Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah

by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

  The weary months of imprisonment dragged by as peace was restored throughout the country and Queen Victoria announced by proclamation that the government of India had been formally transferred from the East India Company to the Crown. Lord Canning was to become its first viceroy, while still holding the title of governor general.83 The end of the Uprising is usually reckoned to date from this proclamation, read out on 1 November 1858 in every major town in India. There were minor pockets of resistance, but there seemed no reason now why the prisoners should still be locked up in Fort William.

  Canning had the delicate task of explaining to the king the reason for his continued detention. He acknowledged Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s previous letters begging for release and told him, ‘It would have been very agreeable to me to comply with this request long ago but the condition of Hindostan, and specially, of the province of Oudh, has made it impossible. Your Majesty may not be fully aware of the use which has been made of your name in fomenting disaffection and treason; but you are perhaps informed of the fact that for more than fifteen months one of the most active Enemies of the State has been the Begum Huzrat Mahal, who, assuming in her own person and in that from Your Majesty’s son Birjis Khader to represent Your Majesty’s House, has supported the pretence by means of the bitterest hostility to the British Government.’84 Canning explained that when the Begam fled to Nepal after Lucknow was retaken by the Company’s troops, she had been offered the chance to surrender and would have received ‘gracious treatment and an honorable position for the rest of her life’. But she had refused. ‘I regret that it has been so’, Canning went on, ‘not only for Your Majesty’s sake, but also for the sake of many who have been misled into following her hopeless cause and who, had she accepted the offer, might long ere this have returned to their homes in peace and security. But the Begum and those about her are now powerless against the British Government and I am unwilling that Your Majesty should suffer longer restraint on account of their impotent enmity. Your Majesty is free to leave Fort William whensoever it may please you to do so.’85 Seldom can a divorced wife’s revenge have had such dramatic consequences for her former spouse. The governor general added, ‘I desire to acknowledge the courtesy which has marked Your Majesty’s communications to myself—I have the honor to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s faithful servant.’

  Cavenagh was instructed to present this letter to the king, and to find out when and how he wanted to leave the Fort. On reading the Persian translation, Wajid ‘Ali Shah responded by saying that he had always been ‘the servant and well-wisher of the British Government’, and that he was unaware of the use that had been made of his name by Begam Hazrat Mahal. He added that ‘henceforth he dismissed both her and her son Birjis Kudder’.86 So sudden was the news of the king’s release that his servants had arrived as usual at Fort William with his afternoon meal. They were told to go straight back to Garden Reach and prepare for his return. Wajid ‘Ali Shah left the Fort at 5.30 p.m. on 9 July 1859 and drove home accompanied by Major Herbert, who reported that ‘His Majesty seemed much affected on leaving the Fort and expressed himself as deeply sensible of the act of grace which restored him to liberty.’ As Herbert and the king approached Garden Reach, ‘his people came out to meet him, some few in carriages and on horseback and others on foot and enthusiastically welcomed his return. Some of those on foot clung to the door of the carriage and running by its side endeavoured to touch His Majesty’s feet with their heads as in the act of obeisance. They formed a crowd of persons round the door of the house where His Majesty, standing in the carriage, silently pressed my hand and alighting immediately, entered the house.’87

  It was a joyous homecoming to the start of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s new life in Bengal. The traumatic events of the past three and a half years were behind him. He had lost his kingdom to the East India Company, in spite of his attempts at reform and his commendable efforts to deal with the Ayodhya crisis. He had been humbled by two years in prison, and saddened by the deaths of his mother and brother in Europe. His palaces in Lucknow were gone, and his prized menagerie had been sold. Loyally, his wives and courtiers seemed prepared to support him in his comfortable exile.

  1. The queen mother, Janab-i ‘Aliyyah, enters the train at Southampton station. From the Illustrated London News 6 September 1856. Author’s collection.

  2. The queen nother and party at Drury Lane Theatre, London. From the Illustrated London News 14 March 1857. Author’s collection.

  3. The Awadh princes, Sikandar Hashmat and Hamid ‘Ali at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, July 1857. Photograph by Leonida Caldesi. Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.

  4. Prince Sikandar Hashmat, embellished photograph, i.e. the crown and robes have been painted onto an existing photograph. Private collection.

  5. Wajid ‘Ali Shah in Qaisarbagh. Painting on cloth, c. 1851. From the collection of Kenneth and Joyce Robbins.

  6. Wajid ‘Ali Shah celebrates the Basant (Spring) Festival on the river Gomti. Sir William Sleeman, in red coat, sits next to the king. Hussainabad Picture Gallery, Lucknow.

  7. The Great Vine and the Lanka, Qaisarbagh, Lucknow. Artist unknown, c. 1862. © Alkazi Collection of Photography, Delhi.

  8. Wajid ‘Ali Shah is recognised as heir apparent, c.1847. Gouache on paper. Private collection.

  9. Prince Mustafa ‘Ali Khan, elder brother of Wajid Ali Shah. Photograph by Felice Beato, March/April 1858. © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

  10. Wajid ‘Ali Shah greets Viscount Hardinge, the governor general, at Lucknow. c 1847. Gouache on paper. © The British Library, London. Add. Or. 742.

  11. Wajid ‘Ali Shah with wife (possibly Akhtar Mahal) and child. Photograph by Ahmad ‘Ali Khan, early 1850s. From William Low, Lieutenant-Colonel Gould Hunter-Weston (1914).

  12. Wajid ‘Ali Shah, oil painting, possibly from a lost original by George Duncan Beechey. Hussainabad Picture Gallery, Lucknow.

  13. Wajid ‘Ali Shah and Safaraz Mahal, from the Ishqnamah, folio 263, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.

  14. Wajid ‘Ali Shah and Begam Hazrat Mahal from the Ishqnamah, folio 155. The caption reads: The likeness of Iftikharunnisa’ Khanum, Lady Hazratma-hall, before the Sultan-e ’Alam, year 1261 of the Hijrah. c. 1845. Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.

  15. Wajid ‘Ali Shah in his zananah at Lucknow, late 1840s/early 1850s. Gouache on paper. State Museum, Lucknow.

  16. The Sultan Khana today, Garden Reach, Kolkata. Author’s collection.

  17. Wajid ‘Ali Shah, date and photographer unknown. Private collection.

  18. Wajid ‘Ali Shah in old age, date and photographer unknown. © Alkazi Collection of Photography, Delhi.

  4

  THE HOUSE OF FAIRIES

  The king as romantic hero and subject of his own youthful autobiography, the Ishqnamah or Chronicle of Passion. He marries numerous women, but after the move to Bengal there are bitter domestic quarrels as they settle into new premises at Garden Reach. British officials become increasingly critical of the king’s treatment of his wives, and although he argues for divorce on religious grounds, he is reluctantly forced into providing for them. His role as a great lover is severely tarnished.

  One of the few things for which Wajid ‘Ali Shah was not criticised by the British, unless it came under the general heading of debauchery, was his extravagant number of wives. By the end of his life he had married approximately 375 women, more than one for every day of the year. The first question is ‘why?’ and the second must surely be ‘how?’ According to one of his numerous descendants living in Kolkata, the king was such a pious man that he could not allow any females to serve him unless he had contracted a temporary marriage with them. It would not have been decent for him to be alone with them.1 It is an attractive rationalisation and may explain some of the marriages, but certainly not all.

  There is no doubt that Wajid ‘Ali Shah was a sensuo
us man who enjoyed being surrounded by women, as we have seen, with his bodyguard of female African soldiers to accompany him when he went out. As a young man he was not unattractive, with long, luxuriant hair flowing over his shoulders in ringlets, a style he had adopted by 1855. The first existing photographs, which were taken when he was in his thirties, show a stout, probably tall, man with a double chin, prominent breasts and sturdy arms. These were pictures taken by Ahmad ‘Ali Khan, photographer and reputedly the architect of Qaisarbagh. One of the photographs is an intimate family portrait of the king seated on an elaborately carved wooden couch dandling a little daughter on his lap. Next to him sits a dignified young woman, her eyes modestly downcast, but clearly wrapped up in her own thoughts, which do not seem particularly happy ones. This is likely to be Akhtar Mahal, the king’s second official wife, who was married to him when she was eleven years old and was a daughter of the chief minister, ‘Ali Naqi Khan. She would have been about fifteen years old when this photograph was taken.2

  The image most closely associated with Wajid ‘Ali Shah and used in books and on websites about him shows the same plump figure, almost bursting out of his richly embroidered tunic and wearing a sash of four rows of large pearls, with his hand on his sword hilt. His left breast and nipple are artfully exposed between the gold-embroidered borders of his dress. Much debate has taken place over the significance of this, but no satisfactory explanation has been found. Traditionally, Muslims buttoned their jackets on the left and Hindus on the right, but whether the king was making an exaggerated point about his religious affiliation or simply wanted to be portrayed as a sensual man, is not now known. This portrait, which hangs today in the Hussainabad Picture Gallery in Lucknow, is a copy from a lost painting, possibly by the last English artist at the Court of Awadh, George Duncan Beechey.

  However, it was not the king’s physical appearance that determined his frequent marriages. Had he been twice as fat, he would still have been husband to many women, from descendants of the Mughals to Abyssinian slave girls. It was both his authority (and wealth) as king as well as his own priapic nature that led to so many encounters, which inevitably ended in matrimony. The fact that he was prepared to justify and describe this behaviour in writing adds colour to the idea that he wanted to be portrayed, both literally and metaphorically, as a great romantic figure, a lover who was irresistible to women, and who could not resist them either.

  One of the frankest autobiographies of nineteenth-century India is popularly known as the Pari Khana or ‘House of Fairies’.3 It was begun by Wajid ‘Ali Shah in 1847, the year he became king, and was completed two years later. The king was only twenty-six when he decided to write ‘the story of my romances from the earliest years until the present’, but he claimed to have already experienced heartache from his earliest days. Every human being had been granted ‘the taste for love’ by God, he wrote, but what should have been an earthly garden of eternal spring had already become for him an ‘expansive wilderness’. How this happened is described in the first chapter. When he was eight years old, a middle-aged woman servant called Rahiman was hired to look after the young prince. ‘One day, she overpowered me while I slept and began to touch me up. Being a child, I tried escaping out of fear. However, she stopped me and threatened to have me punished by my tutor and guardian. I was upset by the trouble that had entangled me. From that day onwards, it became her habit to fondle me.’ What we would describe today as child abuse continued for two years, until Rahiman was dismissed. She was followed by Ameeran, another maid-servant, whom Wajid ‘Ali Shah described as between thirty-five to forty years old, and always wearing ‘colourful clothes’. Finding him alone in bed one night, she lay down beside him, and this time there was no element of fear or coercion in the unnatural relationship.

  But something had happened that was to have a lasting effect. From then on, wrote Wajid ‘Ali Shah, ‘I have had an attachment to the affairs of love’; and in poetic terms he claimed to be ‘often saddened by the condition of true lovers’ and to condemn the ‘cruel beloved’, who showed no mercy to a young man’s feelings. The image of a heartless woman toying with male affections is very common in Persian and Urdu poetry, and is sometimes given religious overtones in the search for spiritual understanding. But here it seems a straightforward case of a child who was sexualised at an early age and spent the rest of his life seeking fulfilment by marrying vast numbers of women, but not finding much real satisfaction.

  The Pari Khana continues with the young prince falling frequently in love with women he met in and around his father’s palace, the Chattar Manzil on the bank of the river. His teenage passion was for Haji Khanum, a married woman who lived in Faizabad, which meant that meetings were not as frequent as the lovers would have wished. Sometimes she would upset him by mentioning her husband, but neither thought this an impediment to their relationship. Then there was a brief flirtation with another married woman, whose husband appears to have been, from his name, one of the African servants or soldiers employed by the prince’s father, Amjad ‘Ali Shah.

  At the age of fifteen Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s first marriage was arranged. For some reason, which he does not explain, the first girl chosen ‘after considerable deliberation’ did not suit him. (She was later married to his younger brother, Sikandar Hashmat, in a face-saving arrangement.) Another girl was found, and terms for the marriage—that is, the dowry arrangements—had been agreed, but again ‘some problems arose’ and the wedding did not take place. A third girl, selected by an aunt, was proposed and accepted, but it was then discovered that she had leprosy, a fact that her family had tried to conceal.4

  Finally, and by this time probably in some desperation, a suitable girl was found, and although, unusually, she was five years older than her intended husband, the marriage went ahead. It was customary for brides to receive honorific titles on marriage, and so she became Malika Muqqadara-i-Azma Nawab Alam Ara. Later, when she had given birth to her sons and her husband had become king, further titles of Begam Padshah Mahal Sahiba were added. But for simplicity’s sake she was known as Khas Mahal, the ‘Special, or Exceptional Queen’, and this is how she will be referred to in this book. Khas Mahal was the niece of ‘Ali Naqi Khan, whose own daughter was to become Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s second official wife. The attraction of the minister’s niece and then daughter, as first and second wives, was that ‘Ali Naqi Khan himself was the great-grandson of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, which gave him enormous status in Awadh. Curiously this is something of which British officials seemed unaware, often referring to him in detrimental terms, and failing to appreciate the importance of the Mughal bloodline and its connectivity with that of the Awadh royal family.

  There was something even more curious in Khas Mahal’s background. Although of impeccably noble descent, she had an Anglo-Indian grandmother, whose original name was Sally Begam. Sally was the illegitimate daughter of a former British Resident at the Lucknow Court, Gabriel Harper, and an unknown Indian woman. Harper refused to acknowledge the little girl as his own, and it was left to Major General Claude Martin to ‘adopt’ her when the Resident left Lucknow in 1787. (Both Martin and Harper appear in the well-known painting by Johann Zoffany entitled ‘Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match’.) By the time Sally was thirteen years old, Martin had taken her to bed, as he did with his other ‘adopted’ girls.5 On his death in 1800, armed with a generous life-time pension from Martin, Sally took off for Calcutta, where she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, who was named Barati. It is not known who Barati’s father was, except that it was certainly not Claude Martin, who was infertile due to various medical conditions. What might have seemed like a huge handicap for Sally—an illegitimate daughter when she herself was still in her teens—proved not to be the case. Perhaps it was that generous pension, but Sally made a very good marriage to Prince Muzaffar Bakht, a grandson of the Emperor Shah Alam II. Barati also married a Muslim nobleman, Sayyid ‘Ali Khan, possibly as a secondary wife, and it was their daught
er who became the queen of Awadh, Khas Mahal.

  His first marriage did not slow Wajid ‘Ali Shah down in his quest for romantic love, although there was at first a compatibility between the newly-wedded couple. Khas Mahal herself was a poet, writing under the pen name (takhallus) of ‘Alam’, and there were certainly times of happiness as husband and wife read their poems out to each other.6 Later Wajid ‘Ali Shah was to name one of his garden houses after his first wife—the Alam Bagh. But by the time Pari Khana was composed, Wajid ‘Ali Shah had already contracted a substantial number of marriages, possibly as many as twenty, including that to Khas Mahal.

  How was this possible, when orthodox Islam limited the number of wives to four, with conditions that each wife be treated equally? The differences between the civil law of the Sunnis and the Shi‘as were examined at considerable length in nineteenth-century India, not least because British judges and lawyers needed to have this information to administer justice, but also from a sense of curiosity about the country that was rapidly falling, state by state, into British hands. Sir William Jones, the great scholar of ancient India, had supervised the translation of A Digest of Mohummudan Law from the Arabic, which laid down the imamiyyah (Shi‘a) code of jurisprudence in temporal matters. The Digest was published in 1805 and became the standard work of reference, which was still being used and updated a century later.