Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Read online

  A number of biographies of Wajid ‘Ali Shah (listed in the Bibliography) have been written by Indian authors, but no English writer has previously attempted to capture this prominent, yet elusive, character. As a young man he was a prolific writer, and some of his works are autobiographical, including the Ishqnamah and his prison diary Huzn-i-Akhtar, which are referred to in this study. Once re-established at Garden Reach, with a very substantial pension, his creative period seems to have drawn to a close.

  This book is not a literary critique,8 nor another examination of Lakhnavi culture, but a political study that attempts to move away from the many myths surrounding the king. There is a daunting amount of material relating to the annexation of Awadh by the East India Company, a topic which has been well picked over and does not need repeating here. Some of the more interesting papers concern the exchanges between British government officials when Wajid ‘Ali Shah was creating his small, new kingdom on the outskirts of Calcutta, because these allow us to look into the mind of an Indian monarch and to understand how he himself defined his princely role. They also allow us to consider what held the ‘kingdom’ together long after it was removed from its original home in Awadh.

  In their haste to remove all reminders of the king after his death in 1887, the archives at Garden Reach disappeared. We know that these were substantial and included the household accounts, copies of letters written and received over thirty years, lists of the king’s numerous wives and children, receipts for the menagerie, wages for the servants and much else, including photograph albums. So information has had to be built up from other sources, including the National Archives in Delhi and the British Library in London. The policy of the East India Company, and later the government of India, was to send to London what was considered official or semi-official correspondence, while ‘domestic’ and often more interesting correspondence remained in India. The Delhi Archives have been fairly thoroughly explored and enjoyed too. Contemporary nineteenth-century Indian newspapers, in the National Archives at Kolkata, gave a different, gossipy slant on events at Garden Reach; and in England the invaluable Illustrated London News and Punch provided pictures and comments on the queen mother’s ill-fated visit to Southampton and London. Contemporary photographs have been extensively studied, including a cache of the king’s relatives which was recently identified in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Paintings have been examined, together with an uncatalogued, but valuable, collection of drawings in the Lucknow State Museum. Some information came from direct descendants of the king, now living in Kolkata and Lucknow, and several visits were made with them to what remains today of Garden Reach.

  The structure of this book is mainly thematic, and the opening chapter places us immediately as witnesses to the unsuccessful mission of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s relatives to England. We then trace the king’s life through his passions for grand theatrical events, his wives, his menagerie (which he claimed gave him more enjoyment than his relatives), the trauma of annexation, his uncurbed extravagance, the frustration of his sons and the dismantling of his household after his death. Real life is messy: it doesn’t always divide neatly into chapters, and past events can suddenly become relevant to the present, so there is inevitably some chronological overlapping in this story. Each chapter therefore has a brief summary and conclusion of its contents and each can be read separately. A time-frame of significant events is included.

  To sum up, what kind of man was the king? Wajid ‘Ali Shah was a survivor and, in his younger days, a highly talented and creative person. Had he been born a century later, he would undoubtedly have found his career in the film world, with the chance to realise, on an epic scale, the theatrical presentations he had directed in Lucknow. His attention to casting, stage design, costumes and musical numbers was that of a professional. Regrettably his attitudes towards the many women he met, including his wives, led to justified criticism and minor rebellions from the women themselves. For all his passionate love poetry, Wajid ‘Ali Shah may have been one of those men who enjoy the pursuit and capture, but do not actually like women very much. He was pedantic about things that interested him; he was religious, and generous to a fault in funding religious festivals, but extremely careless where money was concerned. He never forgot that he was a king, and did not allow others to forget it. So we are left with a new picture: that of a man who was certainly not the debauched character painted by the British, but neither the great romantic hero of Indian memory. Perhaps, after more than a century, someone more interesting is beginning to emerge.

  1

  ‘THAT ENERGETIC OLD LADY’

  The king’s mother, brother and son travel with a large party to England, to plead for the return of the kingdom of Awadh, annexed by the East India Company. Curiously, the king decides not to accompany them. While they are in England, news of the Great Uprising in India (the Mutiny) is received, and the royal mission breaks up in disarray.

  It is August 1856, the height of the holiday season for the wealthy in Britain. Queen Victoria is at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Robert Vernon-Smith, President of the Board of Control, the forerunner of the Secretary of State for India, is at Castle Menzies in Scotland, where the young Sikh prince, Duleep Singh, is also a tenant. Lord Palmerston, the seventy-two-year-old Prime Minister who began his political career as a Tory but moved steadily towards the liberal left, is also on holiday because Parliament is enjoying an unusually long recess. All seems quiet on the political front during the summer. Earlier in the year a peace treaty has been signed, bringing to an unsatisfactory end the Crimean War, fought between Britain, her allies and the Russian Empire. The Second Opium War and the short Anglo-Persian War are both in the near future, but for the moment Britain basks in the late summer sunshine as the steamship SS Indus docks at Southampton. An Indian queen, ‘closely veiled’ and surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, is carried down the gangplank in a sedan chair. She is followed by her youngest son, commander-in-chief of an army which is being disbanded even as he steps ashore, and her grandson, heir apparent to a throne that no longer exists.

  Accompanying this exotic party are the commander-in-chief’s two Rajput wives, one of whom is pregnant and will give birth to a daughter two months later. The queen has brought her personal doctor with her, for she herself is over fifty and not in good health. But this is not a family holiday. It is a diplomatic mission, and among the hundred-strong group disembarking on the quayside are lawyers, courtiers and an English interpreter. Members of the Awadh royal family have brought their own entourages of servants with them, male and female. Among the group are several African slaves, who are, if anything, even more startling in appearance to the townspeople of Southampton than their owners.

  The queen’s name is Malikah Kishwar Bahadur Fakhr-uz-Zamani Nawab Taj Ara Begam, but she is always referred to as Janab-i ‘Aliyyah, a respectful title for a queen mother that translates as ‘Her Sublime Excellency’, and this is what we shall call her. Her youngest son, the commander-in-chief, is General Mirza Muhammad Jawad ‘Ali Sikandar Hashmat Bahadur, known as Sikandar Hashmat. The queen’s grandson is the flighty, immature Mirza Muhammad Hamid ‘Ali Bahadur, called Prince Hamid ‘Ali. The royal family, their courtiers, servants, slaves and all are driven to the appropriately named Royal York Hotel, which stands in the town centre, and was perhaps chosen because of its name. It is the largest hotel in Southampton, a four-storey coaching inn built in the eighteenth century. A central passageway leads through to stables at the rear, and there is a handsome balcony at first-floor level—although Janab-i ‘Aliyyah will not be appearing on it, as she is in purdah. Mr White, the owner, has put the entire hotel at the disposal of the royal family, at a reputed cost of £100 for ten days.1

  The first thing the royal party did on arrival was to close all the hotel’s windows, and they remained closed for the duration of their stay. Even a late summer’s day in England felt cold to people who had left humid Calcutta in the middle of June, sailed up the Red Sea in July, disemba
rked at Suez for the overland journey to Port Said, and passed through the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay and into the English Channel. Closing the windows also kept out some of the noise of the crowds who had followed the carriages from the waterfront, then stood outside the hotel cheering and waiting. The arrival of Janab-i ‘Aliyyah and her party in the middle of the ‘silly season’ was a godsend to the national press. The Times reported almost daily at first on the sensation that she caused, manifested by the crowds that gathered each morning hoping for a glimpse of Indian splendour. It was, of course, added the newspaper disparagingly, ‘mere vulgar curiosity on the part of the multitude who design only to see the dresses and appointments of the servants and followers and greedily drink in the absurd tales of the fabulous wealth and jewels of the royal party which have been industriously circulated’. The magazine Punch was baffled and expressed its surprise at all the fuss in doggerel verse:

  What means that shouting of the crowd?

  The people cheer the Queen of Oude.

  The British people always cheer

  All sovereigns who come over here.

  Why cheer the people Oude’s Ex-Queen?

  She hates, like poison, to be seen,

  In privacy she fain would dwell

  Within the Royal York Hotel.2

  Its rhetorical question was partly answered in another frightful ‘poem’ with tortured rhyme and scansion:

  The Queen of Oude

  She cries so loud

  For justice like a QC

  And claims her right

  And wants to fight

  The Marquess of Dalhousie

  The Queen of Oude

  Has brought a crowd

  That shares her strange halluci-

  Nation that she

  Shall shortly be

  Avenged on Lord Dalhousie

  The Queen of Oude

  Is disendowed

  Of regions rich and juicy

  Their milk and honey

  I mean their money

  Squeezed out by Lord Dalhousie.3

  This second effort at least had the merit of partly explaining to those who did not keep up with Indian affairs what the queen was doing in England and why she had seemingly followed the former governor general, James Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie, when he retired after eight tumultuous years of service in India.

  Those who did know that one of Dalhousie’s final acts before leaving Calcutta was to annex the last remaining kingdom in India, the kingdom of Awadh, also knew that Janab-i ‘Aliyyah was no longer its queen. The plump, middle-aged woman was the queen mother, chief wife and now widow of the late King Amjad ‘Ali Shah. She was also the mother of four children, including Sikandar Hashmat, the commander-in-chief without an army. It is her eldest son, still in India, who is the subject of this book—the last king in India, Wajid ‘Ali Shah. But his mother holds centre stage for a moment, not least because Janab-i ‘Aliyyah is a forceful, strong-minded character, perhaps even more so than her son, the king. Her lineage and connections were impressive. She was a granddaughter of nawab Sa’adat ‘Ali Khan, the sixth and most engaging of Awadh’s rulers. Born in 1803, she was married to the tenth ruler, Amjad ‘Ali Shah, and widowed at the age of forty-five.

  Now an Indian widow, particularly from an aristocratic family, can be a powerful figure. A charming autocrat, she is feared and revered in equal measure by her family. Proud of her own ancestry, often more so than that of her late husband, she insists on the proper forms of address, correct etiquette and unquestioning obedience from her children, particularly her sons. It is an extremely brave, or foolhardy, son who goes against his mother’s wishes, particularly in matrimonial affairs. Often still handsome into old age, and impeccably dressed, the widow gathers visible and invisible courtiers around her, paying homage. She knows the histories of all the important families and is entertaining company, when she chooses to be—full of anecdotes and gossip. Curiously, many such widows are addicted to nicotine, and Janab-i ‘Aliyyah was one of them, never without her hookah and her maid-servant to attend to it. She did not drink alcohol, and it was remarked that she ate her meals with a spoon, instead of using her fingers like those around her. She remained in purdah all her life, as ladies of her background did, surrounded and served by women. Even the entrances to the zananah apartments (female quarters) in the palaces were guarded by female soldiers—African women who had been imported into India by Arab slavers, put into uniform and armed with muskets.

  Moving, according to the seasons, between three palaces in Lucknow, Janab-i ‘Aliyyah was said to dislike ceremonial events, which in any case she could only observe from behind a purdah screen. She tried to avoid travel outside the royal enclosures and gardens, but if she did have to leave home, for religious events or family occasions, she was carried in a closed palanquin by servants or in a silver howdah, on elephant-back. She held her own female durbars, or court audiences, where women from all over the kingdom, rich or poor, could come to her with petitions, complaints and gifts. She was literate, and after her husband’s death in February 1847, the widow spent many hours reading the Qur‘an. She also interfered outrageously in her elder son’s matrimonial affairs and had already tricked him into divorcing eight of his wives of whom she did not approve, including Begam Hazrat Mahal, the mother of a young son.4 In spite of palace politics, it was a comfortable life for a woman of her class and expectations, and infinitely luxurious compared to that of the majority of her countrywomen. So what drove her, in the heat of the summer of 1856, from her Lucknow palace to Mr White’s Southampton hotel?

  The annexation of Awadh by the East India Company was the defining point in the lives of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, his relatives, courtiers, servants, soldiers and thousands of other people. Nothing would ever be the same again, particularly in Awadh and in its capital, Lucknow. The outrageous event, the taking away of a kingdom from a king whose ancestors had been crowned by the British, led directly to Janab-i ‘Aliyyah’s decision to seek redress from another queen, Victoria. ‘I will go to England’, she is reported to have declared. ‘The Queen of England is also a mother. I will ask her to give me back my kingdom.’5

  Janab-i ‘Aliyyah had appealed against the annexation of Awadh as soon as the dreadful news was announced by Colonel James Outram, the British Resident to the Court, on 1 February 1856. She immediately requested an interview with the Resident, which could not be face to face, even for so important an event. An interpreter was present, because the queen mother like her sons, did not speak English. Even through the two filters of the curtain and the translator, Outram was said to be moved by the appeal, but he had no power to reverse the decision of the governor general, Lord Dalhousie, who in turn was under the orders of the East India Company’s governing body, the Court of Directors, acting with the sanction of the cabinet of the British government. The kingdom was annexed (as we shall see in Chapter Three) without bloodshed, on 7 February. Five weeks later Janab-i ‘Aliyyah left Lucknow with her two sons, the king and his brother the commander-in-chief, on the first stage of the journey to England. She was never to return.

  The reason why the queen mother ultimately travelled to England without her son, the king, has never been satisfactorily explained. Although Lord Canning, who had replaced Dalhousie as governor general, was not keen on Wajid ‘Ali Shah travelling to England to plead his case, he did not actively prevent him from doing so. At first Canning did not believe that the king would even get as far as the capital of British India: ‘I have no expectation that he will go to England and not much that he will make his appearance in Calcutta’, he wrote to Vernon-Smith in March, some days after the royal party had left Lucknow.6 James Outram even doubted that he would travel beyond Cawnpore,7 the large British cantonment on the bank of the Ganges, where the party had halted after its first over-night coach journey. ‘He is unwell’, Outram told Canning, ‘and it is reported that the fatigue of making this, the first journey of his life, barely 50 miles and the discomfort of his
accommodation compared with the luxuries of Lucknow are the cause of the illness and that he is so disheartened by them he will be glad to go back again, but for the shame of it.’8 Outram was wrong on both counts. The king had travelled twice to Cawnpore and back, once to meet an earlier governor general there, and the Resident had gravely underestimated Janab-i ‘Aliyyah’s determination, using her son, to win back ‘her’ kingdom.

  When Canning learned in April that Wajid ‘Ali Shah and his party had moved downriver to Benares and were waiting there for a steamer to take them to Calcutta, the new governor general still remained fairly sanguine. It would take the king ‘at least a fortnight to make the journey by water’ at this time of year, and he would have to travel round the Sunderbans, he told Vernon-Smith. In this particular river passage ‘with a strong north-wester blowing, it is likely that His Majesty may have such a foretaste of a voyage by water as will more than anything else deter him from a visit to England’. The best solution would be for the king to return to a ‘quiet retreat at Lucknow’, although Canning feared this was exactly what would not happen, as long as he was surrounded by ‘adventurers and harpies’ no doubt attentive to the 25 lakhs of rupees (about a quarter of a million pounds sterling) that was being carried down to Calcutta, mostly in gold bullion and jewellery.9

  Wajid ‘Ali Shah arrived in the capital on the evening of 13 May, and probably went straight to Spence’s Hotel, an imposing Grecian-looking building conveniently adjacent to Government House and its occupants, Lord and Lady Canning. The next day Thomas Menzies, who had been hired by the king as his agent, sent a letter to George Edmonstone, Secretary to the Foreign Department, announcing his master’s arrival in Calcutta. The letter was passed up to Canning, and passed down again with a pencilled note: ‘Mr Menzies is not recognised. The Govt. of India know nothing of Mr Menzies. No acknowledgment.’ Two days later, having received no reply, Thomas Menzies sent another letter to Edmonstone asking for permission for Wajid ‘Ali Shah to visit Fort William, the military headquarters of the East India Company. ‘Perhaps you will be good enough to let me know to whom I should apply for such authority?’ he asked politely. Another note was pencilled on the back of Menzies’ second letter: ‘An agent’s first act should be to show some credentials. Mr Menzies had addressed the Govt. more than once without doing so; but the Govt. knows nothing of him, or of his functions; and until it does is not called upon to recognise them or notice him. No answer should be sent.’10 Menzies, an Anglo-Indian, was being subjected to the British government at its most pompous and obscurantist. Without being told why his letters could not be answered, he could not remedy the situation.