Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Read online

  Puzzled at the government’s silence and surprised at the lack of acknowledgement on his arrival, the king spoke to nawab Munawwar-ud-daulah, a wealthy landowner, former commander-in-chief of the Awadh Army and one-time chief minister in Awadh. In turn, Munawwar-ud-daulah sent one of his own officials, the respected munshi Baqir ‘Ali, to the Foreign Department office to make an appointment with its Secretary to find out what was wrong. Edmonstone’s written report to Canning after the event was defensive and self-excusing, demonstrating the sensitivities around anything to do with the king. ‘After some hesitation’, he wrote, ‘[I] determined to admit him; as I should have admitted any other respectable native gentleman waiting upon me at my office.’ Edmonstone clearly suspected something was up, because he asked his undersecretary, Mr Shaw, to sit in on the interview. At first Edmonstone denied knowing who Munawwar-ud-daulah was, despite the positions he had held in the former kingdom. Then he said he did not have the authority to set up an interview with him, or with Canning himself, ‘without asking permission in the first instance’. Baqir ‘Ali was staggered by this. ‘What? [I] have placed the whole matter before you, and you can’t give me any answer?’ Limply Edmonstone replied, ‘I have given you my answer.’11

  How long this cat-and-mouse game might have gone on, one can only speculate. The deadlock was broken by the governor general, who ‘let the king know through some of his people’ what the proper procedure was, and agreed to receive a petition from Munawwar-ud-daulah on the king’s behalf. In it, Wajid ‘Ali Shah explained how, after losing his kingdom, he ‘consented to undergo exposure to the burning heat of the sun in the very height of the hot weather, with the desire of getting within the shade of your Lordship’s [Canning’s] benevolence’. Even though he was ‘oppressed with mental afflictions and sorrows and bodily ills which no pen can describe—to say nothing of the severe fatigues and the various great inconveniences incident to travel’, the king had bravely set out ‘disregardful of the dangers of the land and water’ to meet the new governor general in Calcutta. One wonders how great his mother’s efforts had been to spur him on, when he could have retired gracefully to an easy life in Lucknow with a pension.

  In response to the petition, Canning did not fail to remind the king that the latter had been advised by his predecessor, Dalhousie, not to come to Calcutta. When Wajid ‘Ali Shah expressed his disappointment at the lack of courtesy, he was tartly informed by Canning: ‘I have to remind Your Majesty that your arrival in this city was not reported to me in any authentic [way] or by any accredited agent of Your Majesty, nor until the receipt of Your Majesty’s letter or customary form; and that without such intimation, a salute or other recognition of your Majesty’s presence, would have been opposed to the usual observances. Now that Your Majesty has been pleased to inform me of your arrival here, I have ordered that a Salute of 21-guns shall be fired tomorrow at 4.pm from the ramparts of Fort William in honor of Your Majesty.’12 This exchange took place a week after the arrival of the Awadh party, and the following days were taken up in settling into hired houses at Garden Reach, rented from Chand Mehtab Bahadur, the Maharaja of Burdwan.

  By the beginning of June, Wajid ‘Ali Shah had got his 21-gun salute, ‘for the thing nearest the poor King’s heart is the expenditure of gunpowder in his honour’, Canning told Vernon-Smith. Thomas Menzies was still hanging about the royal villa, but was shortly to be imprisoned for debt. Canning reported gleefully that the erstwhile agent’s creditors in Calcutta ‘have shown even less respect for his full powers than I did’.13 But a new advisor and agent had already been appointed, and one whose reputation had preceded him. Captain Robert Wilberforce Bird was an officer in the Bengal Army and considered competent enough to act as assistant Resident in Awadh when the Resident was on tour. Bird was a dapper young man, slim, with a fashionable walrus moustache, and he was also a fluent Persian speaker who had translated some of the earliest letters from the Resident to the new king. (Persian was the Court language in Awadh, as it had been at the later Mughal courts.)

  The governor general was briefed on Bird’s seemingly charmed career, and the man himself. He had recently resigned from the army, on a pension, to pursue his new career as the king’s agent. He was an old friend of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the two used to meet at the Lucknow racecourse, united in a common love of horses and horse racing. Bird had even been living in a house provided for him by the king, near the cantonment racecourse, which had infuriated his superior officer, William Sleeman, who expected the young man to live in the Lucknow Residency with the other British officials. But Robert Bird could get away with a lot because he was connected, through a relative’s marriage, to Sir Frederick Currie, a powerful figure in the East India Company hierarchy who became the last Company Chairman in 1857. After numerous complaints by Sleeman, Robert Bird had been transferred from Lucknow to Ajmer by Lord Dalhousie, which was a demotion, but it got him out of Sleeman’s way.

  Canning noticed that Captain Bird was said to have been given ‘too much to horse-dealing and in that character to have been sharp in his practice and exorbitant in his charges to the Oude Durbar and I believe this influenced Lord Dalhousie in displacing him, but these are matters on which I cannot speak positively’.14 He added that ‘extravagant stories’ were going around Calcutta about what Bird was going to get from the king as salary. It was said he had already been paid 1 lakh of rupees (£10,000), and there would be ‘much more if he succeeds in recovering the throne for his client’. Having appointed Robert Bird as his agent, Wajid ‘Ali Shah planned to send him to England to begin lobbying sympathetic Members of Parliament, the East India Company’s Court of Directors, the British press and anyone else who might be able to help.

  This was not such a wild venture as it might seem at first. As the East India Company extended its grip by annexing large parts of the subcontinent through wars, treaties and depositions of ruling princes, there had been a steady stream of missions to England from unhappy Indian chiefs, seeking reparation and reinstatement of their lost status. Because objective British justice was held up as an ideal for British rule in India, it was not surprising that Indians who felt they had been unfairly treated would seek redress in the Mother of Parliaments, the Law Courts, or from Queen Victoria herself.

  There had been thirty such missions by groups of Indians to England before 1857. A modern historian has noted that ‘Many were convinced by British assertions that justice would ultimately be obtained and wrongs righted if only superior authorities in Britain learned what their British subordinates in India had been perpetrating. Enough of these appellants did indeed obtain redress and/or advance (or at least promise of these) that further Indians were encouraged to make this journey.’15 The Awadh royal family had itself sent four previous delegations between 1822 and 1838, one of which had included an aunt of Wajid ‘Ali Shah. The present party led by Janab-i ‘Aliyyah was the fifth to travel from Lucknow to London, and the queen mother, veiled as she was, certainly knew more about life in Britain than the majority of Britons knew about life in Awadh.

  By early June Robert Bird had been sent on ahead of the group to begin lobbying Liberal Members of Parliament and to prepare the way for the dispossessed monarch. At this point Wajid ‘Ali Shah still intended to travel to London, but something happened during the next ten days to make him change his mind. Canning got a hint of it from ‘an informant’ stationed at Garden Reach, who may have been planted to report on the household in its early days. Bird had drafted out a document by which Wajid ‘Ali Shah was to transfer £17,000 to London for Bird’s initial expenses. Shortly before his steamer, the SS Nubia, sailed, he sent the document to the king for the royal signature and seal. But to Bird’s surprise, when he went to collect it he was barred from seeing his old friend and now employer by Janab-i ‘Aliyyah, who told him the king was not going to sign the money transfer. She offered to send a smaller sum of money in charge of one of the eunuchs and a munshi who would dole it out as necessary. Bird had been relyi
ng on this enormous sum to cover his expenses and flew into a ‘towering passion declaring the King deserved all his misfortunes, even the loss of his Crown and for his own part he was glad to be rid of so wretched a creature’.16 He then stormed off to catch his ship.

  Just under two weeks later, on 15 June, the governor general was astonished to learn that Janab-i ‘Aliyyah, her son Sikandar Hashmat and grandson Prince Hamid ‘Ali had secretly boarded a steamer at night, and were already sailing down river to catch the SS Bengal to Suez. The royal party and their estimated seventy staff had the steamer to themselves, for the boat’s owner had not taken on any other passengers. Canning could not explain the reason why the departure of the group had been carried out so secretly, unless it was feared that the British might try to stop them. Wajid ‘Ali Shah had pleaded illness, suffering from an attack of dysentery when he reached Calcutta, but there is a suggestion that he was fearful of being humiliated by the British and of losing face among his peers and former subjects if his case was rejected in London. His illness was probably more diplomatic than dysentery, but there is no evidence that the British would actually have prevented him from leaving India. A more authentic reason for his decision not to travel to England is hinted at in a contemporary radical newspaper, The Englishman and Military Chronicle, which was no friend of the Company. The king’s chief minister (and father-in-law) ‘Ali Naqi Khan had not been allowed to travel to Calcutta with the royal party in March. He had been arrested in Lucknow by James Outram, ostensibly to help in sorting out the arrears of payment for the palace staff. The minister was released from arrest on 7 June and was preparing to leave for Calcutta when he was re-arrested, this time on charges of bribery and corruption while in office. But the real reason, according to The Englishman, was ‘the desire of our Government to keep away from the ex-King’s person a man who in spite of his many faults, cannot be accused of want of attachment to the late ruler of Oudh’. It was widely believed in Lucknow that ‘Ali Naqi Khan was being deliberately held there on trumped up charges in order to prevent him from advising the king and accompanying him to England. ‘Good God, how wantonly has this unfortunate Oriental King been dealt with at the hands of the British Government!’17 wrote an anonymous correspondent.

  Clearly there had already been arguments between mother and son that led to Bird’s extravagant expenses being curtailed, and it is not difficult to imagine another showdown between the two on the final evening before the steamer sailed. Wajid ‘Ali Shah felt that he could not leave without his minister, while his mother refused to delay any longer. Canning had been puzzled by the secrecy of the embarkation, but a more wily observer like James Outram would have surmised that Wajid ‘Ali Shah intended, almost to the last, to travel to England and therefore the matter had to be kept hidden from the British in case they attempted to prevent him from boarding the steamer. Once the depleted royal party was safely on its way, and could not be recalled, the king wrote to Canning asking that his relatives should be ‘well received and attended to in England’, to which the governor general replied that he could ‘rest at ease on that score’.18 Having given this assurance, he wrote to Vernon-Smith hoping that the latter ‘would verify the promise to the illustrious strangers arriving in England in August’ and that ‘the Court of Directors should do what they can to prevent an appearance of slight’. (Vernon-Smith has added in pencil on this letter, ‘They did just the contrary.’) Canning also noted that when the party reached England Robert Bird would probably join it, in spite of the row, and this is what in fact happened. Bird was too valuable a contact to ignore, with his family links to the East India Company’s Court of Directors, but he also needed financial backing from the fabulously rich ruler of Awadh, even if it was not to be the £17,000 he had initially hoped for.

  In his rant against the king at Garden Reach, Canning’s informant reported that Bird had shouted that he did not know ‘what he should say to Roebuck and Otway in the King’s favour’. The Right Honourable John Roebuck and Sir Arthur Otway were both Liberal MPs, and both with a keen interest in India. Roebuck had been born in Madras at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and as a young man in England deliberately sought out radical and utilitarian allies. Whatever the party in government at the time, his general attitude was to oppose it. Otway had served in India for five years, and after studying law became a powerful supporter of the India Reform Society. This society had been founded in 1853 by the writer and activist John Dickinson. Despite not having direct experience of India, Dickinson was influential enough to get Dalhousie to set up a public works commission looking at deficiencies in administration, and particularly the lack of viable transport in the subcontinent. The year 1853 was also when the East India Company’s charter was due for renewal by the British government, and this brought together a number of liberal bodies opposed to the monolithic, reactionary nature of the Company. Manchester was a particular focus for opposition because of its vested interests in the cotton trade, which it believed the Company was doing little to support. But the charter was renewed, and the old guard continued ostrich-like on its seemingly immutable way. Vernon-Smith told Canning during the Parliamentary debates on India that ‘we routed the missionaries and we gave battle to the Manchester men’.19 So there were sympathetic voices in Britain ready to speak out against Company misrule and to support individual Indians seeking justice in England. It was Bird’s job to solicit their help, and the fact that Wajid ‘Ali Shah was an extremely rich man did not go amiss. Two more Liberal MPs, Sir Erskine Parry and Sir Fitzroy Kelly, had been trying to help the nawab of Surat pursue a claim in Parliament even as the Awadh party was en route for England. Although they were unsuccessful, and the Surat plea was dropped, Vernon-Smith told Canning that ‘the case of an Ex-King who brings over 25 lacs of Rupees … must make Sir E. Parry and Sir F. Kelly’s mouths water to hear of it’.20

  At first it seemed that the king did have a good chance of success. The Englishman was encouraging, writing on 7 June 1856: ‘The King of Oude is still endeavouring to obtain an interview with the Governor General. In this we think he is ill advised, for he can obtain no redress here. The sooner he appeals to Parliament the better, his case is exactly of the kind which will strongly influence them, for it can hardly be believed when they are made fully aware of the facts, that a body of English gentlemen will suffer themselves dragged through the mud by Lord Dalhousie, in the face of all Europe … there is a general belief here that the King will have his own again, a belief growing daily in force, and circulating widely in the City and the districts.’ But five days later, the mood was changing. ‘If the King really means to exert himself in his own behalf, which his delay inclines us to doubt, he should be prepared to refute imputations, which however false and calamitous will, if not denied and refuted certainly make a great impression in England.’ On 13 June the paper’s editor asked pointedly: ‘What is the dethroned King doing at Calcutta?’ There was ‘intense interest in Lucknow’ as to whether he would have his Kingdom again. ‘I really do think that the chances he had of obtaining justice are fast disappearing! His want of action will possibly prove his ruin!’ Two days later Janab-i ‘Aliyyah set out without the main plaintiff in their case against the British government. The Lucknow correspondent wrote a week after her departure that, although the king was not forgotten there, ‘People think it foolish of him to have stayed behind while his family went to England.’

  If Janab-i ‘Aliyyah’s party was depleted—without the king and without Captain Bird—it did at least have the irrepressible John Rose Brandon and his wife Mary Ann on board. Brandon was a working-class man, born in 1809 at Southwark on the south side of London Bridge, and thus entitled to call himself a cockney. He had first travelled to India as a young lad of fourteen and claimed to have joined the East India Company’s army, rising to the rank of captain.21 Four years later he was sent home, but returned to India in 1832 and found his way to Lucknow where he was employed by the frivolous eighth nawab, Nasir ud-Din
Haidar. Brandon’s father was a market gardener, and on the strength of this John Rose Brandon was employed to lay out the gardens in the Lucknow cantonment at Mariaon. He was then appointed by the nawab on a monthly salary of 500 rupees and put in charge of ‘rare plants’ in the palace gardens. Here he met George Harris Derusett, another vivid working-class character, who was known as the ‘Barber of Lucknow’ and was hairdresser to the nawab.22 The relationship between the two men, both Londoners, both born without a privileged background but canny and enterprising men, flourished on a foreign soil. Nasir ud-Din Haidar paid Brandon and Derusett generously, and both exploited him shamelessly, returning to England in 1837 with a sizeable fortune. After the death of Brandon’s first wife, he married Derusett’s daughter Mary Ann, in 1843, and returned to India two years later to set up business in Cawnpore. Although he had been banished from Lucknow for fraud by his former royal employer, Brandon returned and was able to resume his earlier position as head gardener at the palace, this time under the new nawab, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and with the sanction of Robert Bird, then assistant Resident. An unlikely friendship sprang up between the gardener and Captain Bird which was ‘creditable and profitable to both parties’, as a contemporary newspaper hinted.23