Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah

by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

  Indignantly she stated that although it might be reasonable to require a written promise from a ‘concubine’, as she dismissively called the mut‘ah wives, it was an insult to demand a signature from her, who could not be cast aside. She wished to please the king in what she did, but was not going to sign the affadavit. The second official wife, Akhtar Mahal, similarly refused to sign, which made Wajid ‘Ali Shah ‘much displeased’ with them. But male relatives of the two queens defended them robustly, and were extremely indignant that they had ever been asked to sign such a document.

  The truth, or at least a plausible explanation, behind the affidavit story came from the diwan of Khas Mahal. He said that his employer, the queen, had tried to persuade her husband to cut back his expenditure, particularly as he owed nearly 4 lakhs to the unpleasant Safdar ‘Ali and also had to pay back the loan made to him by the British government while he was in prison. The munshi had been overcharging the king outrageously for items supplied, and was now afraid that the two queens would demand an enquiry into his accounts. The affidavit was a ploy to alienate the husband from his wives and deprive them ‘of any influence’ with him.35 Admittedly it sounds far-fetched, but it is a further illustration of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s gullibility, not to mention his ability to fall for tall stories spun by those who wished to manipulate him for their own ends.

  Another case of wife-bullying was reported in 1865 when Begam Khanum Sahibah, a second-class mut‘ah wife, reported that she had been robbed of jewellery worth half a lakh of rupees (£5,000) by the superintendent of the king’s mahals, Nawab Julus ud-daulah, and three male ‘companions’. The begam said she had been tricked into entering a carriage with all her belongings ‘on the pretext of changing her residence’.36 She was driven to a house in Calcutta, told to get out, and immediately had her property and jewellery seized by the four men ‘who stated that they had the authority of their master [Wajid ‘Ali Shah] for so acting. The house where she was left proved to be a house of ill-fame.’ The agent, Malleson, carried out a thorough investigation, which included interviewing Wajid ‘Ali Shah, several members of his household, and the ex-minister who had formerly been in charge of the wives. In the end the case failed because the king denied giving the begam any jewellery at all. He said she would not have been able to purchase half a lakh’s worth from the low wage she was on, which was only Rs16 a month. She had been dismissed ‘on account of her quarrelsome disposition by order of the King’.37 Although there was insufficient evidence to prove the theft, Malleson said he wanted to make it clear to the king ‘and those who surrounded him, that no act of tyranny or oppression towards his dependants should pass unnoticed, and that the pretext of his authority would be no protection to those who might violate the laws of the land’. The outcome was unsatisfactory for Khanum Sahibah, but another marker had been put down by the British government showing that its attitude was hardening towards the king’s treatment of his women. This was to lead to confrontation in the next decade between two opposing ideologies, when changing British views collided with the traditional mindset of the king.

  A word needs to be said about the agents appointed to the king, because it is through their eyes and their reports that we see Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s women and chart the deterioration in his relationships with his chief wives. Their official title was ‘Agents of the Governor General with the King’, and these men, all army officers, were the link between the deposed king and the governor general. Their role was a diminished version of the post that the British Residents to the Court of Awadh had previously undertaken, with the difference that while the Residents had had the task of reporting and monitoring all pertinent events in Awadh before its annexation, the agents now had the limited task of reporting only on the king’s actions in exile. Wajid ‘Ali Shah had no choice over who was appointed as his agent, any more than he had had over the Residents at his Court.

  George Bruce Malleson, the third agent, had served in the Bengal infantry and fought during the Second Burmese War. He was a scholarly, somewhat pedantic man, best known for the six-volume History of the Indian Mutiny. His fellow author, John Kaye, had published the first volume in 1864, a year before Malleson took up his post. It contains the standard British description of Wajid ‘Ali Shah before his deposition: ‘Sunk in the uttermost abysses of enfeebling debauchery, the King pushed aside business, which he felt himself incapable of transacting, and went in search of new pleasures. Stimulated to the utmost by unnatural excitements his appetites were satiated by the debaucheries of the Zenana.’38 Although Malleson’s report on the Khanum Sahibah case is factual and unemotive, he must nevertheless have relished the opportunity to lay down the law to this debased character, as he saw him.

  In the summer of 1874, Major Mowbray Thomson was appointed as the seventh agent to the king. If Wajid ‘Ali Shah was not aware of Thomson’s past, then everyone else in British India was. As a young man, Thomson had joined the 53rd Bengal Native Infantry at Cawnpore during the Uprising. (He had previously been an officer with the Cawnpore police.) Fired on by the Nana Sahib’s troops at Satichaura Ghat (known to the British as Massacre Ghat) on the river Ganges, Thomson was one of only four survivors, out of hundreds of British civilians and soldiers, to escape downriver. After reaching the safety of Allahabad, he followed General Havelock back into Cawnpore where the massacre of women and children was discovered, their mutilated bodies thrust down the infamous well. One of the photographs of Wheeler’s Entrenchment, after its recapture by Havelock in 1857, shows Thomson standing in front of the barracks with his arms folded, and the single word ‘mad’ written on the photographer’s notes.39 Thomson was subsequently wounded and invalided home to England, where he was feted as an outstanding hero of the mutiny. On his return to India he was given a civilian post as political agent in Manipur, and then, in an inspired moment at the India Office, was allocated as agent to Wajid ‘Ali Shah, the man whose deposition had been a major cause of the mutiny. Thomson was not a man to be trifled with, and Wajid ‘Ali Shah found much to complain about. In a series of letters, misleadingly called mohubutnamahs (friendly addresses), the king said he had lived in Calcutta ‘with greatest comforts and ease, under the shade of Kindness of the Hon’ble Government and the favours of Political Agents’, but from 1877 things had changed and his ‘religious necessities’ had been interfered with.40

  During the twenty odd years that the king had been in Calcutta he claimed to have ‘released and dismissed’ about forty or fifty of his mut‘ah wives with no objection from the earlier agents assigned to him. But when he decided in 1878 to dispense with twenty-seven wives all at once, Thomson protested; and not only that, the new agent insisted that the king continue to pay them maintenance after their ‘contracts’ had ended. It was to be a long and bitterly fought battle between the two men: the king citing Shi‘a religious custom and usage for his part, and Thomson retaliating in the language of the Victorian gentleman he was, reminding the king of his ‘moral obligations’ towards the women and accusing him of ‘unmanly behaviour’ and of acting like a spoilt child. Had he wished, Wajid ‘Ali Shah could have put up a much better fight than he actually did. He did not employ lawyers or religious leaders to argue his case, but relied on direct appeals to Thomson; and when these failed, he sent expensive but futile telegrams to the governor general Lord Lytton, who was then in Lahore monitoring British progress in the Second Afghan War.

  The king complained of interference with his religious practices. The taking of mut‘ah wives, he said, was done ‘in accordance with the Holy Koran, and the universally accepted customs of the Shia sect’. Women could be married for a ‘limited time and in payment of a limited sum’, and when the contract was over that was that and the former wife became ‘forbidden’. ‘It is repugnant to the religion of the Mohammedans of the Shia sect for such wives to claim maintenance from the husband’, he blustered.41 The religious argument in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s refusal to pay maintenance to his divorced wives was soon abandoned, although i
t would have carried the most weight in a country that was still using A Digest of Mohummudan Law as the basis for legal decisions. Instead the king cited lack of money, misrepresentations from his wives and general ingratitude all round from his numerous family. The story of the king’s children is told in the following chapter, but in summary, trouble started when two of his adult sons, by different mothers, requested an increase in their pitiably small monthly allowances. They were supported by Thomson and the temporary agents appointed when Thomson was on leave. Wajid ‘Ali Shah saw this as an unwarranted interference in his own affairs. ‘It is a recognised rule in domestic circles’, he told Thomson, ‘that the owner of the house alone should have uncontrolled authority over the disposal of his income and over the destinies of his children and wives.’42 This applied to everyone, he added, not just ex-kings, but ‘rich or poor’ alike. Of course had the king been an ordinary individual, and not in receipt of a British pension of 1 lakh of rupees every month, then Thomson’s intervention would have been intrusive, but this was not the case. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was the highest paid pensioner in India, and the British government naturally felt it should have a say in how the pension was spent.

  When the king got his pension for February 1878, which was delayed until the 13th of that month, he found that 2,500 rupees had been deducted from it at source by the government. He took the remaining 97,500 rupees but refused to sign the treasury receipt. The deducted money was paid directly to Prince Farid-ud-din Qadr, now the eldest of the king’s surviving sons,43 who had been struggling along on 90 rupees a month. In spite of further protests from Wajid ‘Ali Shah, the government declined to alter its mind and in fact threatened that if the king did not voluntarily increase the pensions to his dependants, then Mowbray Thomson would be put in charge of all his financial affairs. Instead of agreeing to the government’s not unreasonable order, the king chose a novel form of protest. Thomson was startled to learn at the end of April that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had divorced two of his wives: Mashuq Mahal, the mother of Farid-ud-din Qadr, and Wajid Mahal, whose son had also requested an enhanced pension. It was a spiteful act, punishing two of his oldest wives because their sons, the king’s children, had dared to ask for more money.

  Both women subsequently wrote dignified letters to Thomson describing how their lives had deteriorated during the long years that they shared their husband’s exile.44 Mashuq Mahal described a lost paradise in Lucknow where she was ranked ‘as the Sovereign Queen and proprietress of the whole Kingdom’ and ‘the jewel in the crowns of all the ladies of His Majesty’s household’. She recalled sitting on a golden throne when the king held an open durbar for the women attached to his house. Those attending the durbar brought presents for her and Khas Mahal, and there were salutes and soldiers presenting arms. Both women wore crowns during festivals like Eid. Now she had been divorced on a matter of principle outside her control. ‘I ought not to be sacrificed at the shrine of my husband’s whims’, she wrote, adding that she was now ‘Alone in a foreign place and deserted by a husband for whose sake I flew away from the arms of loving parents, my only hope now lies in the kind promise of Government that all families of His Majesty should be provided for out of the ample and kingly stipend fixed for His Majesty.’

  This moving letter prompted Thomson to write to Alfred Lyall, Secretary to the government of India. He told Lyall that Mashuq Mahal was the king’s first mut‘ah wife, who used to get 3,000 rupees a month, ‘but now she has become aged and suffers only because her son prayed for an adequate allowance’. Mashuq Mahal, whose original name had been Piyari Sahib, was about the same age as her husband, that is, fifty-eight years old, at the time of her divorce. Thomson added that ‘she has, unlike the other ladies in the Ex-King’s household, been always a great favourite of His Majesty and up to the present time I have heard nothing against her character’.

  Wajid Mahal, who was married in 1845 and had an apartment in Qaisarbagh Palace, used to get a monthly salary of 1,000 rupees, which was gradually whittled down to 100 rupees a month. She did not complain but commented that she had received the king’s favours for thirty-three years. Now, ‘if it pleased him to withdraw his favour and subject me to distress and discomfort in my declining years, I could not do better than silently submit to his will’. Immediately following her son’s request, the king had ordered a sepoy guard to be withdrawn from the gate of her house in Kidderpore, which she saw as a public disgrace, indicating that she was no longer worth protecting. ‘What grievous fault had I committed?’ she asked pathetically. ‘In the midst of my grief and anxiety, I cannot but feel amazed as to how His Majesty could have persuaded himself to inflict such a serious indignity on me in my old age, and I would fain believe this to be not the acts of his own unbiased will and judgement, but the work of evil advisors and secret enemies.’ She added, ‘Compared with my position, I am indeed poor.’45

  Wajid Mahal was singled out by Thomson as a particular example of the king’s callousness, even though she had by now moved out of Garden Reach and was ‘known to be in the keeping of’ Maulawi Mir Fazl Ahmad, a former Inspector of the Oude Police Force. She had been ‘a respectable woman in Lucknow’ before the king took up with her, Thomson said, but now she was not only dismissed from the Court, but was in debt too. Wajid ‘Ali Shah angrily refuted this charge, claiming that Wajid Mahal was a female tailor, who worked for one of his ‘official’ wives. She was also a married woman when he first spotted her, but ‘faithlessly leaving off her husband [she] became my mota wife’. He then added with astonishing insouciancy that ‘the said lady was [only] a respectable woman at Lucknow because I increased her respectability; and she has been involved in debt here by her own act … the allegation of her being a woman of respectability and position is quite untrue’.46 What was even worse, he had had to remove her from one house to another in Garden Reach ‘to keep her separate, her selfishness and partiality go to wound my feelings and render my other mota wives bold and refractory’. He added that even one of his official wives (probably Khas Mahal, who comes over as a strong-minded woman) wanted to start interfering with his ‘religious and domestic affairs’. This was indeed a palace mutiny and the women were up in arms. Another mut‘ah wife ‘of a lower order’ called Mussamat Wali Begam, on a salary of 48 rupees a month, he claimed ‘roves from door to door and spends every day with a paramour and every night with another’.

  Wajid ‘Ali Shah seemed completely unaware of how he himself would be seen and judged in his long, ranting letter to the new governor general, Lord Dufferin, who had only been in office for two weeks when this missive landed on his desk. The idea of the king flitting about like some ariel Rubenesque figure, descending at intervals to bestow ‘respectability’ on poor, working-class women with the touch of a magic wand, is both comical and sad. It is too much of a fairy story. But the crux of the matter is that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had not seen that the times were changing. What had seemed to him, if not to others, as romantic and even kingly behaviour thirty years ago in a semi-autonomous kingdom was not acceptable in British India towards the end of the nineteenth century, particularly when the British government was paying his pension. Moved by the plea of Mashuq Mahal, the government ordered the king to pay her a further 2,500 rupees per month. This raised her income and that of her son to 5,000 rupees a month, which Thomson said would enable them to get a house together in Calcutta, to employ guards for the house and ‘to live in comfort and peace and remove them altogether from the baneful influence of Garden Reach’. He added, ‘Threats were also conveyed to the Prince and his mother that His Majesty would forcibly turn them away’ if they did not leave their Garden Reach home within three days. The government order was conveyed to the king on 8 July 1878.

  Three weeks later, after Thomson had closed up his Chowringhee office for the day, he received an unexpected visit from nawab Amir ‘Ali, the king’s accountant and manager. The king, reported Amir ‘Ali, had retaliated against the government’s order by suddenly divorcing twenty-
seven of his mut‘ah wives. The divorces had all taken place on 31 July. Thomson found this hard to believe at first, and sought confirmation of it from the king the next morning. Then, rather rashly (for Thomson was not a diplomat, but a retired soldier), instead of waiting for that confirmation, he let fly in a letter for which he subsequently had to apologise. If the news was correct, he said, then ‘Your Majesty will be acting most unjustly towards these ladies who are entirely at your mercy, and who at their time of life will find this treatment exceedingly hard and unkindly, having all their lives been accustomed to the luxuries of your zenana … the driving away of a few old ladies will look more like the pettish anger of a spoilt child at finding itself thwarted in doing that which it should not have done.’47

  The king, responding immediately by letter, chose to ignore the jibe about a ‘spoilt child’ for the moment (although he filed it away for future use). It was true, he said, that he had terminated the marriage contracts of twenty-seven mut‘ah wives. This had been done for financial reasons, as there was an ‘insufficiency of income’. By divorcing them, ‘this absolves me from my obligation to support them and takes away all responsibility as to the course of life they may lead in future’. He told Thomson to ‘strike out the names from your register’ and helpfully added a list of the women’s names, with their fathers’ names, where known, and the dates of the marriages, which ranged from 1 November 1859 to 25 August 1869. It was evident that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had celebrated his release from Fort William in the way he knew best, by taking on yet more wives—three in one day alone, on 16 November 1859.48 Not surprisingly, given the king’s strong sentimental attachment to his place of birth, a number of the new wives had come from Lucknow.

  Faced with this fait accompli, Thomson could only express his regret that the news of the mass divorce was true and that he considered it an ‘unmanly, and at the same time, useless measure of economy’. The sharp exchanges of August 1878 between the king and Thomson read as though the two men were engaged in a bitter personal game of chess, and to some extent they were. Thomson had a fair measure of autonomy, as long as he kept the government of India informed about what was going on by writing to the Secretary to the Foreign Department. Guidance and comments on his reports came back down to Thomson from the governor general and council, via the secretary. The agent could also make recommendations to government about future strategies to deal with the king and his vast, chaotic household. This is what Thomson sat down to do in the autumn of 1878, meticulously working out how the king’s monthly pension should be expended.49 Since the government had already threatened earlier in the year to put Thomson in charge of the king’s financial affairs if he refused to pay his dependants, this was sensible forward planning.