary of Raymond’s death on 25 March in a religiously neutral way by sending to his monument a box of cheroots and a bottle of beer. The custom had apparently survived until the last Nizam left for Australia after Independence; but as I happened to be in Hyderabad on the date of his anniversary I was intrigued to see if any memory of Raymond had survived.
    Raymond’s monument was originally built on a deserted mountaintop several miles outside the walls of Hyderabad. But the recent rapid growth that has turned Hyderabad into India’s fourth-largest city has encroached all around the site, so that only the very top of the hill around the monument is now empty of new bungalows and housing estates. I left my taxi at the roadhead and climbed up towards the temple. It was clearly silhouetted against the sulphur-red of the city’s night sky. As I walked I saw shadows flitting between the pillars, vague shapes which resolved themselves as I drew closer into the figures of devotees lighting clay lamps at the shrine at the back of the temple. Maybe the figures saw me coming; whatever the reason, they had vanished by the time I reached the monument, leaving their offerings behind on the tomb: a few coconuts, some incense sticks, some strings of garlands and a few small pyramids of sweet white prasad.

    Back in London, I searched around for more about Kirkpatrick. A couple of books on Raj architecture contained a passing reference to his Residency and the existence of his Begum, but there was little detail, and what there was seemed to derive from an 1893 article in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick’, written by Kirkpatrick’s kinsman Edward Strachey. 2
    My first real break came when I found that Kirkpatrick’s correspondence with his brother William, preserved by the latter’s descendants the Strachey family, had recently been bought by the India Office Library. a There were piles of letter books inscribed ‘From my brother James Achilles Kirkpatrick’ (the paper within all polished and frail with age), great gilt leather-bound volumes of official correspondence with the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, bundles of Persian manuscripts, some boxes of receipts and, in a big buff envelope, a will—exactly the sort of random yet detailed detritus of everyday lives that biographers dream of turning up.
    At first, however, many of the letters seemed disappointingly mundane: gossip about court politics, requests for information from Calcutta, the occasional plea for a crate of Madeira or the sort of vegetables Kirkpatrick found unavailable in the Hyderabad bazaars, such