INDIA: Down to His Last Palace

“My daughter,” the elder John D. Rockefeller is supposed to have told a cab driver who complained that she gave bigger tips, “has a very rich father, I haven’t.”

The same can be said of pomaded, 49-year-old Azam Jah, Prince of Berar and eldest son of India’s wizened, 72-year-old Nizam of Hyderabad. Nobody knows exactly how rich the Prince’s father is. For one thing, a pack of rats recently chewed their way through $8,000,000 in currency stored in moldy trunks in the Nizam’s palace vaults, leaving their value in question. For another, the old Nizam abruptly fired a man hired to count and appraise his trunks full of jewels when he heard the job would take a year. “Why, the man’s salary would have been fabulous,” he said. The Nizam, if not the richest man in the world, is certainly close to it.

Changing Ways. Times have changed in India since the days when the Nizam was absolute autocrat of Hyderabad, could dress in encrusted brocade and im port whole jazz bands from England to play his favorite tunes, Whispering and I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. As a civil servant now, subservient to the New Delhi government, he has to struggle along on a tax-free stipend of only $1,000,000 and an expense account of half as much, as autocratic democratic head of the state of Hyderabad (pop. 19 million). In tune with the tight times and his penny-pinching ways, he keeps his fleet of Cadillacs and other expensive cars in a garage and rides around in a remodeled 1934 Ford. And with a family of three wives, 42 concubines, 33 children, 40 grandchildren and an estimated 3,400 servants, he carefully and personally plans the household menus for them all each day. A Nizam cannot be too careful.

A Nizam’s son is a different matter. Black-eyed, balding and debonair, a married man whose wife lives far away in London, Prince Azam Jah passes his days playing polo, sticking pigs and studying the racing form, his evenings frolicking in a tiled swimming pool with the 50 ladies of his harem. *Having all these pleasures on a monthly allowance of $10,000 might well be a strain on others, but for Azam it was easy. He simply ran up bills. After all, he assured his bookies, he would one day be Nizam.

Changing the Will. Last year, when it became evident that the miserly old Nizam was looking healthier than ever, bookies and creditors began to press for payment of the prince’s debts. Father Nizam paid off some $4,720,000, and the prince promised to reform. But he didn’t. In the past twelve months he has chalked up debts some $500,000 in excess of his income. Last week the Nizam called a halt: Azam’s 23-year-old son, now at Sandhurst, and not Azam himself, would become the Nizam’s heir. Henceforth, the Nizam announced in an ad in a local paper, anyone lending money to son Azam “would have to bear the consequences and blame themselves for their losses.”

“I am no longer a rich man,” said the poor old Nizam. “Everything I have is tied up in trusts and palaces.”

*Estimated upkeep per concubine: $350 a month.