Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah
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Wajid ‘Ali Shah had established his own household entertainers too, according to his last major work, Musammat Banni, published in 1875. There were the twenty-four Sultan Khana Players, named after his principal residence; eleven members of the Khas Manzil troupe; and various other groups, including the mimics (naqi walian), showmen (tamasha walian) and the marsiyah troupe, who recited mourning poems during Muharram. The performers numbered 216 and, together with 145 musicians, their salaries came to nearly £1,300 a month.3 Costumes, scenery and prizes for the best performers were an extra expense. The great days of the Qaisarbagh performances could not be repeated, but there were certainly a number of musical entertainments held in Garden Reach and directed by the king. A revival of the Radha Krishna play was staged, with the actors in elaborate costumes and jewellery. While the fairy chorus wore Indian dresses and embroidered wings, the demon in the play, Ifrit, appeared as an Englishman in formal black jacket and trousers, and wearing gloves.4 His appearance must have provoked howls of laughter and recognition.
But apart from entertainments, what bound the court-in-exile together? The Calcutta correspondent reported that Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s 6,000 subjects were devoted to him. ‘The people employed are more than feudal retainers; they belong to the ex-King, body and soul.’ Was this an oriental exaggeration to titillate American readers, or a practical description of a community that revolved around one man? Certainly there was employment for a good number of people, simply to maintain the estate.5 There were gardeners and sweepers, menagerie staff, stable-hands, dairymen, water carriers, carriage drivers, engineers, lamp-lighters, ‘the boat establishment’, guards, police, door-keepers, messengers, carpenters and bearers. To run the estate a general manager was needed, who in turn employed staff in charge of various departments, including the Postal Department and the paymaster’s department, dealing with wages and other financial claims. The admirable Amir ‘Ali had managed the estate until his death in January 1880. After that no one seems to have been specifically appointed to oversee Garden Reach. The king’s many wives needed their own female staff, and the king needed his palace staff including cooks, kitchen-hands, confectioners, sweet-makers, people to prepare paan and the hookah, valets, washermen, tailors, a doctor and personal servants. Spiritual and intellectual needs were catered for by maulawis, munshis, men employed to chant the Qur‘an, ta’ziyah-makers, poets and artists. A small bazaar was built along Garden Reach Road and rented out by the estate to shopkeepers, who would have included butchers, grain merchants, fishmongers and vegetable sellers, bringing stock in daily from the big Calcutta markets.
All these employees provided necessary services to keep Garden Reach running. But there was something more here that marked it out from the usual run of satellite townships. If Wajid ‘Ali Shah saw himself as the last king in India, then his courtiers had to believe this too. They remained loyal, even as it became increasingly clear that the kingdom of Awadh would never be restored and that the majority of them would never see Lucknow again. Although his personal life was less than happy, with his quarrelling, disloyal wives and sons, nevertheless the king possessed sufficient authority and personality to ensure that while he lived, so did his small kingdom. He was not given credit for this by the British; indeed, it would have negated the very act that deposed him in 1856. While government officials continued to anticipate his death, which did not happen until 1887 when he was sixty-six years old, they complained about his behaviour and extravagance without considering his achievements in holding together a sizeable establishment that lasted for thirty years. Clearly money had something to do with it, and a number of people made a lot of money from the king. But where information is available, the wages for his domestic staff were not excessive. Although rent was not charged for accommodation within Garden Reach, living conditions were far from luxurious for many who had come from Lucknow, leaving family houses behind. The usual perks for courtiers could no longer be handed out. There could be no more grants of land (jagirs), no state offices to hold, and thus no opportunities for making money, no more palaces to be built, and no small private armies to command. Yet something intangible held the little kingdom together still, and as long as Wajid ‘Ali Shah behaved like a king, then the illusion remained.
If the continued existence of the kingdom was a secular act of faith, then was Wajid ‘Ali Shah seen as a religious focus for Shi‘as? Sharar hints that the Muharram processions in Calcutta were even grander than those of Lucknow days, and he claimed that thousands of pilgrims were attracted to them.6 On the other hand British officials spoke only of ‘noisy processions on the high road’, without specifying what these processions were. Wajid ‘Ali Shah had begun building the Sibtainabad Imambarah, which would house his tomb, in the early 1860s, and it was completed by 1864. This was a public imambarah, second only in importance to the great imambarah upriver at Murshidabad. Although greatly different in style, size and cost, the Calcutta imambarah can stand comparison, in religious terms, with the Great Imambarah at Lucknow, built by the nawab Asaf-ud-daulah in 1784. It was a visible affirmation of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s commitment to his faith. It provided a haven, in a foreign and sometimes hostile environment, for Shi‘as, and it immediately became the centre of Muharram rituals, in which the king participated. Here the huge and elaborate ta’ziyah (replica tomb) was housed during the year, to be taken out in procession on the fourth day of mourning to the Shahi (royal) burial ground, along Garden Reach Road.7 Two days later, a second procession would accompany the ta’ziyah to the burial ground again, before returning to the imambarah. India is a land of constant processions, and the commemoration of Muharram by a Shi‘a king in exile does not seem to have evoked any descriptions or any illustrations. Yet we cannot dismiss the attraction that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had for Shi‘as in Bengal. He spent freely on Muharram, with almsgiving and food for the poor, and he led the recitation of mourning songs with his marsiya troupe. The fact that Muharram is still extravagantly marked by Shi‘as in Kolkata today is continuing evidence of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s influence.8
How did the king see himself in his now diminished role? Apart from his still palatial surroundings (not shared by everyone at Garden Reach), his large family, his courtiers, his pension and his entertainments, what other signs of royalty remained? While we have a good number of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own books and his correspondence with British officials, we have virtually no evidence of letters written to his peers.9 As a prolific writer, he would certainly have corresponded with other royal or quasiroyal households in India. While he was officially barred from contacting people in Awadh, we know there were links with the once-powerful house of Murshidabad, which lay upstream on the same river that flowed past Garden Reach, and there were similar connections with Hyderabad in the south. Unfortunately archives and private collections that may contain material are often poorly catalogued and cannot easily be searched without several years of dedicated work. We have mainly to rely, for the moment, on records in the National Archives of India, Delhi, and the India Office Library, London, which of necessity were formal documents. These do, however, drop a few hints about Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s reactions to his reduced status.
Wajid ‘Ali Shah was to retain the title of ‘king’ during his lifetime, but it would not pass to his sons. There was nervousness among the British when the title of ‘heir apparent’ was used for his eldest son, because this might imply that there was a kingdom to inherit. Officials were punctilious in referring to Wajid ‘Ali Shah as ‘the king’, sometimes as ‘the ex-king’ but always as ‘His Majesty’, whatever their private feelings may have been. An early example of the delicate protocols surrounding an ‘ex-king’ came immediately on his arrival in Calcutta. As we have seen, there was initial confusion when the new governor general’s staff refused to acknowledge his presence, because they had not been informed of it ‘in the proper manner’.10 However, when the 21-gun salute was eventually fired to mark Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s arrival in Calcutta, it was to be his la
st salute. Many years later, in 1869, within days of the appointment of a new governor general, the Earl of Mayo, Wajid ‘Ali Shah put in a request for the revival of the 21-gun salute previously fired in his honour. He said it was ‘necessary for the preservation of my honor and dignity and the friendship existing between the [two] Governments rendered stable and firm’.11 This was incendiary language, suggesting that Wajid ‘Ali Shah was the head of a government on a par with that of the British government in India. It was an opportunist move too, in the belief that Mayo, without the Indian background of his predecessor, John Lawrence, might grant the king’s request from the ignorance of a newcomer. Luckily for Mayo, his advisors were on hand to give him the background to the case, and surprisingly it was revealed that Wajid ‘Ali Shah had visited the former governor general at Government House. The date of the meeting and the discussion between the two men is not known. Lawrence spoke Hindustani well enough to make public speeches, so there would have been no need for an interpreter. Moreover, it had been made clear beforehand that the meeting was a private interview, and the king was brought into Government House through a private entrance. The point that Durand, the Secretary to the Foreign Department, wanted to make was that no salute guns had been fired on this occasion, nor would there be on any other occasion involving the king.
Only three Indian rulers were entitled to a 21-gun salute: Hyderabad, Baroda and Mysore. Other rulers got lesser salutes, from 15 to 11 guns, depending on how they had behaved during the Uprising. The loss of the king’s salute caused him particular pain because before his downfall he had stood second in the order of precedence only to the king of Delhi. Queen Victoria herself had agreed the 21-gun salute for Wajid ‘Ali Shah. On the recommendation of the pre-1858 government of India, he had been placed in front of five other rajas and nizams.12 Durand explained that the king’s salute had not been taken away because of suspicions about his behaviour during the Uprising, but because the British government had dethroned him after his refusal to sign the treaty of February 1856 and ‘had assumed to itself the government of Oude exclusively and for ever’. It was ‘impolitic to continue to him an honor calculated to nurse vain hopes of restoration’.13 Although the Awadh mission to England had failed, it was imperative that the government did nothing that could be construed as an admission that the ex-king might indeed have a claim.
It was purely an act of grace on the government’s part, continued Durand, that Wajid ‘Ali Shah could continue to hold the title ‘King of Oude’, and ‘it is pure pretension on his part to talk of the friendship existing between the Governments being rendered stable and firm’. The 21-gun salute that had been extracted on the king’s arrival in Calcutta was not an acknowledgment for him as head of the Awadh government, but ‘a consideration of the personal dignity of the King’, and definitely not a proof of friendship between two governments. Durand argued well, if speciously. He warned darkly that ‘there is a class who make political capital out of every slip of the British Government of this kind and it is an imperative duty on the Government of India to guard against the endorsement of covert pretensions of this description, for no-one can predict how soon they may be turned against the Government and blossom into very unexpected results’. Exactly which class of troublemakers Durand had in mind is not clear, and whether they were in Britain, which had just elected a Liberal government headed by Gladstone, or on the borders of Afghanistan, as Russia punched its way south, devouring the old Central Asian kingdoms. At all events, Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s request was refused as being pretentious, ‘as if he were still an independent or allied Sovereign, exercising authority and wielding substantial power’.14
Perhaps in order to show that he bore no personal ill feeling towards the king, the Earl of Mayo did accept an invitation from him to visit Garden Reach. This took place within a few months of the governor general’s arrival in India, probably during April 1869, and it was a formal, present-giving meeting. We do not know what Wajid ‘Ali Shah gave Mayo, but in return he got ‘1 silver-gilt inkstand, 1 gilt and glass flower vase, 2 hand mirrors, 1 enamelled tea cup with saucer and spoon, 1 enamelled jewel box and 1 enamelled paan box’, which the agent of the time, Captain Randall had been sent out to buy.15 The king’s letter of thanks for the gifts, even when translated from Persian to English, was almost unintelligible in its effusiveness: ‘the inkstand of the choicest workmanship, which is the box for the production of the pearl of the essence of friendship … the coffee cup with spoon and saucer, which is the means of removing idleness from the brain for the preservation of amity …[may] the gurgling sounds of the goblet of supremacy of your Lordship, firmament-like high in dignity, caused by the wine of justice and the protection of subjects, remain for ever unceasing and that through the instrumentality of the Agent Sahib Bahadur [Captain Randall], all my desires, aspirations, and requirements be represented to the mind of your Lordship, exalted as the Heavens’.16 Captain Randall joked that this was a ‘truly Oriental epistle’ and sent a spare copy for Mayo.
Although in British eyes Wajid ‘Ali Shah was no longer head of his government, this did not stop him from writing similarly flowery letters to British royalty and to the governors general. The Earl of Elgin, on his short-lived appointment, got a letter of congratulation ‘as writing is ever the means of shewing what is in the heart, this letter of congratulation is submitted to your Lordship that it may call to mind the obedient friend and represent that which is in the heart of his [Elgin’s] sincere well-wisher’.17 On the death of Lady Canning from malaria in 1861, the grief-stricken Governor General received a taziatnamah, a letter of condolence. ‘The world is a dream of which death is the interpretation. Young and old are alike a prey to the appointed time … Ah! As death, the destroyer of pleasures, is in fear of no-one and as the arrow shot from the bow of the archer Death can be stopped by no shield, what can be done? At the time of the approach of so intense a grief what can the wisest man do further than sew up the lacerations of the heart with the needle of resignation and submission, and if a friend does not anoint the wounds of the afflicted heart with the salve of patience, what can he do?’18 On Prince Albert’s death in 1862, Queen Victoria also received a taziatnamah that began: ‘On hearing the mournful intelligence of the departure of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, the exalted in rank, to the wide realms of death, the lament of pain and grief has pierced the artery of the five senses, and the gasp of boundless grief and sorrow has rent the skirt of the garment of tranquility and repose as has never before happened.’19
There were happier occasions, too, for penning a letter, a habit that the king kept up throughout his life. On 2 March 1882 there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Queen Victoria at Windsor railway station, the sixth such assault during her long reign. The queen was unhurt, and the attack brought an outpouring of sympathy. ‘It is worth being shot at—to see how much one is loved’, Victoria is reputed to have told her daughter. The news brought another letter from Wajid ‘Ali Shah, this time a mohubutnamah (a friendly letter). It arrived in a bag with his seal attached, and was presented in a silver roll wrapped in a kincob of silk and gold thread. ‘Her Most brilliant luminous Majesty, whose towers resemble the sky and whose stirrups the new moon…’ it began, and went on to refer to her as ‘the proprietress of the Kingdom of England and the Empress of Hindustan’.20 Her eldest son, the Duke of Connaught, received a letter of congratulation on being awarded a new title; and Lord Ripon, appointed governor general in August 1880, was welcomed with a congratulatory letter, and then a letter of sympathy when he fell ill a year later. Although the king’s letters were written expressing his own views and feelings, underneath all the elaborate Persian similes and archaic forms of address remains the impression of a man writing to his peers, and expecting his letters to be read, if not necessarily answered.
Wajid ‘Ali Shah was only one of a number of rulers who had been deposed by the East India Company, but he was the one who made the most strenuous efforts to retain his court around
him. In 1799 Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, had been killed in the last of four wars launched against him by the British. His wives and sons were allowed to remain at Vellore Fort, as pensioners of the East India Company. Seven years after Tipu Sultan’s death, there was a short, brutal uprising by sepoys against Company soldiers at the Fort, and a son of the late ruler was put forward as a successor to his father. The revolt was immediately put down in an equally brutal manner by the Company’s army, and the surviving relatives were deported to Calcutta in 1806. It was policy to move rebellious rulers and their heirs far away from their power-bases and into Company territory. This was a clever ploy, because it meant firstly that the lines of support for men who opposed the Company were severed; secondly that the heirs and relatives, who could have become a focus for renewed unrest, could be closely monitored; and lastly it produced an intangible but demoralising feeling of loss on being removed from familiar surroundings.
There had been a number of such shifts. The Maratha peshwa Baji Rao II was exiled from Poona to Bithur, a small village on the banks of the Ganges, just north of the British cantonment at Cawnpore. The exile took place in 1818, after the peshwa’s defeat in the third Anglo-Maratha War. His establishment of relatives and followers was considerably larger than that of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, being estimated at some 15,000 people who were spread out in an area of some six square miles. Although this exile had happened almost forty years before the deposition in Awadh, and in very different circumstances, there was a curious parallel which, because the Company was so bound up with precedence, may have influenced its treatment of Wajid ‘Ali Shah. The peshwa was awarded a very large pension of 8 lakhs a year (£80,000). This hitherto unprecedented sum was defended by Major General Sir John Malcolm, who had led the British to victory over the peshwa. Malcolm thought the pension was justified because of ‘our own dignity, considerations for the feelings of Badjee Rao’s adherents, and for the prejudices of the natives of India. We exist on impressions; and on occasions like this, where all are anxious spectators, we must play our part well or we should be hissed.’21 The governor general of the time, the Marquess of Hastings, allowed the pension to the peshwa to be offered because he thought Baji Rao, then in his forties and having ‘dissolute habits’, did not have very much longer to live.22