Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah

by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

  It sounded an ideal education for young princelings, who were not expected to work for a living, no matter how small their allowances. Eighteen boys aged between five and fifteen were enrolled, divided into four classes. So what went wrong? Details of the committee’s inspection of the school are unfortunately missing from its long report. What we do know is that the committee found it ‘so ill-regulated an establishment’ that it hardly deserved the name of school.34 There were twenty maulawis teaching Persian, Arabic and Urdu, but there was no organisation, no classes, no one to make sure the boys attended, slovenly staff who had no authority over the boys, and poorly selected textbooks, which were in some cases ‘positively bad’. Not only was the school obviously useless for its intended purpose, thundered the committee, ‘it is worse than useless, it is positively mischievous’. The king offered to double his grant towards the school, but this was rejected.

  The committee concluded: ‘If these children [the princes] are to be weaned from the depraving influences by which they are surrounded, and to become decent members of society, some radical change in the system under which instruction is now imparted must be effected … What is wanted, is not only an institution where a good practical education can be obtained, but a place where the pupils will reside, and will be thus separated from those demoralizing influences with which at present their home life is surrounded.’ All the king’s good intentions and his careful drawing-up of the syllabus had been thwarted by the king’s own in-house staff, untrained to teach or to attempt discipline of their royal master’s sons.

  One of the committee members, the resourceful Amir ‘Ali, had already drawn up a scheme for a new Madrassa Sultan-i-Oudh (the King of Oudh’s School), to operate at a cost of 3,000 rupees per month per student. There was to be an English principal and two English teachers. The number of maulawis was drastically cut to three. There would be a riding master, a clerk, servants and horses, and it was to be a boarding school, thus removing the pupils from their home surroundings. Sadly, the new school was to be no more successful than its predecessors. A building was hired through the letting agents Mackinnon and Mackenzie, and the school opened in September 1881. It stood in the compound of a cotton mill, so became known as the Jinwali Kothi.35 A board of management was set up, which included the Commissioner of the Presidency Division and Colonel William Prideaux, the new agent who had replaced Thomson on the latter’s retirement. There was also a school inspector, a mujtahid, a magistrate, a maulawi and a barrister, as well as one of the older princes, Prince Jehan Qadr, son of the late Sikandar Hashmat. The king declined to serve on the board, as he objected to his nephew’s inclusion.

  The madrassa lasted for less than seven years, and was closed down a year after the king’s death in 1887. This was particularly bad luck for its principal, Mr Billing, who had been appointed less than two years earlier. He had previously been the headmaster of the well-regarded Mohammedan College of Calcutta, popularly known as the Calcutta Madrasah, which had been founded by Warren Hastings in 1780. The obvious question arises of why the Awadh princes were not sent there, to an old established college specifically set up for Muslim pupils, with a fine library of Arabic and Persian books. But no one on the committee had suggested it, neither had the lieutenant governor, nor the king, nor any of the princes themselves. Garden Reach, after the king’s arrival in 1856, was described by some as ‘a second Lucknow’. In particular, Sharar said admiringly, after pointing out the supposed delights of the new ‘kingdom’: ‘it didn’t even appear to anyone that they were in Bengal’. And this was precisely the problem. Not only was there a refusal to acknowledge that the times had changed, there was a deliberate attempt to ignore geography as well. Calcutta, with all its intellectual richness, society, business and culture might have been five hundred miles away, rather than the five miles that separated it from Garden Reach. The royal family lived in a bubble of the king’s making, which may have seemed superficially attractive to young men like Sharar, but which imposed an archaic way of life, attitude and thought on those held captive inside the iridescent circle.

  It was inevitable that the Madrassa Sultan-i-Oudh would fail. The board of management had no legal power to make the princes attend and the absentee rate was high. Pressure was put on the students to attend by withholding their allowances, but this did not work either. The main problem was the boys’ mothers, who did not see why their sons should be formally educated anyway. ‘Their mothers are their principal abettors in their evasion of the rules of the school … as the ladies exercise scarcely any influence over their sons in a right direction.’36 Financially the school had been breaking even, because the king put in 1,000 rupees a month, and deductions from the pupils’ allowances, the principal source of income, were nearly as much again.

  A report of 1886 showed twenty-three pupils in attendance, reading English, Persian, Hindustani and Arabic, ‘the highest standard arrived at being that of the Calcutta University entrance examination’. But at the same time, doubts were expressed about whether the curriculum stretched the boys enough. Did it go ‘far enough to place the boys, when grown up, on a par with young men trained in the higher institutions of the country? What facilities for special instruction are afforded to an aspiring youth, who exhibits abilities or industry above the average?’ It was recommended that the madrassa should be brought ‘more into the current of educational progress. The King is, or was, however, jealous of interference, and of attempts to remove the teaching from the old lines.’37

  In spite of this, and notwithstanding the febrile atmosphere of Garden Reach, two of the princes approached the new lieutenant governor, Sir Auckland Colvin, with a request to go to England for further study. Prince Muhammad Babur, now aged twenty-four with his education complete, wanted to become a doctor. His younger half-brother, Prince Dara Jah, was fifteen when he too applied for permission to travel to England. Their request put Colvin in a difficult position. He wished to encourage the Awadh princes to seek a life for themselves outside Garden Reach, and to become independent. At the same time there were practical difficulties, the chief of which was the king’s attitude to foreign travel and the expense it would incur. Learning that Muhammad Babur wanted to study abroad, he vetoed the proposal immediately. ‘The King is opposed to the step’, wrote Henry Durand to Colvin. ‘The lad’s present income from his father, though that is now virtually assured to him by our recent orders, would not be sufficient to support him in England’, and naturally the king would not increase it, nor could the government force him to do so. The monthly allowance of 150 rupees, which was all he had, would amount to little over £10 in England. Another problem was that the prince’s education was ‘not sufficient to enable him to embark on the study of medicine with much chance of success’.38

  ‘It is painful to refuse such a request, which is in itself rather pathetic, but I do not see what we can do. I do not think the King should be allowed to stop his sons from going to England when they are of age, but unfortunately they have no money, and we can hardly undertake to pay for their expenses.’ In Prince Dara Jah’s case, because he was underage, ‘his father can exercise power over his movements’. Both Auckland and Durand agreed that ‘when the King dies, it is to be hoped that something may be done for this unfortunate family. Until then we can really do nothing unless with the approbation [approval].’ The matter was discussed at the highest level, showing that Wajid ‘Ali Shah and his family were still emotive subjects, to be treated carefully.

  If the elder prince did have an aptitude for medicine, Colvin suggested, then could he study at a medical college in India? ‘Later on, if he shows he is in earnest and was capable, we might reconsider the question of assisting him to complete his training in England.’ He asked Durand to consult the Surgeon General of Bengal, to see if the prince could start at Calcutta’s Medical College. Dr John Coates, principal of the College, said that if the prince passed the University entrance examination, he could attend classes and become eligible for a c
ertificate. However, he would have to pass a Latin examination too. The cost for a year’s tuition was negligible, at 200 rupees, but Colvin thought that ‘probably the King and the young man will not like the idea’, and he was right, because the prince’s application was postponed in May 1888.39

  With the king’s death, the absentee rate at the school intensified, now that its founder and financial backer was gone. Pupil numbers dropped from twenty-three to fourteen. The school’s closure, seven months after the king’s death, was an opportunity for the government of Bengal to consider the future of the princes, and indeed how many princes there were at Garden Reach. The lieutenant governor’s secretary thought that ‘the future education and employment of the late King’s descendants are matters of importance both politically and financially. We do not want to find the family by and by growing out of even liberal pensions like the Sind Talpur family.’40

  In June 1888 twenty-two of the late king’s sons were alive and living in Bengal. The eldest prince, Qamar Qadr, was aged about thirty-six, and the youngest was Prince Afsar-ul-Malik, one of two seven-year-old boys who were supposed to be illegitimate. Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s ability to father children, at the age of sixty, had been called into question by the Bengal government. It was a delicate question too, and one which could not easily be answered. An untraceable rumour, a complaint by a disgruntled wife, a sniggering courtier—something must have triggered it off, but the government’s sources were not named. Following the 1880 Committee’s report, Ashley Eden recommended that any children born of His Majesty’s wives were not to be formally recognised by the government. A note in the margin says, ‘His Majesty was understood to be impotent.’41 A letter was sent to the king at the beginning of 1881 stating: ‘The Government will not, according to general practice, look upon every child that may be born of the womb of the supplicants’s wives from and after the date of the Committee’s report as Your Majesty’s child.’42 Not surprisingly the king complained, ‘My humiliation and indignity have been proclaimed to the high and the low’, although he did not refute the charge.

  But what was the future for those princes whose legitimacy was not in doubt, and who were now, after their father’s death, deprived of even the small allowances he had made them from his own pension? ‘Male descendants should be encouraged and assisted to employ themselves usefully’, wrote William Cunningham, undersecretary to the Foreign Department. He said that English lessons at the madrassa had benefited the princes, resulting in some of them now being ‘fit for Government service’. It seemed an extraordinary suggestion at first, but in fact the government of Bengal, since it had taken over responsibility for the Awadh royal family in 1880, had to its credit been careful to separate its attitude towards the king, who was considered beyond redemption, from its behaviour towards his sons. (The government appeared to have no view on the princesses.) It was important to wean the princes away from the idea of a government pension and towards supporting themselves. It was helpfully pointed out that one of the sons of the ex-king of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, had got a job as a tehsildar, a revenue officer, in the North West Provinces.

  As if to support this radical idea, Prince Asman Jah, now in his mid-thirties, applied to the governors of several provinces, including Burma, for help in finding employment. The prince had moved out of Garden Reach into Gardner’s Lane, central Calcutta, and got his petition to Lord Dufferin, the Governor General, printed and submitted in May 1888. Calling himself ‘your Excellency’s Humble Petitioner’, the prince confessed that he did not know English but hoped there might be a job for him in the subordinate Executive Service of the North West Provinces, Bihar or the Punjab that did not require any knowledge of English. The prince did not ask for any special consideration, or a made-up job, but said his request was ‘simply a sincere desire to serve the Government instead of whiling away the time’.43 The princes were beginning to realise that, with their father’s death, the constraints that had kept them captive in the curious time-warp of Garden Reach had fallen away. Escape was not possible for everyone, of course, and for some it was easier to remain imprisoned by the memory of past glories than to make a bid for freedom, as the unfortunate tigress had done all those years earlier. It is impossible to trace the lives of all the king’s sons and to see whether or not they prospered. That would require a different kind of history, but we do at least know that the youngest prince, Afsar-ul-Malik, legitimate or not, did grow up to lead a useful and fulfilling life, as we shall see in the Conclusion to this book.

  The escape of the tigress from the menagerie led to fear and annoyance in Calcutta. The importance of animals to the king and his royal status have been examined. Attempts to control the animals by government inspections were followed by attempts to control the king’s continuing extravagance and challenge his lack of financial provision for his wives and children. The education of the princes at the king’s madrassa was unsatisfactory and left the young men unsuited to earn their own living.

  7

  A MIMIC KINGDOM

  Wajid ‘Ali Shah is a recluse in his little kingdom, keeping up a way of life that is long out of date, yet one that still binds his subjects to him. He compares his lot bitterly to that of other, more amenable, exiled Indian princes. British officials have long anticipated the king’s death. When this happens, the governor general assumes complete authority to dismantle the Garden Reach estate, which is rapidly sold off to shipping and railway companies for development.

  In the autumn of 1874, the Calcutta correspondent of the New York Times persuaded Mowbray Thomson to get permission for him to visit Garden Reach. The correspondent’s name was not given, although he had something of a scoop. His vivid (if sometimes erroneous) description of the estate and its ruler was published in November of that year.1 American readers were presented with an exotic miniature kingdom on the banks of the Hugli. The British government could not interfere in it, readers were told, except over legal matters, and ‘within the four walls of the Ex-King of Oude’s mimic kingdom … the King is supreme. His kingdom, though small, is compact. His subjects are in all about 6,000, and devoted to him. His court is perfect in form. His officers of state, several of the chief of whom accompanied us over the grounds, have their titles and gradations as they … had in Oude.’ After describing the menagerie and serpentarium at great length and before listing the numbers of royal women, the ex-king’s routine was noted. ‘He spends his days in his menagerie, and in drawing, painting, and writing poetry. His songs are said to be excellent, according to native taste…’ Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s evenings were spent among musicians and dancing girls, when the buildings were lit with ‘innumerable small lamps of different colours’, reflected in glass balls hung from the ceilings. One of the three principal houses would be selected for the next twenty-four hours and here the king would spend a day and night—‘Calcutta meanwhile as ignorant of his pleasures and he of its as if he were still in Oude.’ All this of course entailed lavish expenditure, and the correspondent was not the first to note that ‘the King maintains a little town, providing the elite of it with choice amusement, and the whole town with amusement of some sort, in addition to providing them with the means of living. The little camp is, in its way, royal—as Eastern peoples understand royalty.’

  There was, as the correspondent implied, something almost magnificent in the king’s refusal to acknowledge changing times. A few miles outside the walls of his small kingdom lay the capital of British India, at that time the largest city in the subcontinent, with an estimated population of over 400,000 people. Then, as now, Calcutta was a place of radical, even revolutionary ideas—a city of poets, musicians, cooks, intellectuals, traders and businessmen. The Bengal Chamber of Commerce had been set up in 1856, municipal government was in place from the 1840s, and the Indian Museum and the Asiatic Society of Bengal had their origins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While it is understandable that the Hindu-led Bengal Renaissance would not be of much interest to a
Muslim monarch still intent on keeping up the style of the great Mughals, there were innovations in the fine arts and drama that might have attracted his attention.

  By the 1870s there were a number of theatres in town, both Indian and British. While Britons enjoyed popular Gilbert and Sullivan operas like The Pirates of Penzance at the Corinthian Theatre, innovative Parsi theatre companies were providing dramas for an Indian audience. Their repertoire included Fasana Ajaib (The Strange Tale), and by the summer of 1875 the Parsi Operatic and Dramatic Company was performing at the Theatre Royal in Chowringhee. Among its productions was a popular medieval romance, The Fairy Drama of Gul Bakavli, followed by ‘the Splendid Opera of Indur Sabha under the patronage of the Jewish Community’. There was also the dramatisation of a long narrative poem, Qissai Benazir aur Badremunir (The Story of Benazir and Badremunir) by Mir Ghulam Hasan, performed by the Parsi Elphinstone Dramatic Club.2 Its author was a Lucknow poet who had composed the Qissai during the reign of nawab Asaf-ud-daulah. No reports have been found to suggest that Wajid ‘Ali Shah ever visited the Calcutta theatres, although he is said to have seen seen a Hindu drama, The Victory of the Pandavas, at the Basu family home in Bagbazar. He could also summon the theatre to him, and it is likely that Parsi dramatic groups did perform at Garden Reach, providing one of the ‘choice amusements’ that entertained the courtiers on soft Bengal evenings.