John Zubrzycki’s Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician & Spy
John Zubrzycki’s Mysterious Mr Jacob mingles spies, court cases, the occult and a near priceless diamond.
Inevitably the Australian continent will collide with Asia, in due tectonic time. The collision of their respective literatures has not been as slow, but it does tend to be patchy. In particular India, linked by empire, Commonwealth and cricket, has been a significant omission from Australian letters. Until recently it was somewhat rare for an Australian to write of matters Indian, and vice versa.
The exceptions are noteworthy. John Lang, the first Australian-born novelist, spent years in India, editing newspapers and causing trouble, so much so that he was jailed by the East India Company. Mena Abdullah wrote exquisite short stories. The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj and Shantaram dealt with the seamier side of the subcontinent.
Lately there has been a flurry of activity: anthologies by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, the blog Southern Crossings, novels by Chris Raja and others. The omission, as Englishman William Dalrymple has fruitfully shown, is not for want of a rich subject.
Now Australian journalist John Zubrzycki has produced two books about Indian history. His 2006 debut, The Last Nizam, was the story of a Muslim potentate who much preferred the wilds of Western Australia, driving heavy machinery. The new one, The Mysterious Mr Jacob, has matter to delight Salman Rushdie and his ilk, mingling as it does spies, court cases, the occult and a near priceless diamond.
Unlike The Last Nizam, it is the story of a will-o’-the-wisp. Part of the journalistic strength of that book was that Zubrzycki had interviewed his subject and thus had a personal connection. The subject of the new book, Mr Jacob, died in the 1920s, beyond living memory. He was also, when talking of his life, a most unreliable narrator. At various times he claimed to be an ex-slave, Arab, Parsi, Jewish or Italian. The truth was more that the man was mutable, changing his story to suit the circumstances.
He started off as Iskander Sabunji, a Syrian Christian in Turkey. A desire for adventure led to his passage to India. There he metamorphosed into Alexander Malcolm Jacob, self-proclaimed sage and dealer in exotic jewellery. His showroom in Simla, the colonial summer capital, was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. It was alluring to writers, most notably Rudyard Kipling, who depicted Jacob as the Healer of Pearls in Kim.
Like Kim, Jacob partook of the Great Game. He had excellent cover: as a connoisseur of jewels he moved between the Indian princes and the British Raj with ease. He also cultivated his mystique as a fakir. For his guests he performed magical tricks, even besting the famous theosophist Madame Blavatsky. Jewels might have been the source of his wealth, but were valued also for their mystic properties.
What brought him down was a diamond, the Imperial, among the largest ever found. Jacob had planned to sell it to his richest customer, the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad. The Nizam had an appetite for jewels as great as for his zenana, and it was bankrupting his state. The British, fearing Hyderabad’s insolvency, intervened to prevent the sale. Instead it was Jacob who went bankrupt.
The sale had always been risky, a gambler’s high-stake game. Now it became surreal as a legal battle ensued.
At issue was the deposit on the diamond, which Jacob had secretly imported to India, and a possible secret second deal whereby the Nizam agreed to buy the diamond at a reduced price. Criminal and civil suits ensued, Jacob fighting fiercely.
It ended well for nobody, with the Nizam obliged to buy a diamond he now considered cursed, and Jacob’s reputation destroyed.
Such was the high drama, and the remaining 30 years of Jacob’s life constituted a slow decline. The trajectory poses a problem for Zubrzycki, as does the incomplete nature of his sources. Jacob kept diaries, which would have been a treasure trove akin to his shop — but they have been lost. Indeed at times the diamond’s curse seems to have fallen on the author. The owner of a rare portrait of Jacob drowned; files vanished; and Zubrzycki arrived at his subject’s gravesite only to find it had been razed the week before.
Despite the footprint Jacob left on India and its representations, he seems almost to have orchestrated his subsequent disappearance, like a fakir climbing up a rope. The story here is rich and most strange, well-researched, and told like a thriller. Yet the man at its heart is elusive, despite Zubrzycki’s best efforts.
Towards the end of his life, Jacob faced another writer with his latest version of his life story. It reads now as new age: it refers to a meeting with Indian guru El Moghraby, wise in knowledge from Atlantis onwards. Jacob would share his spirit guide, winning wealth and power. This Faustian bargain meant celibacy and a vegetarian diet, and it was fragile. When Jacob went too far and mocked the spirit, he got abandoned in the middle of the diamond deal.
Such matters are really beyond the realist biographer, being more the domain of the magic realist novelist.
Somebody again will follow Kipling and fictionalise Jacob, for a spying occultist jeweller amid the splendour of the Raj is too great a temptation to resist.
In the meantime, Jacob has a small, significant, ironic immortality. The jewel that caused so much trouble, and was at one time hidden in a Nizam’s slipper, now belongs to the Indian government. It is known as the Jacob.
Lucy Sussex is a writer with an enduring interest in Victoriana and crime.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician & Spy
By John Zubrzycki
Transit Lounge, 289pp, $29.99
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