Was It the Job Description?

Mukarram Jeh with Princess Ersa in 1967

It's not often a ruler with a title longer than a freight train rolling through Reno at 3 A.M. passes away, but it seems like it just happened.

As I always said, obituaries are informative, like finding out what a nizam is and that India is big enough to told an area the size of Italy. Who knew?

But  the fact remains that Mukarram Jah, who once held the title of what couldn't be placed on an ordinary business card: the Rustam of the Age, the Aristotle of the Times, .the Ruler of the Kingdom, the Conqueror of Dominions, the Regulator of the Realm, the Victor in Battles and the Leader of the Armies, has now passed away at 97, an age that puts his birth in another era, the 1930s world of post- WW I.  It was a very different world. He held more titles than a shelf in the library.

His grandfather was Osman Ali Khan who saw a way to increase the authority of the royalty when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey overthrew the Ottoman caliph Abdul Mejid. and the grandfather helped the Mejid family. When Osman Ali Khan's two sons married the deposed caliph's daughter and niece, a union between "the mightiest houses of Islam were united" according to the Washington Post at the time.

Osman Ali Khan favored the grandson, Mukarram, as a successor, passing over his eldest son. ("Dad never liked me.") The ex-caliph Abdul Mejid named the still-in-grade-school Mukarram as the next nizam. It almost sounds like the cast from a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movie.

In 1967 Mukarram was crowned the nizam of Hyderabad. India won its independence from Britain in 1947 and invaded the region of Hyderabad. Mukarram's grandfather admitted defeat and the state of Hyderabad was dissolved.

The Indian government however allowed the grandfather to retain his title, but he basically ruled over an imaginary realm. When Mukarram was named nizam he inherited a government of 14,700 people, including 3,000 bodyguards, and 42 concubines. Some jobs were simply to dust the chandeliers. He later discovered there were 4,000 people of the royal purse who simply did not exist.

It was as if he became mayor of NYC and found out there weren't just people working from home, there weren't any people working. It was worse than what in modern parlance is called Lu-Lu's (in lieu of) jobs, jobs that pay but you don't have to show up for in person. In Mukarram's case, there weren't even 4,00 people anywhere. Come on down.

Mukarram found like any reform mayor of NYC, he wasn't liked. Fired employees adopted membership in Communist labor unions. His own father and aunt sued him for what they felt was a greater share of the wealth, a wealth so large that in 1935 it was estimated to be $250 million in gold and $2 billion in precious stones ($48 bullion in today's money) Much more than Donald Trump.

Not easy being a royal. The number of litigants to the fortune was in the thousands, all descendants of the seven prior nizams. And we thought the Kennedys had a large family.

In the early '70s Mukarram visited Australia, fell in love with the land and the people, and bought acreage to raise sheep.

This wasn't Robert Mitchum in the movie The Sundowners. Mukarram bought a half million acres in Western Australia, on the coast and inland to raise sheep. He met a 27 year-old secretary and got married. Again. It might have also been the beer that attracted him. Pale India? He loved Australia because he said, "there are miles and miles of open country and not a bloody Indian in sight." Well, things change, don't they?

Helen Simmons, the secretary he married, supposedly had a partying lifestyle, and she passed away from AIDS in 1989. The Australians grew tired of him, so he liquidated his holdings in the 1990s. Things weren't going well.

What goes around comes around. He came back to Turkey and visited India where he still had numerous properties. At his son's wedding he reunited with his first wife, Princess Esra, and she literally got old the house in order, now a museum. Seen on the right he sits barefoot in Hyderabad, looking every bit of what you'd expect an older sword swinging sultan to look like, nearly bald, with a white drooping mustache.

Imagine being around so long and from so rich a background that Mukarram would tell stories of his grandfather who would place a white handkerchief on the shoulder of a woman on the palace grounds and tell her they were going to sleep together that night.

A man from a different era. How times change.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com