The nawab could not have been more delighted. Hugely elaborate preparations were made for his coronation. An area north of the river Gomti was marked out as a great tented enclosure for guests attending the event, and it is still known today as Haidarabad (Haidar’s settlement), after the new king. The Lal Barahdari, a pleasant red-painted pavilion within the palace complex, became the throne room, with a newly painted ceiling of plump flying cherubs. Because there were no precedents for crowning a Muslim monarch according to Christian rituals, the ceremony became a curious blend of Indian and English elements.2 A coronation robe of heavy blue velvet with an ermine cape was ordered from London3 and a Persian-inspired crown was designed by the Court artist in residence, Robert Home. Home also designed chairs with blue velvet seats and backrests of gilded fish for the guests attending the ceremony. The throne was an extravaganza of beaten gold panels richly embellished with jewels placed under a pearl-embroidered canopy. Over £1 million was allotted by the nawab for expenditure on the coronation, but in spite of all the pomp and ceremony there was little significant political change. The new king began to strike coins in his own name, using his own regnal year, and he acquired a coat of arms too; but as an English officer observed, ‘Ostensibly, his Nabobship has been promoted from the rank of servant to that of lord, virtually he has only changed masters…’4 Nevertheless the nawabs were now royalty, and were to be addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ even by the governor general. With the departure of the King of Delhi to exile and death in Burma after the Uprising of 1857, Ghazi-ud-Din Haider’s great-nephew was indeed the last king in India.
The crown, with its fashionable egret plumes, had been placed on the head of the first king by a young cleric, Sayyid Muhammad Nasirabadi. He was described, misleadingly, as a ‘high priest’, although Islam does not officially recognise religious hierarchies. Nasirabadi was a mujtahid, the learned son of a pious Muslim family. The symbolic act of crowning a new king (which in England is carried out by the Archbishop of Canterbury) was to remind the congregation and the British Resident that the nawabs, too, were men of faith. They were Shi‘as, who regarded ‘Ali (the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) as the first legitimate Imam. The schism between Shi‘as and Sunnis resulted from a dispute about leadership after the Prophet’s death. Within the Shi‘a sect came further divides, but the majority of Shi‘as, including the Awadh family, trace the leadership descent from ‘Ali to the twelfth Imam, and are known as Twelvers, or Isna ‘ashariyah. Ghazi-ud-Din Haidar actually claimed descent from the seventh Imam, Musa al-Kasim, which gave him an impeccable pedigree. Although Company officials were aware of the different sects of Islam, not least because they had had to intervene in clashes between Sunnis and Shi‘as during Muharram of 1828, they chose to ignore the importance of religion in the lives of the nawabs. They missed the connection between Lucknow and Iraq,5 which was regarded by the nawabi family as their original homeland and which was still a place of refuge and retirement. Indeed, an unsuccessful contender for the Awadh throne spent the last years of his life living in a house that later became the British Residency in Baghdad.6
The links between the Shi‘a community in Iraq and the ruling nawabs in Lucknow were strengthened by men like Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Naqvi, father of the cleric who had crowned the first king in 1819. It was Dildar ‘Ali, a Lucknow scholar, who had persuaded the fourth nawab, Asaf-ud-daulah, to fund the building of a canal in the Iraqi city of Karbala. The small waterway is still known today as the Asafi Canal after its donor, and this pious gesture ate up huge amounts of nawabi money, despatched from the Lucknow treasury. It was followed by equally generous amounts for other projects at the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The regular transfer of money to Iraq, through the British political agents in the Ottoman Empire, is a continuing theme throughout the whole of the nawabi period and, as we have seen, one of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s first acts as king was to distribute money for Shi‘a pilgrims at Baghdad. It was not a one-way traffic either for Iraqi workmen were brought to Lucknow as builders to recreate the religious edifices of their homeland. A building in the old part of Lucknow is a close copy of the Shrine of the Two Imams at Kazmain, now on the outskirts of Baghdad. Wajid ‘Ali Shah inherited this rich and substantial background, which gave him status among Shi‘as in India, Iran and the Ottoman Empire. This was not only by virtue of his descent, but also from the generosity of his predecessors towards the holy places of Islam, something that his British detractors signally failed to acknowledge. He had a position to maintain, both as a temporal king and as a descendant of the seventh Imam.
Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s personal feelings as a Muslim—and a Muslim ruler—are harder to gauge and somewhat contradictory. Under his predecessors, and particularly his late father, the mujtahid had done very well, both financially and politically. They had played an important part in Court life, often prompting or initiating the building of mosques, imambarahs, schools and theological colleges, as well as advising on correct procedure during the mourning month of Muharram. Wajid ‘Ali Shah felt confident enough to stop payment of the government-funded poor tax established by his father, which the mujtahid had administered, mainly to their own benefit. He was later to stop funding the Shi‘a seminary, also set up during his father’s reign, which had received regular grants from the treasury. He reintroduced the restricted sale of opium, wine and bhang, which had been forbidden by Amjad ‘Ali Shah. At the same time, as we shall see, Wajid ‘Ali Shah was not above invoking specific Shi‘a laws when it suited him. He remained a teetotaler all his life, and we have no reason to disbelieve his descendants who say he was a pious, God-fearing man who prayed five times a day. Whether he drew on the comfort of his religion during difficult times is harder to say. There was certainly more than an element of self-pity in much of his writing, but he lived within the boundaries of his faith, observing, and being seen to observe, the obligations of a Shi‘a. Later in life Wajid ‘Ali Shah would himself be regarded as a mujtahid, and one of his books deals with the problems of religious jurisdiction.7 Interestingly, its place of publication, which was at the king’s Garden Reach estate near Calcutta, is given as daru ‘l-hakumat, the conventional term for an area where Muslim edicts are in force.
During the first critical period of his reign, when he needed all the help he could get, Wajid ‘Ali Shah had had to rely on the unsatisfactory British Resident Colonel Archibald Richmond, himself under pressure from the governor general. Richmond was good at finger-wagging and dishing out criticism, but far less adept at making positive suggestions, or encouraging initiatives by the new king. In the two years before William Sleeman became Resident, in January 1849, Wajid ‘Ali Shah embarked on a number of projects that could have been nurtured and developed by a more sympathetic British advisor. One such initiative, started with the best of intentions, was to erect a number of ‘complaints boxes’ in public places in Lucknow. These were called mashghalah-ye-noshervani, a grandiose Persian term that translates as something equivalent to ‘the royal prerogative’. Like letter boxes, with a small slit in the top, the idea was that the general public could post letters and petitions which would be read by the king himself (his prerogative) and passed on to the appropriate government department for action. There were also two silver letter boxes that were carried at the front of royal processions on a stick, where the public could post their complaints. Although there is no tangible or written evidence for these boxes, mention of them appears in oral accounts from eyewitnesses, captured by several historians of Awadh.8 It was an imaginative gesture by a young king. If it seems naïve now, then it is no more so than today’s British government inviting email petitions from the electorate. Unfortunately, the complaints boxes had to be quietly removed after they were found to be full of obscene suggestions.
A more significant gesture was Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s attempted reform of the Awadh Army, again something upon which Colonel Richmond, as an officer, could have advised. Although micro-managing many aspects of the king’s life, the East
India Company did not interfere with his military arrangements, because it did not perceive the Awadh Army as a potential threat. In this the Company’s judgement was correct. There had been no hint of army insurgency either against the nawabs or against the Company since the battle of Buxar, nearly a century earlier. Ostensibly recruited to protect the kingdom of Awadh, in fact the last time the army had been called on to do so was during the second Rohilla War in October 1794, when it arrived twenty-four hours too late to participate in the only battle of that short-lived event. Thus the army’s role had not been defensive for many years, but it was retained to assist in land revenue collection from reluctant landholders, to keep the peace throughout Awadh and to provide a colourful backdrop during royal processions and ceremonies. The uniform of the Awadh Army was based on the European model and consisted of a short blue jacket with gold frogging worn over long white trousers and a shako with a plume on the head of the officers. The palace guard soldiers wore a similar uniform, with the shako and plume but with blue trousers.
Shortly after his enthronement the king was reported to be visiting the Lucknow parade grounds regularly on horseback to inspect his troops. A small painting in the Hussainabad Picture Gallery in Lucknow shows him doing just this. He raised a number of new regiments to support those already well established, and gave fanciful names to the new platoons, like Palton Akhtari, Palton Wajidi and Palton Gulabi (the Rose Platoon).9 Relatives and Court favourites like Prince Miftah-ud-daulah and the eunuch Diyanat ud-Daulah were appointed as commanders of the regiments. A number of European and Anglo-Indian officers were in charge of platoons, or serving in them, including Captains Magness, Barlow, Hearsey and Orr.10 The king’s father-in-law, ‘Ali Naqi Khan, was appointed officer in charge of the Habshiyan Risalah, the Black Regiment, made up of Africans who had been brought into India by Arab slave traders. The history of Africans in Awadh has only recently been uncovered,11 but it is clear that they had long been employed in the nawabi army, as they were in the nizam of Hyderabad’s army. From the mid-nineteenth century there were anecdotal reports that the king’s personal bodyguard was made up of African women, who were described as ‘Amazons’ by British eyewitnesses. These reports were previously dismissed as fanciful, but now that the king’s liking for African wives has been established (see Chapter Four), we can imagine how he would have enjoyed being surrounded by these female black warriors. The Rose Platoon was commanded by Haji Husain Ali, and this was almost certainly the king’s own female bodyguard, riding out in their smart red jackets and ‘tight-fitting rose-coloured silk trousers’.12 Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s love of the theatrical meant that he had probably designed their uniforms too.
Money was lavished on the soldiers, apart from providing them with uniforms. ‘Arms and Accoutrements’ were purchased by the king from the Company’s Cawnpore magazine, specifically for the African Regiments at a cost of £900.13 Other soldiers got prizes and titles for exhibiting particular skills. The king told Richmond that he had found the army in a bad state when he took over, and at first he contemplated reducing the army corps by degrees, to make the remainder more efficient and serviceable, but when he learned of the difficulty of collecting land revenue with fewer men, he changed his mind and increased his force.14 The Resident argued that it was the police force that should be strengthened, not the army. Richmond pointed out that because the East India Company’s three Presidency armies (Bengal, Bombay and Madras) had been considerably enlarged since 1837, the king’s own Awadh Army could be correspondingly reduced. But this did not happen, and on annexation it was found that the army consisted of 52 regiments with 60,349 serving officers and men.15 (Although the Awadh Army was disbanded on annexation, it is clear that some platoons re-formed during the Uprising that began in Lucknow in June 1857. These included the Akhtari, the Ghanghor and the Nadri Paltons who joined other forces to oppose the British.) By the time of Hardinge’s visit in November 1847, the king’s military enthusiasms had been effectively quashed, and apart from appointing regimental commanders he took no further interest in the army and ceased to visit the parade ground. Bribery crept back in again with new soldiers having to buy their way in, but the army remained loyal to the king.
The third and final innovation was to be a reform of the land revenue collection. Without being specific, Viscount Hardinge had talked about the Company’s duty to protect the ryots, the peasants who actually farmed the land. Because of the way the revenue was collected, with some money sticking to the hands of everyone it passed through before it got to the nawab’s treasury, the peasants were thought to be dreadfully exploited. This was certainly true in some cases, though it was not universal throughout Awadh. Landholders were canny enough to realise that they needed productive, reasonably healthy workers to till the land, and that ultimately their own financial standing depended on the men and women who pulled the plough and planted the spring and autumn crops.
In the spring of 1848 Wajid ‘Ali Shah decided to introduce the ‘English system’ of revenue collection, where officers appointed directly by the Resident were responsible firstly for assessing the potential worth of the land, and secondly for collecting the revenue. (This is how the term District Collector originated.) Robert Bird was sent to Agra to meet the lieutenant governor of the North Western Provinces, James Thomason, and to work out how the scheme could be implemented. Sensibly it was proposed to start with the areas of Awadh that adjoined British territory, then to work inwards towards the centre of the kingdom. Following Thomason’s suggestions, Bird returned to Lucknow with written proposals, got them approved by the minister ‘Ali Naqi Khan, and was about to present them to the king for implementation when the Resident decided that the new governor general, Dalhousie, should look at them first. Whether the scheme got as far as Dalhousie is unclear. It was forwarded to Henry Elliot, Secretary to the Foreign Department, who peremptorily rejected it, saying, ‘if His Majesty the King of Oude would give up the whole of his dominions, the East India Government would think of it’, but that it was not worth while to take so much trouble about a portion.16 Bird was later to comment that Elliot’s remarks amounted to a snub not only to himself, but to the king, his minister, the Resident Richmond and the lieutenant governor Thomason. There was no more talk of revenue reform and the old method of collection remained unchanged until annexation, when the new government immediately implemented the ‘English system’.
While he had dismissed the king’s proposals out of hand, there was one thing that Wajid ‘Ali Shah did have that interested Elliot greatly, and that was his huge collection of books. If the king had chosen to inspect his Lucknow arsenal in the second year of his reign, he might have found Dr Aloys Sprenger, the clever Austrian orientalist, poking around inside the large building and trying to avoid the rats. Sprenger had received orders on 6 December 1847 from the government of India appointing him as ‘Extra Assistant to the Resident at Lucnow, as a temporary measure, for the purpose of cataloguing the extensive collection of works in Arabic and Persian literature in the king of Oudh’s libraries’.17 (Sprenger had arrived in India in 1843 and was appointed principal of Delhi College, thanks to his knowledge of oriental languages.) He was exactly the right man to take on the formidable task of cataloguing the three nawabi libraries, which had been built up since the 1770s by men of culture and unlimited wealth. Some of the treasures from the libraries of the Mughal emperors had found their way to Lucknow, including the famous Padshahnamah, which was presented as a gift by nawab Asaf-ud-daulah to the visiting governor general of the time, Sir John Shore.18 This was an indication of similar riches which Elliot hoped would be found in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s libraries. Elliot, as we have seen, had been in Lucknow since the middle of 1847, preparing the Resident and the king for Viscount Hardinge’s visit in November of that year. As a keen historian, Elliot would have been shown the royal libraries, and was told about other, private, collections in the city.19 After Sprenger’s death in 1893, a second catalogue was published, a Report… into th
e Muhammadan libraries of Lucknow, many of which of course were lost during 1857–8.
There is practically nothing historians will not do to get their hands on new material, and the libraries of Lucknow were beyond temptation. It is of course possible that Elliot, during meetings with the king, suggested that his libraries should be catalogued and Wajid ‘Ali Shah, as a man of letters himself, agreed. If so, no written agreement has been found, and Sprenger makes it clear he was ‘ordered’ by the government of India to compile the catalogue. There is no mention of the king inviting him, as one would expect. He arrived in Lucknow on 3 March 1848 and spent nearly two years working there. As European scholars became aware of the treasures held so carelessly, it seemed, by libraries in the East, there was a surge of interest. Sprenger told Elliot that the French government had sent ‘gentlemen to Algiers, Egypt and Constantinople to examine the Libraries and Mr Fahn of St Petersburg published in 1845 a List of Oriental works which the Russian Government had purchased for the Imperial Academy’.20 He added that ‘The devastation of manuscripts in the East and more particularly in India is so rapid that anyone who takes the slightest interest in Literature or in the honor of the government must want a record.’ We read this with mixed feelings today. The cataloguing and purchasing of oriental books and manuscripts from these countries by European governments can certainly be seen as a manifestation of arrogant colonialism. But at the same time Sprenger was quite right about the way many of these manuscripts had been left to deteriorate. The ‘library’ in the Lucknow arsenal was upstairs in the northern wing, and the books were not on shelves but in about forty dilapidated boxes known as ‘camel trunks—which are at the same time tenanted by prolific families of rats … At the end of the hall there are bags full of books completely destroyed by white ants.’
Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Page 11