Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Read online

  The period between the completion of the palace and the annexation of Awadh was brief, no more than four years, and during that time Wajid ‘Ali Shah had little inclination to show tourists around his new home. Our knowledge of Qaisarbagh, therefore, depends on images taken by European photographers immediately after the city’s recapture, a short description by the writer Abdul Halim Sharar, whose maternal grandfather worked there, and a survey carried out a few years ago by an Indian architect.16 The early photographs cannot convey the colour of the buildings, with their neat green shutters, fanciful orange curtains, brass domes and shining white balustrades. The architect chosen by the king to realise his vision was almost certainly Ahmad ‘Ali Khan, the first amateur photographer in Lucknow and perhaps in the whole of India. He was known affectionately as Chhote Miyan, or ‘little master’, and is believed to have also designed the Husainabad imambarah, a religious building, for Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s grandfather. Certainly Ahmad ‘Ali Khan was the superintendent of the imambarah, but almost nothing else is known about him, except for a hint that he may have been a relative of the king. We know very little about the actual construction of Qaisarbagh either, except that it took four years to build, from 1848 to 1852, and is supposed to have cost about £80,000 (8 lakhs), an impressively large sum. However, this would have provided an army of workers with a living, including brick-makers, scaffolders, stucco-workers, painters, gilders, foundrymen, carpenters, upholsterers, lantern-makers and gardeners, all of whom required food and accommodation, to be provided by a second tier of people.

  The whole complex consisted of a large rectangular courtyard flanked on each side by terraces of two-storeyed houses, with additional adjoining courtyards, government offices, gateways and bazaars. It incorporated three existing buildings, two of them the tombs of the king’s great-grandfather and his wife, and a splendid mansion erected by a former chief minister. There were a number of unique features within Qaisarbagh, now known only from photographs, including the Mermaid Gate (Jalpari Darwaza), the trick spiral staircase that led nowhere, the Palladian-inspired pigeon house, and the Great Vine supported on its wooden framework. There were small free-standing mosques, inlaid marble pavilions, summer houses with tiled roofs, little kiosks and numerous statues of shapely women.17 At the centre of the great courtyard is the Safed Barahdari, the White Pavilion, which was originally intended as a ‘house of mourning’ during the Muharram rituals.18

  Much of the European criticism levelled at Qaisarbagh was that its architecture was ‘theatrical’ and reminiscent of the Vauxhall pleasure gardens on the southern bank of the river Thames. There were terraces that appeared as solid structures, but in reality were only painted facades, creating an illusion of greater depth than was actually the case (a trick familiar to stage-set designers). The Lanka provided a perfect setting for actors to appear suddenly at rooftop height, and the free-standing pavilions could be decorated and lit from inside, like separate stages. Today, with the benefit of the Qaisarbagh painting and descriptions of the musical extravaganzas held there, we can see that ‘theatrical’ was exactly what Wajid ‘Ali Shah intended. He would have been delighted by the description.

  It is easy to get seduced by the king’s fantasy world of romantic poetry, love songs and dancing girls into thinking that this represented Awadhi life in the mid-nineteenth century. After all, these are the things that come most readily to mind whenever Wajid ‘Ali Shah is portrayed in novels, plays and films.19 But he also had a kingdom to govern, and it was the revenue from this kingdom that enabled him to live the luxurious life that he did, to fund his theatrical productions, to build Qaisarbagh Palace and to support his many wives and numerous relatives. So how much princely training did Wajid ‘Ali Shah actually receive when he succeeded to the throne on 13 February 1847, following the death of his father?

  He was born on 30 July 1822 when his great-uncle, Ghazi-ud-Din Haidar, was the ruler of Awadh. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was not then in the direct line of succession, and so he received no special treatment during his early years. He was not born to be king, and it was not apparent that he was in line for the throne until he was fifteen years old, when his grandfather was placed on the throne by the East India Company after an attempted palace coup. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was conventionally educated at home, learning Persian, the language of the Court, and enough Arabic to read the Qur‘an. His father’s old tutor, nawab Imdad Husain Khan, was employed to teach the boy, who showed an early talent and love of music, dancing and literature. A touching story—based only on hearsay—relates that during lessons he kept tapping his feet to an invisible orchestra, and this so annoyed his tutor that the latter slapped him across the head, leading to a permanent loss of hearing in one ear.20 Certainly he was known to be hard of hearing as an adult, and British Residents were aware of this when talking to him, repeating their statements if necessary. It was a handicap that he had to adjust to when supervising musicians and singers. Another misfortune was his size. From an early age Wajid ‘Ali Shah was plump, an inherited trait which missed out certain members of the family but settled inexorably on others. His great-great-uncle, Asaf-ud-daulah, had become quite gross, even as a young man. Another uncle, Iqbal-ud-daulah, who had led one of the earlier Awadh missions to England to pursue a claim to its throne, was found to weigh 23 stone when he stepped onto a weighing machine in Manchester.

  Wajid ‘Ali Shah was formally appointed heir apparent (wali ‘ahd) to the throne of Awadh in May 1842. A number of ceremonies at the old Farhat Bakhsh palace marked the occasion. A fragile painting, passed down to descendants, records the scene of the chubby young man holding a slip of paper, his passport to the throne, and standing next to his father, King Amjad ‘Ali Shah. He was twenty-one at the time and already the father of three sons, the eldest of whom, Nosherwan Qadr, was born disabled. This formal recognition of a successor may seem an archaic ritual, but in fact it was necessary to ensure that the throne of Awadh passed smoothly to the appointed heir on the death of the king. The unpleasant scene, only five years earlier, during a failed coup, was still vivid in people’s minds. The British Resident at the time, Colonel John Low, had had to call out Company troops to force the pretender, Munna Jan, off the throne in the Lal Barahdari, the coronation hall.

  In the present ceremony acknowledging Wajid ‘Ali Shah as heir, his elder half brother, Mustafa ‘Ali Khan, was being passed over. He had been born to a concubine of Amjad ‘Ali Shah, probably before the king’s first marriage. Genealogical records simply note that, although a nominal heir, he had been ‘repudiated’ by his father and his claim to the throne dismissed. The poor man was imprisoned by the British in the Lucknow Residency during the siege of 1857, and was described after his release as living ‘on small means and continual hopes’. There was always the possibility that people unhappy with a king’s rule might form themselves into a group around a pretender to the throne, and this is why it was so important to make a public ceremony of recognising Wajid ‘Ali Shah as the legitimate heir to his father, and his throne.

  The heir apparent was given a number of impressive-sounding, but meaningless titles, cruelly mocking his real lack of power. These included Abu-l-mansur and Sahib-i-alam (master of the universe). He was also appointed as deputy (peshkar) to his father, in the expectation that he would shadow his father in the latter’s administrative duties. We do not know how diligently he applied himself during the five years’ apprenticeship. He was certainly busy writing romantic poetry, as we have seen, fathering more children with new wives and directing his first play featuring Krishna and Radha. He also ordered the construction of three mansions for himself and his wives: one for the winter season, the Shahinshah Manzil (King of Kings’ House); one for the summer, the Makan-i-Khass (Special House); and one for the rainy season, the Falak Sair (Heaven-wandering House). None of these houses can be identified today, and it is possible they were demolished to make room for Qaisarbagh. Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s first identifiable residence, when he left his father’s palace,
was in Hazratbagh, south of the main road, which was already lined with large mansions.

  Whatever he was doing, even before he became king, was annoying the British Resident of the time, John Shakespear, who complained to Lord Hardinge, the governor general: ‘The prospect that the present reign offers is truly a melancholy one and in case of anything happening to the King, I should much dread that the future will become still more clouded. The Heir Apparent’s character holds out no promise of good. By all accounts his temper is capricious and fickle, his days and nights are passed in the female apartments and he appears to have resigned himself to debauchery, dissipation and low pursuits, and for some time past has been on distant terms with his father.’21

  Thus Wajid ‘Ali Shah was already marked out in British eyes as an unsuitable heir to the throne and this description was to follow him for the rest of his life. He seems to have done little to alter this impression at the time. As deputy of the king there are no accounts of his touring the countryside and probing the administration, as the later British Resident, William Sleeman, was to do with devastating results. Holed up in his new palaces, dreaming of love, music and drama, his lack of enterprise only increased the distance between the bubble-like atmosphere of the Court and the reality of peasant life outside the city.

  Given the political importance of Awadh, the kingdom was surprisingly small: some 24,000 square miles, less than the size of Scotland. But Awadh had been consistently nibbled away at since the East India Company became interested in it in the mid-eighteenth century, and it had been halved in size under a treaty of 1801 between the Company and the nawab Sa’adat Ali Khan. Yet neither party seemed quite able to accept this psychologically, with the result that Awadh was seen by the British government as an immense, intractable problem, while the nawabs continued to behave as if they still had the bounty of the whole of northern India coming into their treasury coffers. The population was estimated at about 10 million people in the early 1850s, and of these possibly as many as 700,000 lived in or near the unwalled city of Lucknow before annexation.22 The Company’s own census of 1856 provided the lower figure of 370,000, but because the returns were destroyed in 1857 we cannot be sure how this was arrived at. Whatever the correct total, it was still a considerable number, and surprisingly it was more than double the population of Delhi, the old walled Mughal capital. Apart from Lucknow, the other courtly city of note in Awadh was Faizabad, to the east, which had been the previous nawabi capital before 1775.

  Geographically Awadh lay in the Gangetic plain, a flat, fertile area bordered to the north by another kingdom, that of Nepal, with a fuzzy indeterminate frontier which was to provide a useful escape route in troubled times. As the nawabs’ interest in the countryside declined and British interference in internal politics increased, separate power-bases emerged in rural areas. Landholders, known as ta’luqdars or petty rajas, lived in fortified houses and sometimes actual forts built of unbaked brick surrounded by thick hedges of prickly cactus and impenetrable bamboo. Most kept their own groups of armed men, or men who could be called upon to fight when necessary. If the enemy was not another ta’luqdar seeking to increase his holdings, or simply gain revenge for a grievance, then it was often the land revenue collector who had to venture out with his own armed soldiers to bring in the money to support the king and his government. Smaller amounts of revenue came from customs duties, bazaar taxes and travel tolls (payments for using a road, bridge, or being rowed across a river), but it was the land revenue that provided the bulk of the treasury holdings, and this was assessed from the amount of land held by individuals.

  Of course there was corruption, injustice, bribery and murder inherent in such a system, and where the collection of revenue was farmed out to contractors, corrupt men grew enormously wealthy. Yet somehow it continued, an unwieldy contract between the government and the people, poorly managed at times, with inevitable outbreaks of violence, but one that had survived for generations, and with which the rulers at the centre found little reason to interfere. Although the kingdom was divided into five main areas, for the purposes of revenue collection and the maintenance of civil and criminal law, Awadh had a centralised government. Power was vested in the king, and the king and his ministers were in Lucknow, which naturally acted as a magnet for those seeking work, patronage, justice and shelter.

  The government departments of Lucknow provide a fascinating picture of how a post-Mughal kingdom was run.23 In some ways it was similar to a large modern organisation, with its post room for incoming mail and its Finance Department; in others there were unpleasant hints of a police state. Wajid ‘Ali Shah inherited twenty-three distinct departments, and set up another three. They reflected the dichotomy between rule by an absolute monarch through his ministers, and controlled access by the public for civil matters, like registering a land deed or applying for a permit to purchase wine (which was not on open sale). There were three offices that dealt with ‘intelligence gathering’ or spying, to use a less technical term. The largest was the Political and Espionage Department (daftar-i bait-ul-insha’), which tried to anticipate what the British Resident was thinking and analysed confidential matters of state. It was accepted practice to plant servants in the British Residency who would report back to the Court, just as the Resident had his own men planted in the palace.

  An independent office, whose staff were not attached to any of the ministries, sent its spies out into the city streets to gather and assess information on what the population was saying and doing. Any matters worth consideration were passed to the head of department who forwarded them on to the king. And the king had his own personal spies too, who collected news of daily happenings in the palace, including the women’s quarters, and submitted secret reports direct to their master. In addition, there were daily summaries from the government departments and courts of justice in the city, which were written up for the roznamah, the journal or diary of events.

  There were five major departments: the Treasury, the Secretariat, the Chief Minister’s office, the Finance office and the Paymaster General’s office, which dealt with all military matters, including the appointment and dismissal of army officers. Less important departments covered land claims, superintendence of the 52 police stations in Lucknow, the Frontier Police Force, urban armed patrols, litigation regarding loans, land registry, permits for various controlled commodities, excise and customs, and revenue. The royal mint (bait uz-zarb) retained its offices in the old part of the city, west of the Chauk, where it had been originally established in Mughal times, although the king tried to bring it up to date by renaming the area Akhtarnagar, or Akhtar’s city, after his poetic pen name.

  The all-important Land Revenue Department was split between three offices: the Treasury, which appointed officers to collect the money; the Finance Department, which kept current accounts of annual collections and rents; and one of the News departments, which appointed clerks attached to the collectors who toured the countryside with them, submitting written reports to the centre. This looks unwieldy at first, but there was a rationale behind it, and a system of checks and balances to ensure that not too much money was siphoned off before it got to the Treasury. Similarly, the seemingly odd arrangement whereby the Paymaster General’s office appointed army officers was a deliberate move to prevent the army from establishing its own power-base and thus presenting a possible threat to the monarchy. These were systems that had been inherited virtually unchanged from the provincial governments of the Mughals. They were based on experience, sometimes painfully gained, and were well-suited to an autocracy like Awadh.

  The emphasis on police and armed patrols was an expedient response to the lawlessness that Sleeman was to discover during his tour of Awadh. The Frontier Police Force had been specifically set up on his advice as Resident, and its duty was to curb the activities of thugs and dacoits, mopping up any groups remaining after his successful campaign against them, which had earned him the nickname of ‘Thuggee’ Sleeman. In the city an
d in country towns, the streets were patrolled night and day by armed men, on horseback and on foot, who had the authority to arrest troublemakers. The latter were confined in police station lock-ups until brought to trial, or released after bribing the guards.

  After the king, the two most powerful men in Awadh were the wazir (chief minister) and the diwan (chief financial officer). Traditionally—that is, since the start of nawabi rule in Awadh in the 1720s—the post of diwan was filled by a Hindu from the elite kayasth caste. Not only this, the post became hereditary too, handed down from father to son, sometimes skipping sideways to accommodate a son-in-law, but remaining within the family. Raja Balkrishan was the diwan during Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s nine-year rule, and loyally he refused to serve under the British after annexation. The office of Paymaster General (bakhshi) was also in Hindu hands and also hereditary, its last incumbent being Dhanpat Ray, whose father and grandfather before him had served the nawabs. The appointment to a ministry post was of incalculable value. It offered almost unlimited opportunities to build up a personal fortune through bribes and payments by underlings seeking work. It gave the minister the chance to promote his own relatives into posts (Raja Balkrishan was reported to have nearly a hundred clerks in his office who were related to him in some way), and with luck it provided a job for life and one’s sons. The money laid out in achieving such a post, in the form of lavish gifts to the sovereign, was worth the rewards the office would bring.