Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Read online

  It was a highly sophisticated system of government, and reassuring to the young Wajid ‘Ali Shah who inherited it on his father’s death in February 1847. The deliberate compartmental-ism of the departments and the rich rewards for those in office meant that there was no threat to his rule from this quarter and, as we have seen, very little chance of an army coup either. What the king did have to worry about were factions within his own family, and the much greater threat from the East India Company, with its increasing interference in the administration of Awadh.

  Amjad ‘Ali Shah’s death was not unexpected. He had been suffering from cancer for some time and died in the Farhat Bakhsh palace at 5 p.m. on Saturday 13 February. Four hours later Wajid ‘Ali Shah was escorted up the steep steps of the Lal Barahdari to the throne room, with its gorgeous ceiling of painted cherubs. A contemporary report says that the crush of well-wishers was so great that the iron banisters flanking the stairs gave way.24 At his night-time coronation further titles were announced for the king, who now became Father of Victory, Supporter of Religion, the Grandeur of Alexander, the Just King, Caesar of the Age, as well as Sultan of the Universe. These epithets were announced to the faithful during the Friday sermon the following week. The coronation was a time for gifts. Government ministers and officers of state received ceremonial robes from the monarch, and honorific titles. Rupees were given to the royal artillery and the sepoys of the 23rd Native Infantry regiment, who were on duty at the Lal Barahdari. Their British officers, Lieutenants Nicolson and Hilliard, each got a handsome shawl and embroidered handkerchief. Two days later, ministers were confirmed in the offices they had held under the former ruler, which indicated that no immediate changes were planned.

  One of the new king’s first acts was to set up a trust to look after his father’s mausoleum, the Sibtainabad Imambarah on the main road in Lucknow. It was an extensive structure with two large gateways, the first fronting the main road, Hazratganj. Inside the second gateway was a large walled courtyard, with cells built into the walls, so that pilgrims coming to pay their respects to the late king could lodge here for a few nights. Across the courtyard, and furthest away from the road, stood the imambarah on a raised platform, where Amjad ‘Ali Shah was laid to rest. The tomb had been constructed during his lifetime, as was customary. Wajid ‘Ali Shah told the newly arrived Resident, Colonel Richmond, that he was depositing 7 lakhs (about £70,000) in the Residency treasury ‘by way of a perpetual Loan’ to the East India Company. The interest of 5% on the loan was intended to cover the wages of 170 men to be employed at the tomb.25 There was a superintendent, a deputy, a lawyer, a muezzin to call out the prayer times, eleven men to read the Qur‘an, watchmen, sweepers, gardeners, masons, carpenters, water carriers, musicians and a hundred soldiers. An allocation of £500 was made for the month of Muhurram and the same amount for ceremonies to mark the death anniversary of the late king. A second pious act was to send a sum of money (£2,375) to Baghdad, to be distributed to pilgrims visiting the holy places at Karbala. Again, this was paid into the Company treasury, and the Resident was charged with sending it to Major Henry Rawlinson, the political agent in Turkish Arabia, as the area was known under the Ottoman Empire.

  But after that, the new king’s political life, with all its problems, began. The dreamy poet was faced almost immediately with the reality of his situation, a ruler already marked out by the British as a failure. The East India Company was pursuing an increasingly aggressive policy towards supposedly autonomous states and kingdoms. Sindh had fallen into its grasp in 1843, and after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’, dissension among his successors and an increase in the Sikh army led to confrontation with the Company. The political agent in Lahore reported that there was disorder in the countryside and corrupt behaviour at Court, exactly the same charges that would shortly be levelled at Wajid ‘Ali Shah. The first Anglo-Sikh War was quickly concluded by the Treaty of Lahore, in March 1846, and the guns and cannons captured by the British during the two major battles were brought in triumph to Calcutta, where they were exhibited on the parade ground in front of Government House. Wajid ‘Ali Shah learned that he was to be presented with one of the Sikh guns, the grandly named Koh Shikan (‘mountain-denting’) cannon. It duly arrived on Christmas Eve and we hear no more about it. Although ostensibly meant as a compliment to the new king, the hint must have been clear to him. The Company, which had begun as a trading concern at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was becoming ever more voracious in its appetite for Indian territories.

  There was trouble nearer home too. Barely a month after his coronation, a letter arrived from one of the city’s newswriters reporting on a seemingly dreadful event. A jeweller called Chhote Lal had cut the throat of a seven-year-old Brahman boy and sacrificed him to ‘the Idol Purasnath’ [Parsunath] in a newly-built temple.26 Without stopping to think how absurd this was, Wajid ‘Ali Shah immediately sent two of his Muslim staff with a group of workmen to demolish the temple. Perceiving what was about to happen, fifty or so jewellers left their shops and marched in a body to the palace to complain about the false report and the demolition. They were turned away by palace guards and told to return home. The following day, Wajid ‘Ali Shah sent his retainers and workmen out again and three more temples were destroyed, and property found in them was brought to the palace. Taking advantage of the disturbances, one of the king’s favourite companion-servants, Mir Mahdi, sent a hired thug called Farzand ‘Ali to Haidarganj, where a number of Shiva temples and personal property belonging to Hindus were destroyed. The superintendent of police, ‘Ali Riza Khan, sent in an urgent petition confirming that no atrocities had taken place, and that the jeweller caste of Hindus would not kill an insect, much less shed human blood.27

  But the damage had been done. A much larger procession of jewellers, some eight to nine hundred-strong, marched to the palace, and Colonel Richmond, the Resident, thought that a ‘general disturbance’ was likely, particularly if the jewellers recruited other Hindus to their cause. The situation was only defused when the chief minister managed to calm the demonstrators down and send them back to their homes and shops. Richmond rushed to the palace for a crisis meeting with the king—the first of many—and asked what Wajid ‘Ali Shah thought he was doing. The king admitted straight away that he had ordered the temples to be demolished because it was ‘his desire to save the lives of innocent little children, who’, he was informed, ‘would be sacrificed under the wheels of the Idol’s car’. This was a reference to the great Jagannath’s wheeled chariot taken out in procession once a year. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was hopelessly confused and Richmond told him so. He blamed the king for inflicting hardship on his subjects without checking if the first report was correct. Wajid ‘Ali Shah retorted that he was surprised Richmond would defend ‘shedders of blood’, but on being assured again that the jewellers would not kill even an insect, he backed down and ordered an investigation. The king asked his chief minister why he had not been warned that the initial report was flawed, to which the minister retorted that it was not his job to do so, and that he was not responsible for orders issued through other persons. The king’s late father had appointed his old tutor, nawab Imdad Husain Khan, then in his sixties, as chief minister in 1842, with the title of Amin-ud-daulah. He had been Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s tutor too, the man who had slapped him round the head. It was clear from the above exchange that the relations between the tutor, now an elderly man, and his former pupil, now king, were not good.

  Richmond himself was under fire from the governor general, Viscount Hardinge, who told him that he should have reacted as soon as the first temple was destroyed on 20 March 1847. In defending his own position, Richmond said it was ‘very evident that many of His Majesty’s present attendants who have been raised from the lower ranks are endeavouring to exert their influence over him to their own advantage’.28 He learned that the favourite of the moment, Mir Mahdi, had previously been a drummer, playing for dancing girls. Having ris
en rapidly through the Court hierarchy, Mahdi had wanted some land near his home in Haidarganj that was occupied by the Shiva temples, and had been acting without the king’s consent in ordering their demolition. In the end the situation calmed down, though Richmond reported that ‘an evil feeling still seems to prevail amongst many of His Majesty’s subjects’. Wajid ‘Ali Shah had the grace to express his regret for the destruction of the temples, saying that ‘his youth and inexperience in state affairs had led him to commit himself in this matter’, and he trusted that the government of his country would be better administered in future.29 He put Mir Mahdi under temporary house arrest. There is no doubt that the king could be gullible—there were to be plenty more examples of this—but could he really not know, at the age of twenty-five, that the Jain caste, as some of the jewellers were, would literally not kill an insect or any other living being?

  Within a month of this crisis being defused, something even worse happened. Early on the morning of 8 April 1847, the chief minister, Imdad Husain Khan, was on his way to the palace for an appointment with the king when his carriage was held up by four men armed with daggers.30 The attack took place in Golaganj, in the old part of the city, and someone ran down to the Residency to tell Richmond what was happening. Mindful of being reprimanded for not acting quickly enough in the temple incident, Richmond was on the spot immediately, with his assistant Robert Bird. The two men found that the minister had been dragged out of his carriage and pinioned on his back on a low parapet in front of the Malikah-yi-Zamani imambarah. Assessing the situation, Richmond sent for guns and soldiers from the cantonment, four miles away, and while he waited for them to arrive, he began negotiations with the kidnappers. The four men said they had no livelihood and demanded 50,000 rupees (about £5,000) and safe passage to Cawnpore, in British territory. The ransom money was speedily brought by the minister’s relatives, arriving on elephant-back, and Dr Login, who was attached to the Residency, was then allowed to treat the frightened minister. Richmond promised the men that their lives would be spared if they let the minister go, and shortly afterwards the four ‘desperate characters’ were escorted into the Residency with the ransom money.

  An emergency meeting was arranged for midday at the palace between Richmond and Wajid ‘Ali Shah, who appeared as shaken as his minister and ‘much alarmed’. A compromise was reached that the men should face a fair trial, but would be spared the death penalty. The king’s wakil (agent) was summoned to the Residency to escort the men out. However, they had not gone more than a couple of yards beyond the Baillie Guard gateway when they were set upon by the wakil’s own men and severely beaten with sticks, whips and sword hilts before being taken to the lock-up. The ransom money was placed in the government treasury. The affair left the British Resident looking foolish. He had given his word, albeit it to kidnappers and under duress, but then had not been able to keep it. When he tried to intervene with the king the following day as the men came to trial, Wajid ‘Ali Shah told him that all investigations of crime in the kingdom were carried out according to Shari‘a law, and that he, the king, could not influence this. The four men now appeared to be something other than common criminals, or at least men with a real grievance. They protested that ‘good men were not now employed by the Oude Government’, and gave as an example the recent appointment of Farzand ‘Ali as the new deputy superintendent of city patrols. It was Farzand ‘Ali who had demolished the Shiva temples and, instead of being punished, he had been rewarded with a good job. The men, all Muslims, added that they were flattered the king should put them in irons, the implication being that there were much greater rogues in government. The chief minister intervened on behalf of his kidnappers, and three were sentenced to life imprisonment while the other was sent home, but was to be ‘closely watched’.

  Poor Richmond was told off again by the governor general, Viscount Hardinge. He had been right to promise that the men’s lives would be spared, but then he should have ensured this by immediately getting them to a place of safety outside Awadh. Clearly Hardinge was ignorant of the layout of the Residency, and the difficulty of ensuring that a coach to Cawnpore, the nearest British cantonment, would not itself be hijacked en route. In turn, Richmond rounded on the king again, in what was becoming a familiar pattern of blame and accusation. He reminded Wajid ‘Ali Shah of the treaty drawn up in 1837, which was to prove hugely controversial later on, and which gave the British government the power to interfere ‘when necessary for the proper government of the kingdom’. Richmond added piously, ‘I did not omit to point out to His Majesty that without the active support of my government, His Majesty could not stand for one day, instancing his own request that the two guns and the regiment of native infantry might remain in the city for the purpose of preventing tumult and plunder until such time as he could make some arrangement for the maintenance of tranquillity.’ 31 It was a horribly rude awakening for a man who only a few years earlier had been directing fairies and milkmaids in private theatricals.

  Wajid ‘Ali Shah responded by withdrawing into his palace, where according to the Resident he was ‘surrounded by a body of low intriguing men, players on Native Instruments and Women he has given himself up to all sorts of excesses allowing the first mentioned parties to carry every species of intrigue and entirely neglect all care, or thought of the government of his kingdom’.32 He added that nawab Imdad Husain Khan was unable to administer anything because the king’s favourites had taken over his role and were issuing their own orders without the minister’s knowledge, leading to ‘great confusion and discontent’. The ‘singing and dancing men’ were preventing the minister from meeting Wajid ‘Ali Shah ‘by keeping the King duly employed in dancing and singing and such like amusements while His Majesty’s Minister was waiting for orders on matters of government’.33 It did sound as if reality and fantasy were coinciding in a gigantic pantomime, with a cast of villains and a large and unruly musical chorus.

  Unlike the post of finance minister (diwan), that of the chief minister (wazir) was much less secure. One of the reasons was that the East India Company had become so powerful in the kingdom that it was able to veto appointments and propose its own candidates. Nawab Imdad Husain Khan could count himself lucky that he had survived for five years, with only one short break. He was a steady, rather than brilliant, administrator and his master, the late King Amjad ‘Ali Shah (1842–7), had been a quiet, pious man to work for, sensibly keeping his head down from the British. Now things were very different. The old man was being made a fool of by the new king’s friends, and with the new regime in place, younger men were looking for opportunities at Court. One of them was ‘Ali Naqi Khan, a slim, handsome man with a long face. He was an ambitious young courtier of impeccable background who was later to strengthen his ties to the king by becoming his father-in-law. He first set his sights on becoming wakil and, according to Richmond, was offering large bribes for the purpose. But a greater prize beckoned. On 3 July, the Resident was startled to learn that nawab Imdad Husain Khan had been dismissed and ‘Ali Naqi Khan appointed as chief minister.

  Richmond hurried round to the palace again, along what was becoming a well-trodden route, and berated Wajid ‘Ali Shah. It was, he said, against the spirit of a fifty-year-old treaty that a chief minister should be appointed without the approval of the Resident.34 Wajid ‘Ali Shah had been king for less than six months, condemned as hopeless before he even got to the throne, threatened with the loss of his kingdom because of promises made by his predecessors and frightened by the prospect of civil unrest. But he was also a man of principle—something for which the British never gave him credit, preferring to call it obstinacy when he made a stand—and this was something on which he was not going to back down. When ‘Ali Naqi Khan was criticised for his lack of administrative experience, the king robustly argued that there was no reason why men of ‘ordinary ability’ should not be able to do such a job.35 The former minister had been at fault in not maximising the collection of land revenue, and
was said to have accepted bribes from district administrators. The army had fallen into disorder too, though this was not strictly within the chief minister’s remit. Richmond seemed taken aback, and he was faced with a fait accompli two days later when he learned that the seals of office had been taken away from Imdad Husain Khan, which effectively meant that the minister could no longer act in the king’s name. Grudgingly, the Resident had to accept the situation, although he did win two concessions: firstly, that ‘Ali Naqi Khan was to act ‘in conformity’ with the Resident’s advice, and secondly, that both Mir Mahdi and Farzand ‘Ali were to be dismissed over the temple demolitions. The Resident learned from his palace spies that this had been done, and ‘Ali Naqi Khan was duly installed in his new office on 5 August 1847.36 He was to prove a loyal friend to his master, accompanying him into exile within the decade and sharing his subsequent imprisonment in Calcutta.

  The governor general, Viscount Hardinge, was due to retire in January 1848 and return to England. He was the last governor general to accompany the commander-in-chief on the battlefield, which he had done during the First Sikh War. It was customary for departing governors to make a farewell tour, and Hardinge intended to visit Cawnpore and Lucknow in November 1847. As soon as this was known, Richmond began holding the visit over the king’s head, both as a threat and as an inducement to reform. But Wajid ‘Ali Shah was not the only one anticipating the visit with some dread. The Resident, too, would be under scrutiny, and so far he had not done very well. Like most Residents Richmond had a military background, not a diplomatic one, but this was his chance to show that he had a difficult monarch under control. He attacked on several fronts. Wajid ‘Ali Shah had appointed some of his musical friends to high positions in government and the army, and a month before Hardinge’s arrival the Resident was anxious to have them removed. He warned Hardinge about ‘the unlimited control which the dancing and singing men so often alluded to by me in the various reports had obtained over the king…’37