Mir Osman Ali Khan, Hyderabad Nizam who wore cotton pyjamas & used a diamond as paper weight

 

New Delhi: To say that Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, was wealthy, would be to put it lightly. The richness of his treasury was, in fact, legendary. So much so that he used the

 Jacobi diamond, a 185-carat gem the size of a lime, as a paperweight.

The Nizam’s family had ruled Hyderabad since the early 18th century; yet he was the only ruler in British India who enjoyed the title of Exalted Highness owing to his contribution of £25 million to the British exchequer during the First World War.And a few days ahead of India’s independence, he deposited an amount of £1 million in his account at the Westminster Bank in London. The money remained untouched for nearly 71 years and accumulated to about £35 million, or Rs 306 crore as valued in 2019, when a British judge finally ruled for the Nizam’s descendants to collect it from London’s National Westminster Bank.

Yet the man had an oddly modest appearance — wearing the same tattered fez for 35 years and mostly cotton pyjamas. Of course, he had his indulgences — the nizam had a prodigious sexual appetite, and it is said, had more than 100 illegitimate children.

His public image too was conflicting. While on the one hand he was hailed for being a progressive ruler, who brought in measures such as the abolition of bonded labour and the separation of the judiciary from the executive in the state, post-independence India remembers him primarily for his opposition to joining the union of India in 1947, one of the five rulers at the time to do so. The others included the Nawab of Junagadh, Muhammad Mahabat Khanji III and the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Hanvant Singh.Which explains why, since the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh (AP) in 2014, into AP and Telangana, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been pressurising the K. Chandrashekar Rao-led Telangana government to celebrate 17 September — the day Hyderabad ceased to be an independent state — as “Liberation Day” from the ‘tyrannical rule of the Nizam’. So far though, the state has managed to evade the subject.

On Mir Osman Ali’s 135 birth anniversary on 6 April, ThePrint looks back at the chequered life of this former royal.