There was no element of snobbery, as we would understand it today, in the king’s choice of female companions. Once his nikah wives had been selected from good families and had started producing heirs, he was free to choose whom he wanted and clearly found lower-class women, maid-servants and African women perfectly acceptable, as long as they were pretty. Some of these women were introduced to Wajid ‘Ali Shah by intermediaries, for the king did not often go roaming the streets of the old city in person. Money certainly changed hands, and in at least one case it was the girl’s mother who brought her daughter to the palace. Others were promoted by his first mut‘ah wives, who gave him young women as ‘gifts’ in order to please him, and Khas Mahal supplied eight of the fairies with extravagant outfits and jewellery. Sexual desire among princes for lower-class women has been named the Cophetua syndrome, after the legendary king who fell in love with a beautiful beggar woman, and this is certainly a recurring theme in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s love life. It may be that his feelings of superiority and power in such a relationship added to the sexual frisson.
His father, the saintly Amjad ‘Ali Shah, had not been immune either, falling in love with a greengrocer’s daughter in middle age. Sultan Mahal, who came from ‘the humblest class of society and in very poor circumstances’, was spotted delivering vegetables to the palace when Amjad ‘Ali Shah ‘conceived for her that passion which led to her becoming his wife’. Sadly both king and queen died within a few months of each other in 1847. Wajid ‘Ali Shah then tried to claim the £10,000 which his father had willed to Sultan Mahal, but her mother and brother boldly put in a counterclaim as her heirs. The case went all the way up to the governor general, who ruled that the greengrocer’s family was entitled to the money, a decision that Wajid ‘Ali Shah accepted fairly gracefully.23 This story shows that there was not only social mobility for a lucky few, but that wealth could trickle down too. The financial gain for a mut‘ah wife was not great, particularly if, or when, the marriage ended, but it was better than remaining among Lucknow’s poor. And of course it did widen the gene pool in a society where cousin marriage, or marriage between relatives, was common.
There were fundamental changes after the move to Calcutta, which affected the ‘female establishment’ perhaps even more deeply than it did the king. The zananah was recreated at Garden Reach, and we know more about its many inhabitants there than in their Qaisarbagh days. This is because the bulk of the money that supported the wives now came from the British government, not the land revenues of Awadh. This gave British officials more authority to interfere in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s domestic arrangements (while appearing not to do so), and also led to a few of the wives complaining directly to the British agents about their husband’s behaviour towards them.
When the king left Lucknow on 13 March 1856, he took with him, as well as his mother, three of his wives, including Khas Mahal and Akhtar Mahal, the first two nikah or official wives. The fourth woman may have been Mashuq Mahal, the first mut‘ah wife and one of the king’s early passions. An unknown number of wives were left behind in Lucknow, as well as nine divorced women, including Hazrat Mahal and her young son. Although a considerable amount of work has been done on the Awadh family tree, the exact number of wives and children will probably never be fully known. In part this may be because mut‘ah marriages do not always require witnesses, and secondly because no records appear to have been retained in public ownership when the Garden Reach establishment was broken up.
When it became known in Lucknow that the king was not going to travel to England to plead his case, and had in fact rented a large compound at Garden Reach, a number of wives and children travelled to Calcutta to join him. The local District Magistrate, Mr Ferguson, decided to find out how many of the king’s people were already established at Garden Reach in June 1858, by which time Wajid ‘Ali Shah himself had spent a year in prison. Apart from the king’s personal assistants and servants, who numbered nearly six hundred, there were also twenty ‘nobles and favourites’ with their own households, and Ferguson found ‘183 Begums and other females, including servants and slaves girls’. He was also told that 170 houses in the compound had been put aside for the king’s women, although it was not possible for his staff to examine them, as the men were not permitted to approach these female quarters.24
Ferguson describes the zananah buildings both as ‘houses’ and as ‘thatched huts’, or bungalows. In the confusion and disruption of the flight from Lucknow, the ensuing Uprising and the imprisonment of the king, there had been little time to plan the new settlement in Calcutta. There was an ad hoc nature to the establishment, a kind of refugee camp atmosphere which persisted for years, even after proper houses had been built. This initial impression was to colour the views of British officials dealing with the king and his numerous dependants and staff, particularly as the area was not under their control, although only a few miles distant from the seat of British government in India. As many as 250 bungalows and houses were counted during the first survey, and the magistrate promised to watch ‘most carefully’ the retainers of the ex-king, although he thought ‘The presence of the Begams and other females is, to my mind, a pledge for good conduct…’
Not surprisingly during the Uprising, when Lucknow had suffered first from the influx of supporters besieging the Residency, then from the dreadful revenge of the British, many inhabitants had indeed been refugees, some seeking safety in the East India Company’s territory. It has been estimated that the city’s population fell by around 50,000 people following the king’s departure and the events of the following year. Many of these had been notionally connected to the Court—soldiers in the king’s regiments, tradespeople, craftsmen, builders and animal keepers, to name only a few who found their livelihood gone when the king left. The position of the wives was different. They had been taken into the sheltered palace life, usually as girls or very young women. Some had been ‘bought’ by the king, and could not return to their parents, who themselves benefited financially from their daughters’ royal marriages. Even with Wajid ‘Ali Shah imprisoned, and the date of his release unknown, the wives continued to arrive in Calcutta, including at least two who had been divorced but had children by the king.
Between April and September 1859 more wives and courtiers made the journey from Lucknow, some in groups and some alone, travelling with their servants. Only one wife, Nawab Zaib Mahal Sahibah, who arrived on 13 July, went back to Lucknow in September ‘on account of bad health, the climate not agreeing with her’.25 The others settled down in their new quarters and made the best they could of their altered lives. The Pari Khana must have seemed to them now like a distant fairyland. There were financial difficulties too. The king had had to borrow money from the British government during his imprisonment, and his generous pension of 12 lakhs per annum was not finally agreed until his release in July 1859. When the payments began in the autumn he went into an orgy of spending, but mainly on himself, making up for all those months of deprivation. Major Herbert reported that at a time when Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s ‘considerable resources are … required for the purpose of providing accommodation for the ladies and others who are with the King’, his wives were living in ‘thatched mat huts, which it is desirable should be replaced so far as is possible with brick houses’.26
Khas Mahal, the first and senior official wife, was outraged at the situation, and wrote to Lord Canning requesting a separate pension for herself, independent of what her husband was receiving. Her own expenses were ‘thousands of rupees a month’ and were impossible to reduce. She claimed that as she and her son were heirs of ‘His Majesty the King [Wajid ‘Ali Shah] it was incumbent and fitting for the British Government in consideration of the connexion between the two Courts, in every way to protect the family’. The implication that the court of the ex-king in exile was in any way comparable with the court of Queen Victoria was not well received. Major Herbert was instructed to tell Khas Mahal that her request was rejected, and to remind her that her hu
sband’s allowance, equivalent then to about £10,000 per month, had been given to him during his lifetime for his own support and the support of his family.27
However, Khas Mahal’s hopes were raised when she learned that the crown jewels were to be restored to the king early in January 1860. With considerable foresight on the part of Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Awadh, the jewels had been forcibly taken from the Qaisarbagh treasury and into the Residency for safe keeping, shortly before the siege began. They had been buried in barrels under the lawn in front of the Resident’s house, and remained there for nearly five months while the British and their Indian supporters faced death and near starvation as the Residency was bombarded daily by its besiegers. When rescue came at last in November 1857, the jewels were disinterred and somehow got to safety together with those people who survived the siege. On their way down to the treasury at Fort William, the jewels and ornaments, including several tinsel crowns, had been catalogued and repacked into thirteen ‘strong timber boxes’.28 Their arrival was an unexpected bonus for the king, when so much had been looted. Khas Mahal immediately put in a written claim for ‘certain articles’ of her own among the treasures, but submitted it to Major Herbert, who was now in the unfortunate and embarrassing position of intermediary between husband and wife. What should have been a domestic matter became the subject of government correspondence. Herbert was told that the queen could have her articles ‘provided the King does not refute the claim of [Khas Mahal]. Should he do so as respects any of the jewels she claims it will be necessary to put the disputed articles aside, in safe custody, until the dispute is settled.’29 Whether the queen’s claims were accepted is not clear, because the jewels were soon put up by Wajid ‘Ali Shah for auction in Calcutta at Hamilton & Co., the well-known jewellers. They fetched 5 lakhs (about £50,000), a sum which went only a small way towards his enormous annual expenditure.30
This unhappy incident demonstrates the final breakdown of the relationship between the king and his first wife, to be followed by bitter accusations. On 10 April 1860 a devastating fire swept through Garden Reach. At this time of the year, when everything was bone dry before the monsoon, the thatched bungalows with their bamboo supports and coconut matting partitions would have gone up like fireworks. Major Herbert, visiting Wajid ‘Ali Shah a couple of days later, could not resist pointing out that had his advice on replacing the thatched huts with brick houses been followed, ‘the fire and its disastrous consequences could not have occurred’.31 The king’s reaction was impassive, and he appeared to the agent to be unable to reflect on what to do for the best. Herbert then visited Khas Mahal, after an urgent request the previous evening by her diwan, Mahdi Quli Khan. He found the queen, her son the prince, her daughter-in-law and their attendants crammed into four rooms in her fire-damaged bungalow. Two further rooms were unusable. The queen was deeply distressed, not only because of the fire, but by the subsequent behaviour of her husband. Immediately after the conflagration she had sought shelter in her husband’s brick-built house, but when she returned to her own bungalow to see what had been salvaged, she was told by the king to stay there. Khas Mahal immediately sent a note to her husband begging him to provide her with suitable accommodation, and to increase her allowance from the Rs900 a month which was so inadequate for her needs that she had refused to accept it.
Later that same evening, the king sent round to her ravaged bungalow what sounds like a group of bully-boys, led by munshi Safdar ‘Ali, a dubious and deceitful man, as we shall see. He and a ‘concourse of men’ surrounded her house and in the name of the king demanded entrance to examine some boxes that had been saved from the fire, and to find out if any valuables were among them. Khas Mahal refused to admit him, and her son indignantly pointed out that it was improper for the munshi even to think of entering a zananah dwelling. A crowd of the prince’s supporters quickly gathered and violence would have broken out had Safdar ‘Ali not had the wisdom to withdraw. An answer to the queen’s letter came the next day from her husband. Wajid ‘Ali Shah said that he had given her as much allowance as he could afford, and as for new accommodation, he had just given orders ‘to all members of his suite to disperse and find lodgings where they could and that she may go and live where she likes’. Tearfully Khas Mahal told Major Herbert she took this to mean that she was being ordered to leave the damaged bungalow, that she was an invalid without any means, and that to live apart from the king would be a disgrace to her.32
In his weekly diary report, which was sent regularly to the Foreign Department, Herbert can be seen struggling to remain sympathetic, but at the same time trying to distance himself from these distressing domestic disputes. He advised the queen and her son to remain put, but they insisted that if nothing was done, Wajid ‘Ali Shah would have them forcibly thrown out. This was unlikely, replied Herbert, because the king would certainly not want to bring such disgrace upon himself and his own family. But of course he could not interfere in the king’s private affairs. Was not Herbert, as a government official and agent to the king, there to protect the family and look after their affairs, demanded the prince? No, that was a mistaken assumption, Herbert replied; but he did promise ‘to bring their statement to the knowledge of the Government’. His diplomatic skills were being painfully stretched in trying to adopt a neutral position in the royal family’s disputes, yet at the same time acting as advisor and critic to the king. He concluded his report by stating that Khas Mahal and her household were embarrassed for want of money, and the king seemed to have given up. His own affairs were in ‘great disorder. He does not seem to take any serious thought of the real wants of his dependents and it appears hopeless…’
Wajid ‘Ali Shah may have suffered some kind of breakdown at this point, which paralysed him into inaction. The previous year had seen life-changing events for him—his release from Fort William after two years of imprisonment, the realisation that his pension was a fixed sum for the remainder of his life, the shabby conditions of his new, permanent home and now the fire. But like a shopaholic suffering from compulsive buying disorder, he could not stop spending money he did not have. He had wanted to purchase a further estate at Garden Reach that lay between the two houses he had already bought. Major Herbert reported in a diary entry that after the dreadful fire Wajid ‘Ali Shah would have been able to buy the estate for much less. Presumably it was fire-damaged too, but the king was so impatient to have it that his staff made ridiculous offers to the owner, who naturally held out for more. Prepared to offer the equivalent of £9,500 for the property, nearly a month’s pension, the king was neatly forestalled by Khas Mahal, who moved into the property herself.33 After her plea of poverty to Herbert, money had obviously been found or borrowed by the queen from somewhere. Less fortunate and less wealthy wives were forced to move out of Garden Reach and ‘are now dispersed about the neighbourhood living wherever they have been able to find lodgings’.
Major Herbert’s reports, and those of subsequent agents, show that although the chief wives were unseen, they were certainly not unheard. Protocol meant that the agents did not meet the women face to face but through intermediaries, sometimes a son or a diwan. Purdah-nishin women, that is those who were concealed behind a veil, could only meet a very limited number of close male relatives; to men outside this small circle they were haram, or forbidden. All their servants were female, apart from the eunuchs, who appropriately inhabited a kind of no-man’s-land between the zananah and the masculine, or public, part of the palace. But this did not prevent the wives from running their own, often influential, power-bases. The establishment of Khas Mahal, as chief wife, was a smaller, female version of the king’s, with tailors, washerwomen, nursery maids, bedchamber assistants, sweepers, hookahberdars (women who prepared the hookah), storytellers and punkahwalis, who operated the large cloth fans. Other women prepared paan, the addictive betel leaf and areca nut delicacy, and sherbet drinks. The male diwans dealt with matters outside the zananah, negotiating loans with the Calc
utta moneylenders on behalf of the queens, who ran up respectable debts on their own account (though not on the scale of their husband), and carrying messages to and from their lawyers. There was no need to go shopping, because everything the women wished to purchase was brought to them for their approval and displayed on the floor in front of them.
Inevitably there was rivalry, intrigue, tale-bearing and backbiting between the establishments of the different queens, and this was sometimes exacerbated by mischievous male interference. A number of mut‘ah wives had decided to return to Lucknow, despite the loss in status that this would involve. Choti Begam was the first to go, in the autumn of 1859,34 and her departure led to others asking to leave, perhaps not permanently, but certainly until the problem of accommodation had been sorted out. As a result, Wajid ‘Ali Shah was advised by Safdar ‘Ali (the man who had tried to enter Khas Mahal’s bungalow) that the king should get all his wives to sign an affidavit promising to obey all his wishes, and admitting that if they failed to do so, they would forfeit all legal claims on the king. This was undoubtedly in response to the fear that if enough wives left, the king would have to pay out large sums as leaving presents. When a copy of the affidavit was presented to Khas Mahal, she flew into another rage and refused to sign it.
Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Page 17