It's Only Money

Ever since 1936, when someone splashed water on him during a rowboat trip in Madras Harbor, His Exalted Highness Rustam-I-Dauran, Arastu-I-Zaman, Lieutenant General, Muzaffar-ul-Mulk WalMamalik, Nawab Mir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur, Fateh Jung, Nizam-ud-Daula, Nizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah, G.C.S.L, G.B.E., Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, had kept his vow to stay inside his own territory of Hyderabad. But the Nizam, one of the world's richest and closest-fisted men, relented last week to attend a national conference of Indian regional governors and princely heads of states in New Delhi.

Fifty-five retainers were sent on ahead to ready the Nizam's 100-room New Delhi palace (which has been mostly taken over by Indian government offices since India absorbed Hyderabad in 1948). Most of the Nizam's 70 wives wanted to go along, but the Nizam, explained an official, "decided to be selective." Only 15 were picked, along with ten of the Nizam's 36 children and some 56 physicians, barbers, nurses and servants, to join his three-airplane voyage to India's capital.

Instead of the frayed and buttonless clothes which he wears around the home palace grounds to save money, the miserly Nizam wore a well-pressed and spotless outfit--yellow turban, tweed coat, loose white trousers and black shoes. He peeled $1,000 off his own bundle (at least $200 million), laid in a supply of tea, cakes, nuts, ice cream, tomato juice and lemon squash, and gave an elegant garden party for New Delhi's 400, among them junketing Eleanor Roosevelt and India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nizam gathered six sons and four daughters around him, but stuck his 15 wives behind a cloth screen on a veranda, where they could only watch.

Main event of the Nizam's first trip "outside" in 16 years: a meeting with a few fellow princes and potentates for two days of reflection on the sad state of highnesses now that India is a republic. The good old regal powers were all gone; now they had nothing left but money--and the Nizam had most of that.

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