At some point during his calculations, he realised that a solution to the problem of the newly discarded wives lay in the divorce, earlier that year, of Mashuq Mahal. Because she and her son were ordered out of the rent-free accommodation in Garden Reach, where they had lived for the last twenty years, new living quarters in Calcutta had to be found and paid for. An additional expense was hiring security guards for the new house. If these costs were to be multiplied by twenty-seven, Thomson mused, and then deducted from the king’s monthly pension before it reached him, the ex-wives could be provided for at no cost to the government, considerable irritation to the king, and benefit to the women who would be shifted from the ‘baneful influence’ of Garden Reach. It was an ingenious move, and a chart was compiled showing how much each woman could expect. Because the women had been on different monthly salaries, from 26 to 50 rupees a month, the sums had to be worked out proportionately, calculating an extra one fourth of their allowances to pay for the hire of new houses. The sums involved were not large, but the principle was important. Although adamant that he would not pay maintenance for the divorced wives, the king agreed that he would not turn them out of their Garden Reach homes until the governor general had responded to Thomson’s report, thus giving a period of grace to the worried women and their children.
Thomson was urged by the government of India to try to persuade the king to meet his financial obligations. It was estimated that if all the wives, ex-wives and dependants were to get a reasonable, but not over-generous pension, it would cost the king 24,500 rupees a month, just over a quarter of his own monthly pension. This calculation infuriated and alarmed Wajid ‘Ali Shah. The realisation that the government could, and would, deduct the money prompted him to make a rare visit to Calcutta to protest in person to Thomson. The agent duly reported the bizarre conversation that took place in his office on 24 February 1879. ‘How can a small quantity of oil [be] spread over a large surface?’ asked the king, which Thomson interpreted as meaning how could the royal pension provide for so many dependants. When he first started receiving 100,000 rupees a month back in 1859, the king complained, he did not have so many people to provide for. One can imagine Thomson manfully holding back the obvious retort about more wives often leading to more children. Instead, his reported words were, ‘Why, Your Majesty would not even cease to provide for any old dog or other animal in your menagerie when it became old and worn-out?’ referring ‘to his wives who in their old age he wished to dismiss penniless’.
The king’s answer was, ‘But the women are old and ugly, and can bear no more children; they are no use to me.’
‘Then who is to provide for them in their old age?’
‘The Government, whose ryots [peasants] they are.’50
How far Wajid ‘Ali Shah had fallen from that self-deceived vision of the passionate lover of Lucknow, forty years earlier! Did he really see women only as providers of children? Had he never realised that to grow old with a loved companion is not to mind the inroads of age into one’s partner? Clearly not. By the end of his life he was to sever all links with his long-suffering family.
The king’s relationships with his numerous wives and children, although taking up a large part of his time and energy, and that of the agents, were in some ways easier for the government to deal with than other facets of his behaviour. There were certainly flashpoints that called for delicate negotiations, but ultimately these were domestic matters. His wives suffered as much, if not more, in the move to Calcutta and in adjusting to their changed circumstances. Not only did they lose the comfort of palace life in Lucknow, but also in many cases their income. As the king grew older, he became spiteful towards the women he had married thirty years earlier, including some of the ‘fairies’. Their plight moved government officials to intercede on the wives’ behalf.
5
AT GARDEN REACH
Life in the Bengal palaces, as Wajid ‘Ali Shah recreates the vanished world of Lucknow. He is wildly extravagant and continually in debt, which is made worse by his servants, who fleece him shamelessly. British officials try to rescue him from his own folly. They also try, unsuccessfully, to control the royal estate through policing and improved sanitation.
When the Chief Justice of Calcutta, Sir Lawrence Peel, retired to England in 1855, he settled down on the Isle of Wight and built himself a pleasant house, which he named ‘Garden Reach’. This was a tribute to the area that lay south-west of Calcutta where Peel had lived during the latter years of his Indian career. Wealthy British officials had begun building country or ‘garden’ houses in the 1770s along a two-mile stretch on the southern bank of the Hugli. Although referred to as ‘bungalows’, these were substantial two- or three-storeyed houses, often Palladian in style, with fashionable bow-fronted facades. A decade later, when the artist William Hodges travelled upriver, he wrote in his journal: ‘As the ship approaches Calcutta the river narrows; that which is called the Garden Reach, presents a view of handsome buildings, on a flat surrounded by gardens; these are villas belonging to the opulent inhabitants of Calcutta.’ They were indeed very handsome buildings, and well able to rival the large houses along Chowringhee that gave Calcutta its proud name, ‘City of Palaces’. At Garden Reach there were no constraints on space, so each villa stood in its own large garden compound, with separate buildings for stables, kitchens and servants’ quarters. The area was known locally as Matiya Burj, which means a clay or earthen tower, as an old watchtower of unbaked bricks had stood somewhere here to guard the bend in the river that led up-country.
William Hickey, the Calcutta lawyer more famous for his entertaining memoirs than his career at the Bar, hired a garden house here for the three ‘horridly dusty and disagreeable months of March, April and May’ in 1791.1 It was a ‘very large and commodious residence in Garden Reach, the last in that line, about seven miles and a half from Calcutta, beautifully situated within a few yards of the river, affording us the advantage of water as well as land carriage’. Hickey’s rented house, which he shared with a friend, had nine large apartments, with four smaller ones on the ground floor. There were ‘six very spacious ones above stairs’, two of which had their own private staircase. There was a noble dining room, a similar breakfast room, a spacious sitting or drawing-room and an adjoining billiard room. Such luxury had a price too, and Hickey found his share of the hire, at the end of three months, was over 7,000 rupees. A similar house at Garden Reach was sold for 35,000 rupees a few years later to Lord Wellesley, who intended to set up a college here for junior East India Company staff. Wellesley imagined something along the lines of an Oxford or Cambridge college with professors, and in fact he purchased another four houses along the riverbank for this purpose. The Court of Directors in London was horrified by the potential expense involved, and the idea of the college at Garden Reach was dropped, leaving the Company with a number of large houses to rent or sell. However, it remained a popular place among the legal profession, and apart from Sir Lawrence Peel it was also home to two Chief Justices, Sir Edward Ryan and Sir Charles Grey. In the late 1830s the road from Chandpal Ghat (in central Calcutta) to Garden Reach was built and opened ‘to the public’ on payment of a toll. By 1855 the road was made over to the East India Company, who now took on its maintenance.
A recent history of the area cites a map of the 1840s, where the grand houses along the southern riverbank were prosaically named Bungalow No. 1, Bungalow No. 2 and so on.2 (There were thirteen ‘bungalows’ in all.) Peel’s former house was Bungalow No. 11, which now belonged to Chand Mehtab Bahadur, Raja of Burdwan. Following the hurried flight from Lucknow and preparations for the journey onwards to England, Wajid ‘Ali Shah was installed in No. 11 early in June 1856, less than two weeks after his arrival in Calcutta.3 The king’s new home was a smaller version of an existing building in the centre of Calcutta called Metcalfe Hall. Constructed in 1844 and named after the acting governor general of the time, it was considered one of the finest examples of classical Grecian architectu
re in the East, with its thirty graceful Corinthian columns supporting the entablature. Peel’s house was a cosier, more domestic building, and not intended as a grand imperial statement, but it was still of sufficient pretension to attract Wajid ‘Ali Shah.
The building was cruciform in shape, with four wide verandahs behind its twenty-four double-height columns. Inside, a fine central staircase rose to the second storey, with its high-ceilinged rooms, all interconnected with tall doors so that the river breezes could waft through and cool the humid air. Apart from being well removed from the noise and dirt of central Calcutta, No. 11 had its own private ghat, or landing stage, onto the Hugli. It was advantageous to have the choice between river or road transport into Calcutta, as William Hickey had found. Even after it had been adopted as a public highway, for many years Garden Reach Road was little more than a narrow track running between the thatched huts of villagers and enveloping trees, so a river journey would certainly have been quicker and more comfortable. Wajid ‘Ali Shah could, if he wished, sit on the northern verandah of his new house and look directly across the garden and over the Hugli, a much grander river than the Gomti, which ran beside his first home in Lucknow. Bungalow No. 11 was renamed Sultan Khana, or King’s House. Little is known about how it was adapted from an English gentleman’s residence into a palace for a king in exile, except that a private mosque was built adjoining the house for daily worship, equivalent to the private chapel of grand country houses in England. Unusually, the mosque had no domes or minarets, and was a flat-roofed building. Several rooms inside the Sultan Khana were decorated with chandeliers and ‘set apart as imambarahs’ for private worship. It was reported that the king’s sons were not allowed into their father’s house at all, and that his wives were only allowed into the imambarahs ‘on certain special days’.4
Two adjoining garden houses were also rented. The king had been followed from the Lucknow Court by many of his ‘principal officers’ whom he wanted to have near him. It was discovered after his death that, although only a tenant at first, the king immediately issued firmans (official written orders) to these men and their families, granting them specific plots of ground as building sites within the compounds. ‘In addition to these occupiers of houses who are in possession of firmans from the King, there are a large number of persons who either on the verbal sanction of His Majesty or probably in many cases, with no sanction at all, but with the connivance of his officers have squatted on the land and built tenements for which they now exact rent.’5 And in some cases tenants refused to pay rent, claiming that they were occupying the land on a mu‘afi tenure, that is, a rent-free agreement. It was a recipe for chaos and, as we have seen, within two years of the king’s arrival there were already an estimated 250 thatched bungalows and houses on the site in June 1858, all tucked into three large compounds. The king’s long imprisonment in Fort William meant that nobody was in charge of the Garden Reach area, and the Burdwan raja, who owned the site, did not choose to intervene.
At the time of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s release in July 1859, he was paying the raja a rent of 1,000 rupees a month. However, he was anxious to buy the Sultan Khana, because he said that as a tenant he could not get proper repairs made to the house. He also wanted to purchase the neighbouring two houses and compounds, where his staff and courtiers were already squatting.6 Major Herbert, the agent, was sympathetic to the king’s request, passing it on to government for approval. A sum of 3 lakhs of rupees was allocated for the purchase of the Sultan Khana and the two neighbouring houses, which were promptly named Asad Manzil and Murassa Manzil. Knowing the king’s financial habits, not to mention his debts, the purchase money for the properties went straight from the government treasury to the vendors. (Many years later, government officials queried whether the 3 lakhs had been a loan to Wajid ‘Ali Shah or an outright gift, but at the time it seems to have been considered as compensation for his palaces in Lucknow, which had been seized by the British.)7 The king paid the annual land tax on the houses from his own purse. Once in full possession of the three houses, and with his pension backdated to 9 July 1859, Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s extravagance knew no bounds. Major Herbert now reported that he had heard ‘from various quarters that a wasteful expenditure is going on’.
Herbert had been approached by Babu Ramprasad Roy, a government-appointed official of the civil court, who was trying to get some outstanding accounts paid by the king. When Herbert said he had no control over the king’s financial affairs, Roy replied that some form of control should be established and warned that the government would find itself in ‘considerable trouble’ over the king’s debts if nothing was done. Roy said that some up-country bankers had consulted him professionally as to whether they should accept ‘certain negotiations for considerable pecuniary transactions’ that the king’s courtiers were proposing. This was potentially alarming. The ‘up-country’ bankers were likely to be established at Lucknow, and although the flow of people from Lucknow to Calcutta could not be halted, unless everyone was arrested, the less communication Wajid ‘Ali Shah had with his old haunts the better. And what could these ‘certain negotiations’ entail?8
The agent had no reason to doubt what he was hearing, because he knew ‘it is the drift of the King to deny himself nothing and to incur debt’ in order to demonstrate that his pension, generous as it was, would not meet his needs. It was a risky game and ‘a course which cannot fail eventually to produce a great deal of trouble’. Lord Canning stepped in to say that if Wajid ‘Ali Shah continued like this it would ‘infalliably lead him into embarrassment and distress from which he will look in vain to the Government of India to extricate him’. ‘Ample provision’ had been made for him, and under no circumstances would the government intervene to relieve him from the ‘embarrassment of debt’.9 Years later, Wajid ‘Ali Shah justified money spent on the buildings by claiming that ‘the three houses that were given me were from their fashion and style and their then existing accommodation fit for habitation of no more than twelve Europeans. I have had to spend lakhs of rupees to alter and convert them into Hindoostani fashion and style.’ He added, somewhat unbelievably, that he had even ‘had to curtail his daily expenses’.10 Just how unlimited expenditure was to transform three large European houses into a huge new palace complex we shall see later. For the moment there was considerable anxiety among British officials about the king’s indebtedness.
Canning learned that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had been ‘trying to raise money in the bazaar’ to cover his expenses, which was certainly embarrassing for the ex-king, but also as embarrassing for the British government, which faced continuing criticism of its treatment of the deposed monarch. Any suggestion that the richest princely house in India had been deliberately impoverished by the government could have had dangerous consequences in a country so recently emerging from the Uprising. And yet the government could not be seen to bail out a man who was receiving the equivalent of £10,000 a month. The king had to be saved from himself and his extravagant ways; that was the clear message from government. But in fact for the remainder of his life Wajid ‘Ali Shah made constant pleas for more funds, and there were a series of ‘one-off’ face-saving financial concessions by the government. The words Garden Reach and ‘extravagance’ became synonymous.
While the king was in prison, life had to go on for his wives, his children and the numerous courtiers and servants who had followed him from Lucknow and were now cramped together in the three compounds. Some were wealthy people in their own right, if they had managed to realise their assets before leaving Awadh. Numerous restrictions had been put in place by the British, particularly on property, and if the courtiers’ wealth was in land, then they now had to rely on the king to support them. Others learned that their houses had been looted, either by rebel soldiers opposing the British or by the British themselves. The chief minister, ‘Ali Naqi Khan, lost 72 lakhs in cash, gold and jewellery before the city was recaptured in 1858. Servants whose wages were paid by the king were wholly dep
endent on him. These included 50 African slaves, 245 ‘special guards’, 120 sentinels armed with swords, 20 mace-bearers and 18 eunuchs. There were also various tradesmen attached to the Court, including butchers, confectioners, bakers and potters, and domestic servants like sweepers, grooms, barbers and ‘gunta pandies’, men who marked the passing hours by striking bells. Two of the ‘Abyssinians’, or African slaves, said that they had not been paid for eighteen months, and on reaching Calcutta were told rather sharply they could leave again ‘if so inclined’.11 The king had been forced to borrow money to maintain his family and staff at Garden Reach, before accepting the pension offered by government. Once the pension was in place there was an orgy of spending, which clearly did not have repaying the moneylenders as its first priority. But there was still an urgent need for money.
Were there any remaining nawabi assets that could be realised? Two years after his release, Wajid ‘Ali Shah learned with ‘great surprise’ from the Delhi newspapers that the tomb and gardens of his ancestor, the second nawab Safdar Jang, had been put up for sale by the British authorities. Grand tombs, like that of Safdar Jang, were maintained by renting out small houses and shops in the surrounding areas, the rent paying for the tomb’s upkeep. Through his agent, the king laid claim to this and other property in and around Delhi worth £10,000, including a house near the Lahore Gate. This was a large and ancient property, known as haveli Sa‘adat Khan, and dated back to the time of the first nawab. The government’s response to the claims was confused, but not unexpected. Firstly, it had not realised that Wajid ‘Ali Shah owned any property in Delhi, and if he did, then he should have spoken up sooner. ‘Whatever rights he had, he has compromised himself by his long silence.’12 Secondly, a man called Amir-ud-daulah claimed that the king himself had given him the old haveli shortly before the Uprising, and the ‘deeds of gift’ appeared genuine. The lucky recipient was believed to be a man ‘of very low extraction of the “doom” caste’. Thirdly, it was supposed that all the king’s property throughout India had been confiscated, and the three Garden Reach houses given in lieu of all other claims, public or private, although this had not been stated explicitly to Wajid ‘Ali Shah. Lastly, did the Safdar Jang tomb and its garden private property belong to the king? British lawyers were not certain about this, but thought it unlikely, and in any case the king should not get it back.
Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah Page 19