Reclaiming the Lost House of Oudh
Md. Kasim dusts off an old carpet at the Malcha Mahal. Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
For decades, abandoned and alone in a desolate jungle mansion in Delhi lived Wilayat Mahal and her self-proclaimed royal family. After the death of the last prince at Malcha Mahal, Abhimanyu Kumar decoded history, personal accounts, and mysterious texts to explore if the family were the true inheritors of the House of Oudh.
“They would all occupy a separate corner in the Mahal, sitting away from each-other. They seemed consumed by disappointment.”
It was sometime in the late 70’s. The Prince Cyrus Ali Reza had moved into the New Delhi Railway station along with his mother Begum Wilayat Mahal, sister Sakina, brother Asad, a number of liveried servants, exquisite carpets, and several ferocious dogs—all of a foreign pedigree. Ali Reza loved dogs, and till the end, remained involved with them, often reading German dog magazines—a language he spoke—about the better care and welfare of the species. He would also help the diplomats living in the Chanakyapuri area to breed their dogs, and this was how he earned some money to carry on with the business of living in his last years.
Years ago, I had heard from a heritage enthusiast that princess Sakina had died. The rumour was that Prince Ali Reza was keeping the corpse in the Malcha Mahal without burying it. I called up Pradip Krishen, an environmentalist and expert on the trees of Delhi, to verify this, and was then able to get the prince’s landline phone number from a guard at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Earth Station next to the Mahal.
A prim gentlemen’s voice answered the call on the other end, betraying a slight trace of annoyance. I remember telling him that I was an admirer of his ancestor, the king Wajid Ali Shah, for his secular views, and that I wished to meet him for a story. I knew he was not keen on meeting Indian journalists, but I took a chance.
He refused to meet or talk any more, only telling me cryptically that princess Sakina was ‘very much around’. Of course, this did not answer my query if she were alive or not. I tried again next day, and got the same reply. “If you are a gentleman, you will not press further.” I did not try to meet him after that.
For a while, I had the idea to wait for him standing on the long and winding road that connects Malcha Mahal to Sardar Patel Marg outside, with its rows of state bhawans and behind them, and the Malcha Marg residential area. But, busy with other assignments, I couldn’t pursue the story further. I did maintain an interest in their affairs, reading whatever came out about them, but there was little in their last years in terms of press coverage.
Once the prince died in 2017, there were a flurry of stories in the newspapers, including the New York Times, who, in 2019 published a deep, investigative piece on the subject. The prince was no more, but his story now belonged to the world.
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Md. Kasim first met Ali Reza—the last prince of Awadh—at Connaught Place, in the heart of colonial and commercial Central Delhi. Originally from Bihar, Kasim had only been in Delhi a week, working as a shop-assistant in the H-block of CP, which was the site of the old Plaza cinema (now the PVR Plaza), opposite to the State Entry Road entrance to the New Delhi Railways Station. It was there that the prince, riding a bicycle, fell off, and Kasim was there to offer a helping hand.
The prince took a liking to Kasim and they kept in touch. When the Awadhs were allotted Malcha Mahal as their residence, Kasim left his job in the shop and moved in with them as their ‘Man Friday’. Malcha was the village on which the Rashtrapati Bhavan estate—the Viceroy’s House as it used to be then—and parts of Lutyen’s Delhi was built. There is still an ongoing court case in which the inheritors of the former residents of the village have demanded compensation for losing their lands to the British for which they were never compensated. The villagers of Malcha had also participated in the 1857 Great Sepoy Mutiny in which period they used the Mahal as a hiding spot.
I meet Kasim in a locale far removed from those days—in the sense of space as well as time. Kasim goes back and forth in time in his story, and it takes our combined efforts to piece the narrative together. We are in our car, near a water theme park. I’m co-writing a piece about the Mahal for an American publication, unaware that another mainstream American newspaper—the New York Times—was also on the story.
The Begum Wilayat Mahal died by allegedly committing suicide in 1993. The means of her death were as dramatic as her life: swallowing crushed diamonds. Kasim left; his family in Bihar advised him to leave the employment of the self-proclaimed last inheritors of the House of Oudh.
“They had a quarrel involving property worth Rs 80 crores with the Indian government,” said Kasim. “The government had taken over their property in Lucknow. They tried everything to get it back, including going to the courts. The elder brother, Asad Ali, died from the sadness of losing it all.”
According to Kasim and other accounts the government agreed to accommodate them in Malcha Mahal, and did not grant any other demands—and especially, the restoration of property.
“They treated me like a son,” Kasim said.
I ask him if he was paid on time; the financial status of the family never seemed to be stable and in their final days, they were reduced to utter penury and even starvation. “They had some gold and silver with them,” he said. “They used to pay me by selling that. They were quite well-connected. The prince even shook hands with the then President of America, George W. Bush. I remember seeing a photo of his doing so.”
They were very determined to make Malcha Mahal inhabitable when they first moved there, said Kasim. “We even dug up a well on that rocky ground.” However, in keeping with their history of failed efforts, no water was ever found. “We used to get water from the market down below, loading it on the cycle. They suffered many adversities.”
The government did give a verbal assurance that the property under dispute belonged to them. “The courts said the same. Their relatives are in-charge of the upkeep of the properties although they have no rights.”
According to Kasim, in 1988, the Awadhs received a court judgement in their favour that the properties indeed belonged to them. The news came out in a national newspaper and Kasim remembers being photographed for the report, although I haven’t been able to independently verify this claim.
But the government never fulfilled the promise to hand over the properties, following the court judgement, said Kasim. “Governments kept changing subsequently and no one did them justice.” He added that the judgment was from the High Court, most likely the one in Lucknow.
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
Kasim spent around thirteen years with the family, first at the railway station, then in Malcha Mahal—from 1980 to 1993. “They saw only misery in those thirteen years. They had neither water nor electricity. After they had lived there for eight years, they received a water connection from the ISRO Earth Station.” Food was cooked on woodfire. Rations came from the main market in Paharganj, said Kasim.
The Begum Wilayat Mahal died by allegedly committing suicide in 1993. The means of her death were as dramatic as her life: swallowing crushed diamonds. Kasim left after that, as his family in Bihar finally lost patience and advised him to leave the employment of the self-proclaimed last inheritors of the House of Oudh. It was only after leaving the employment of the prince that Kasim finally got married. “Today, my eldest son is 18 years old,” he says. He has two more school-going children.
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The Malcha Mahal is a former hunting lodge, built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq in the 14th century, when Tughlaq reigned over the Sultanate of Delhi. The lodge now stands in the centre of an urban forest, hugging close some of the city’s busiest freeways, luxurious hotels, diplomatic missions, and residences to the rich and well-connected. According to Pradip Krishen, an expert on Delhi and the Ridge Forest, the woods around the palace “would have been a dense forest there in those days, possibly with tigers and certainly leopards and deer.”
Malcha was the name of a village that used to surround the monument; Malcha Mahal means Deer Palace. “The villagers were pastoral people, who lived inside the forest”, says Krishen. “The monument may have been used by them for protection in the last days of Mughal rule, as this was a common practice in those days when power was loose and many bandits active.”
The forest houses the remaining boundary walls of an ancient water reservoir and an 800-year-old dargah which is surrounded by dozens of earthen pots said to imprison the spirits of bad souls and djinns. The caretaker of the dargah still holds regular exorcisms to add to the collection.
Before the Awadh family moved into Malcha Mahal, it used to be inhabited by the young painters of Delhi, managed by the Lalit Kala Akademi, the central organisation responsible for the promotion of arts in the country.
“It was beautiful, surrounded only by nature,” recalled painter Shanti Dave, now 89. At the time he was an internationally established artist known for his large murals, including one that he painted in 1964 at JFK Airport in New York. Photos of him standing in front of Malcha Mahal in the late 1960s show a monument not yet overgrown with brush and vegetation. There was space to stand back and take a picture of the entire structure—something that’s impossible today.
“We were young artists, trying to find out who we were after Independence,” said Dave, now partially blind and hard of hearing. His fond memories of the space include a ceiling-high painting he made there, a jackal that once occupied his studio for days, wood-fired lunches, and moonlit performances on the roof by the famous Indian classical dancer Uma Sharma.
The artists, who had moved into Malcha Mahal in 1967, had to vacate the premises almost a decade later during construction of the Delhi Earth Station—a structure used for satellite observations by ISRO—which was officially inaugurated in 1977. The artists didn’t leave Malcha Mahal in shape for permanent inhabitants, though they had installed metal shutters on all the outer gates to keep the monkeys out and to protect their artwork. Nowadays, all of those shutters are broken or hanging from the nearby trees.
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I chanced upon Kasim’s phone number written on a piece of paper strewn about in the Mahal when I visited the old palace for the first time following the death of the prince. I called it one afternoon. “The police had also called me,” he said. The call from the Chankayapuri police station came after the prince passed away, alone in the Mahal.
The cause of the prince’s death was most likely dengue. Kasim seemed desolate that he was unable to meet the prince in his last days. “He would call me sometimes, but I had not visited the Mahal in many years, busy with work and my family.”
Like hordes of other workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Kasim took a job in one of the many factories in Kapasheda, an industrial outpost on the border of Delhi and Gurgaon where middle-sized firms make clothes for international brands. He worked as a tailor in a garment factory for the past two decades.
Around this time, Ellen Barry, the South Asia bureau chief of the New York Times, wrote a long-form piece about Prince Ali Reza, the Malcha Mahal, and the family. The intimate piece explored personal, political, and historical story in great depth, following on the footsteps left behind by many other international journalists who were allowed access into the private life of the Awadhs over the years. Barry’s longform feature charted Wilayat Mahal’s sudden appearance at the New Delhi railways station in the 70s with her children, their move to the Malcha Mahal, Wilayat’s death, and the dismay of the prince’s final few years. Published in November 2019, the story titled ‘The Jungle Prince of Delhi’ was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and has been commissioned for a televised drama series by Amazon.
Shanti Dave. Photo: Aletta Andre
After Prince Ali Reza’s death, whom Barry knew personally, the narrative takes a truly unexpected spin. Barry reaches out to a man named Shahid—now based in Bradford in England—who claimed to be Prince Ali Reza’s eldest brother. Shahid threw the claim of Wilayat Mahal and the family into turmoil, claiming that her mother and her siblings were not real royalty, but frauds.
It was after the publication of the NYT story that Kasim agreed to another meeting with me, to clarify things further.
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To reach Malcha Mahal, you have to enter the Central Ridge Forest, a surprisingly dense stretch of greenery at the edge of an affluent diplomatic enclave called Chanakyapuri, in the heart of India’s capital. The same forest houses the remaining boundary walls of an ancient water reservoir and an 800-year-old dargah (a shrine on the tomb of a Sufi saint) which is surrounded by dozens of earthen pots said to imprison the spirits of bad souls and djinns. The caretaker of the dargah still holds regular exorcisms to add to the collection. When I met the Pir of the dargah after the prince had died, he told me he used to speak to the prince who would visit sometimes. “I advised him to be less reclusive as he was alone and getting on in the years but he paid me no heed,” he said. He added that the government had earlier showed the family apartments in the posh neighbourhood that surrounds the area next to Sardar Patel Marg and Malcha Marg, resided by many diplomats and other notables of the city. However, the family refused, according to the Pir, as they did not want to live with “commoners”.
At the end of a short, bumpy ride on an unkempt pathway full of garbage, monkeys, and the occasional jackal, a narrow path—lined by broken barbed wire and rows of long thorny cactus plants—leads to an imposing building with arched gateways and high ceilings.
At the threshold, he touches his head with his right hand, uttering sotto voce ‘aadab arz’, paying polite obeisance to his deceased employers. “It was not so dilapidated when we lived here.”
No one currently administers Malcha Mahal, and the governmental Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has shown no interest in managing it. A non-profit called the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) filed a proposal in October to conserve it on behalf of the Delhi government.
For now, the walls are occupied by bees, and the ceilings by bats. Trees are growing through the windows and staircases that lead to the roof. Centuries after it was built, the monument has become almost one with its surroundings. It is late December 2019 and the movement against NRC and CAA is in full swing around India and the capital. Kasim is dressed in blue trousers, a blue sweatshirt with a narrow strip of red in the middle, and he has his head covered with a skull cap. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and his feet are covered in sandals. He trails behind as we make our way towards the Mahal but then overtakes us and moves with ease, walking with a measured pace, betraying no particular emotion. The path is overrun with wild and thorny vegetation, and tall aloe vera plants, which reach up to our faces.
As we reach the stairs in front of the structure, he pauses and gazes upwards at the Mahal which seems both inviting and forbidding.
Then, the stories begin. Kasim tells us about how the Awadhs liked their breakfast: toast, tea and coffee, always before 9 am. They were very particular about that. He walks up the stairs. At the threshold, he touches his head with his right hand, uttering sotto voce ‘aadab arz’, paying polite obeisance to his deceased employers.
“It was not so dilapidated when we lived here,” he notes, looking at the dumpy condition of the Mahal, with big holes in the wall, and broken columns. He adds that there were gates to keep the intruders out. “Dogs used to lounge about here. We had four Great Danes, ten Doberman, and four Labradors,” he says with evident pride. These were the only three breeds of dogs the family kept. “The dogs liked to hang around Rani Sahiba [Wilayat Mahal]. As the sound of any car would reach the dogs, the Labradors would be the first to run towards it.”
As we enter the structure, we come into an arched hallway, surrounded by other smaller rooms. “This used to be the darbar [court],” he says. “This is where they received the guests.” The room is littered with dust and all kind of waste papers, telephone bills, bank slips, newspaper cuttings, and ash from a bonfire someone must have had using the wood from the bed that used to the be there before. In this corner was the bookshelf,” he points.
Next to the hallway, there is the dining space where they also did Yoga to keep fit. On an earlier trip I had seen the dining table with some remaining utensils but now there is nothing left. “It was almost impossible to live here in the early days. We used to feel any kind of accident could take place with anyone anytime.”
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
Kasim was the one of the few servants to accompany the family when they moved to the Mahal. None of the others stayed for long, he says. “They were not trustworthy enough,” he says of the other servants.
Kasim last came to the Mahal almost a decade ago. That was the last time he met the prince. “He asked me to go back and take care of my children and family.” Kasim would still call him sometimes on the landline, but, busy with his own family, never came to visit the prince again.
“I feel like all is over,” he says, after this melancholy revisit. “It is such a feeling I cannot put it in words. He never treated me like a servant. He took care of me as a brother as far as it was possible for him. Looking at his clothes lying around like that, I got goosebumps. I also think that the kind of statements being made about him are extremely unfair.”
“Were they frauds?” I ask, referring the NYT story.
“Had they been frauds, no one from central government would have visited them in the first place. If they had been frauds, why did foreign dignitaries come to meet them? It is totally false,” he adds. “It is very wrong to spread such misinformation and misleading statements.”
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The government had showed the family apartments in the posh neighbourhood that surrounds the area, resided by many diplomats and other notables of the city. However, they refused, as they did not want to live with “commoners”.
The Prince—the last of the Awadh’s—died in September 2017. From my many trips to the Mahal since, I discovered that artistic and literary activities had kept the younger generation occupied. Prince Ali Reza liked to paint. An easel, a mixing palette, several paintbrushes, and tubes of colours could be seen lying in one of the rooms.
The princess Sakina wrote a memoir of which she presented a copy to the royal house of Udaipur for translation into Urdu but it did not transpire in the end.
It is correctly stated by Kasim that many people gave the family the respect due to royalty, and the family too took its royal status utmost seriously. Their very decision to stay in Malcha Mahal, secluded from ‘commoners’ and keeping away from them despite the miserable surroundings in which they lived shows that. It also mirrors the decision of the Queen mother—generations ago—and her entourage to stay completely secluded in a grand house they rented in London on their ill-fated trip of 1856, which they made to convince the British to take back their decision to depose Wajid Ali Shah. This is narrated by British historian Rosie Llewyn-Jones in her biography of Wajid Ali Shah, Last King in India.
The cover of Sakina Mahal’s book.
The family members were well-versed on the tumultuous history of the House of Oudh. On one of my many trips to the Mahal, I recovered two handwritten pages. The top left corner of these pages—made from handmade paper and foolscap in size—read: ‘H.R.H. (Her Royal Highness), The Begam of Oudh, Shehzadi Wilayat Mahal, Heir to the Last King of Oudh Begam Hazrat Mahal and Wajid Ali Shah’. Written in perfectly intelligible English (with occasional grammatical errors), it is mentioned in that start that the British and afterwards the Indian authorities, were “in possession of considerable portion of treasures of Nawab Sadat Khan, Burhan-ul-Mulk and Safdarjung (first two nawabs of Awadh).”
Safdarjung’s tomb lies on the intersection of Lodhi Road and Aurobindo Marg in Delhi, not far from the Dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia, and a stone’s throw away from Amrita Shergil Marg, which marks the beginnings of Lutyen’s Delhi. In Old Delhi lies the Haveli of Nawab Saadat Khan, according to Jones’ book.
The note continues: “It was Warren Hastings who kept behind irons the then Begams of Oudh for many months starved, beaten and deprived of food. And the treasure of the Begams of Oudh was seized and estates and properties wrested.”
The narratorial voice turns prophetic and laments, under the section titled: “Why Knowingly Hiding the Real Realities…”:
Nor his heirs ever in vain thought of fleecing the subjects… Historians were are and shall be in future always swayed by favouritism and mislead intentionally. It is this Royal House of Oudh in the open portico who shall never waver (sic) for our justified return of our ancestral palaces and properties by the Government of India and not the meaningless decision taken by the Government of India the offers of government properties which was refused and rejected by we, the Begam of Oudh, Shehzadi Wilayat Mahal.
The reference to the Open Portico is to the space they inhabited at the New Delhi Railway Station.
A torn envelope found in the Mahal carries the imprint of the Royal Mail of England. The letter, sent from Yorkshire, on 25.10.15, is addressed to: Princess Sakina Mahal, followed by the address: ‘Malcha Palace, Malcha Marg, Chanakyapuri -110021, New Delhi’. It is likely it came from the same Shahid the NYT story mentions. Curiously, the letter is addressed to ‘Princess’ Sakina. Yet another envelope from Mexico is addressed to Maharani Sahiba, Oudh. Another large envelope from the Netherlands Embassy simply addresses the letter to ‘The Rulers of Oudh’.
Sakina calls the dog by the name Egyptians used to call the deity they associated with death, with a man’s body and dog’s head, the Anubis. “The Knower’s of Premonitions”, she terms them. “The Princess Anubis do not possess deceitful human calculations.”
According to Wilayat Mahal, the family was the ‘Last inheritors’ of the House of Oudh, descending from the line of the warrior queen Hazrat Mahal, who fought the British for one full year during the Great Mutiny of 1857. When she did not succeed in defeating the British and stopping them from taking Lucknow back, she fled to Kathmandu, Nepal, seeking refuge and protection along with her minor son Birjis Qadr, whom she had installed as the king during the period of fighting in Lucknow. She died in Nepal and remains buried in Kathmandu. They trace their lineage from a daughter they claimed Hazrat Mahal had although this is not something that is in historical records; there is however a possibility this daughter of Hazrat Mahal was illegitimate, if Sakina’s account is to be believed. Birjis Qadr is said to be the only official descendent of Wajid Ali Shah from Hazrat Mahal. This is the reason that all the so-called official descendants of Qadr deny the claims of Wilayat Mahal although ironically, Qadr was officially disowned by Shah when he left for Calcutta since he did not approve of Hazrat Mahal taking up arms against the British. This is mentioned by Jones in her book.
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Some months ago, the memoir that Princess Sakina wrote about herself and her family, and their strange fortunes, found its way to me.
The book starts by acknowledging Sakina Mahal as the sole author of the book. The title page reads: The Un-Seen Presence Princess Wilayat Mahal Oude. The cover page carried a painted portrait of Wilayat Mahal. She is here seated on a couch, dressed in a black sari, hair open and flowing, a solemn and sad expression in her eyes. This painting was made by a professional painter when they lived at the station; according to Sakina’s text, the painter also gave Ali Reza some art lessons.
Inside the cover follows a full-page photograph of Wilayat Mahal, seated, dressed in a black kaftan-like dress, her right hand holding the paw of a huge dog whom Sakina identifies as Castle. In the background, Kasim stands at attention, turbaned, wearing white trousers and a dark-colour buttoned shirt. The dog’s head reaches the middle of his torso. Wilayat Mahal looks haughty: her wide forehead and hooked nose dominating the rest of her features. Her lips are thin and pursed and the look in her eyes is steely. Her expression is pleasant enough, although she is not smiling.
Sakina calls the dog by the name Egyptians used to call the deity they associated with death, with a man’s body and dog’s head, the Anubis. “The Knower’s of Premonitions”, she terms them. “The Princess Anubis do not possess deceitful human calculations.”
She then proceeds to name all the members of the family: the mother Princess Wilayat Mahal, the two deceased princes, Asad and Mehdi, and the two remaining (then-alive) members, prince Ali Reza, and the author, Sakina. The names of the three princes are suffixed with the surname Cyrus, after the Persian king Cyrus, who founded the first Achaemenid empire. (In Barry’s NYT account, there is claim of more siblings, but Sakina is categorical about the number and their names, never mixing it up. It is likely the other siblings were from Wilayat’s first husband. Sakina mentions him as being much elder to her husband and married to her mother when Wilayat was very young.)
Sakina sets out the historical origins of their story: the tragic end of Nawab Sadat Khan, who founded the House of Oudh, from which they claimed descent. She credits Sadat Khan with mixed ancestry, as having come to India bearing traces of both Macedonia as well as Persia. Although the line of descent may be hard to prove, it is known that Sadat Khan did come to India from Iran, and belonged to a noble, high-class family; Persia or modern-day Iran was once conquered by the Macedonian king Alexander the Great. Sadat Khan is said to have come to India from the city of Nishapur, a former capital city in the Khorasan province of Iran, famed for its cultural accomplishments during the days when the Silk Route flourished between Asia and Europe.
An excerpt from Sakina Mahal’s book.
Khan founded the House of Oudh, some years before he died under mysterious circumstances in 1739, the year of the invasion by the Persian emperor Nader Shah who also sacked Delhi, then under Mughal king Muhammad Shah II. It is believed that Sadat Khan, a Shia like Shah, had invited the Persian emperor to raid Delhi, in order to settle scores with his adversaries in the Mughal court. Some historians believe he committed suicide by drinking poison when he finally realised he had committed a great treason by inviting him. This is similar to the version Sakina also relates, using it to emphasise the importance that the House of Oudh placed on the idea of personal honour: she notes that Khan committed suicide hurt by the accusation that he had committed treason. She mentions both the year of the raid—1739—as well as the site of the decisive battle with Mughal forces—Karnal—now in Haryana, a state neighbouring Delhi.
Sakina praises Wilayat Mahal, extolling the virtues of her mother for never giving in and for remaining steadfast in her resolve to wrest from the government of India what belonged, in her mind, to the House of Oudh. For this unjust appropriation, she blames Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, as well as the governments of India and Britain.
Sakina addresses the treatment that the Awadhs received from the government, as well as the public-at-large, and anticpates the criticism that later would come their way, especially the charges of defrauding the Indian government and being imposters. In their own self-inflicted suffering, they drew sustenance from the story of Ali, the revered patron saint of Shias, who is believed to have been the right candidate to take over the Caliphate of the Islamic world after the death of Prophet Mohammad, and was said to have been denied his so-called rightful due. Additionally, it also gives us insights into their stay at the Malcha Mahal for more than three decades, right from the time they first shifted there from the railway station.
The life and death of Wilayat Mahal is a recurring motif in the book. Sakina describes her mother in small details, stating the ‘princess’—how she called her mother—always bathed herself in morning and evening, never eating before she has washed herself up. The siblings maintained a formal distance from her mother, even asking permission in their interaction or when they sat together for meals.
Sakina also lets us know that Wilayat Mahal told her that she could not bear to be separated from her, and hence, refused all prospective suitors for her daughter, a decision Sakina accepted gladly on account of similar feelings for her mother. She also notes that she shared a stronger bond with her mother compared to the brothers.
Sakina describes how the dogs started dying one by one a few months, before the death of Wilayat Mahal and afterwards too. She notes that the dogs were treated with both affection as well as strictness by their mother and credits her with the ‘perfect administration’ of the Mahal.
On the afternoon she passed away, Wilayat Mahal was writing about the history of the House of Oudh, with her ‘favourite’ newspaper the Calcutta-based The Statesman open before her. Sakina heard being called for by her. ‘Rajkumariji’ is how she was addressed by her mother, she says. When she approached her, Wilayat Mahal did not say anything to her. Rather, she just placed her head on the stone writing table, writes Sakina.
Wilayat Mahal died on September 10, 1993, at 2:40 pm, on what Sakina calls a Black Friday. Eight hours pass with the body lying there, lifeless. Sakina mentions that her mother placed her head on a stone writing table, never to lift it again. Wilayat Mahal smoked heavily, and a cigarette packet lay on the table next to her. Around 10 at night, she writes, the dogs begin a ‘heart-rending’ cry. “We could not have the audacity to touch [her corpse]”, she writes. Both her and the prince then ‘sought her permission’ to bury her, by asking her aloud. They wept along with the dogs, she says, while the retainer—Kasim’s successor in their service—stood there, in shock. They asked him not to disturb them for next three days as they slept with the corpse of Wilayat Mahal without eating or drinking anything, accompanied by the remaining dogs.
Sakina writes that this was the first time they slept with their mother without first seeking her consent.
Three days turn into a week, then ten days. They embalm her with ‘ancient ingredients’ and the ‘diamonds, pearls and rubies’ which she wore when alive, were also crushed and used by them for the purpose. Afterwards, they wrapped her corpse in her seven-yards-long cream-coloured silk sari, writes Sakina. They dug her grave which took them a week. Inside the grave, they placed marble slabs on which Wilayat Mahal used to sleep to make a vault to place her corpse.
Sakina mentions two other deaths: of elder brother Cyrus Asad at 24, while the family was living at the New Delhi railway station; and Cyrus Mehdi, who died at the age of 14. In Sakina’s words, Wilayat Mahal “inwardly grieved” for these two sons, but maintained her composure.
In her account in NYT, Barry claims there was two other sons, one of whom is Shahid—Barry main source after Ali Reza himself—who ran away to England from Pakistan as a minor. We are never told how a minor boy of 14 found his way to England without parental supervision, or how he arranged for a passport. From his deathbed in England, it is Shahid who claims the fraudulence of the family. He is first identified as a “half-brother”, by the admission of his own Western Union transfer. Then, Barry’s account elevates him to full, blood brother later, without explaining the contradiction. However, Sakina does not acknowledge Shahid as her brother, only hinting at one place that there might have been a cousin or step-brother ‘who later went his way’.
Sakina displays some bitterness when she writes of their decade-long stay at the railway station, accusing both the general public and the authorities of hostility towards her family and especially the latter for inciting violence towards them. “Each day and each night had its own untold and open miseries…”, she writes, about the experience at the station where they faced goons who wanted to oust them. It is not known who sent them, but it is likely they came at the behest of some higher authority.
Life in the Mahal was a challenge. Sakina laments their wretched abode, with neither electricity nor water, denied to them by the government. “Whenever it rains, its roofs which are now very weak become a sieve-pouring rainwater flooding everything”, she writes. It had ruined their Persian carpets and Chinese tapestries.
“We could not have the audacity to touch [her corpse]”, she writes. Both her and the prince then ‘sought her permission’ to bury her, by asking her aloud.
By Sakina’s account, the family had moved into this home—The Malcha Mahal—on May 28, 1985. Sakina describes that the Mahal, “has no doors or windows. It is stark open to all the four seasons of nature in complete dilapidated ruination. It has the honour of being nearly 700 years old.”
Sakina readily mentions issues with the water supply, noting that the family paid municipal corporation for water but the tankers sent would often not be able to climb up the ascending road that led to the Mahal. Sometimes, water from the tankers would fall out in such a struggle and be wasted. This made them dependent on the whims of the authorities of the Earth Station nearby.
The electricity department, she mentions, had installed a power grid next to the Mahal in perhaps the 1960s or 70s, but Wilayat Mahal had it removed due to fear that the dogs would get electrocuted. Sakina calls the experience of seeking both water and electricity from the Earth Station as ‘great humiliation.’ She notes that sometimes Kasim would get into altercations with the employees of the Station and use ‘harsh words’ for receiving the supply of water.
She compares their need for water and the humiliation they used to suffer for it with the story of Imam Hussain in Qarbala, a foundational story for the Shia community. For Shia Muslims, the battle of Qarbala holds as much significance as the crucifixion of Jesus for Christians. In the legend of the battle of Qarbala, the denial of water to drink to Hussain and his companions by Yazid’s army—which cut their access to the river and forced them to go without water to drink—is a defining motif which for Ali’s followers shows the utter lack of humanity of the opposing side.
Sakina narrates how the family tried to dig a well, but the efforts proved useless as there was no water to be found in the area. For Sakina, this was due to the ‘meanness’ of the bureaucrats assigned to their case, who kept them deprived of essential amenities despite ‘government orders’; she mentions the name of then Home Minister P. V. Narsimha Rao who she says gave such an order in 1984, when the family was still at the railway station (she has included a letter to this effect). The assassination of Indira Gandhi in October that year caused drastic turmoil in the capital, and Wilayat Mahal agreed to move to Malcha Mahal in 1985 after “much hue and cry in the Parliament.”
Sakina notes that Wilayat Mahal received Rs. 500 at the time as allowance under the Privy Purse scheme, although Indira Gandhi had done away with the practice in 1970. Sakina claims the amount should have been Rs. 15,000 and it was against this that Wilayat Mahal protested by staying at the New Delhi railway station for ten years, demanding this amount “along with two of the palaces of our ancestors—the rulers of Oudh.”
Wilayat Mahal
In 1993—the year of her death—Wilayat Mahal sent letters on two occasions to then-President Shankar Dayal Sharma about the ‘severe distress’ the family was in. Sharma did not reply. Calling him ‘insensitive’ like all government functionaries, she says she knew well that the Government of India was used to making false assurances.
Sakina invokes the name of her ancestor Hazrat Mahal, in the context of her lament over the alleged perfidy of governments when it came to the House of Oudh. Hazrat had opposed the official declaration of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India and the British takeover of the right to rule India from the East India Company in 1858. She remembers the other redoubtable Begums of Oudh along with Wilayat Mahal, who were looted and punished by Warren Hastings in 1781 over the issue of the rebellion of the king of Chaitpur, as well as Hazrat, noting that they never ‘surrendered’ their right and privileges.
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If the latest account in the NYT is to be believed, the Awadhs were Butts from Kashmir, which would mean that like Kashmiri Butts, they were Sunni Muslims. By this logic, they could not have belonged to the House of Oudh, which was a Shia dynasty founded by Sa’adat Khan, a Shia of Persian origins.
When I first received a copy of Sakina’s book, I realised that it had two sections. The first part was written in a dense poetic style, mostly as a lament over the death of Wilayat Mahal and the denial of the family’s due, as per their claims of being the last inheritors of the legacy of the House of Oudh. Initially, it was not easy to read or make much sense of, except for discerning certain themes. Moreover, some of the references seemed extremely obscure. The latter part, however, shifted to slightly-more readable prose. Sakina’s descriptions of Wilayat Maha’s death seem to be incoherent, bringing together what appeared to be very disparate events and traditions. The strange practice they followed of embalming the corpse of their mother was Egyptian, for example, and not followed by Muslims.
For most South Asian Sunni Muslims, the most important festival is Eid. In her book, however, Sakina gives that status to Navroj for the Awadhs. She says they celebrated it every year with narcissus flowers and a special lunch and tea. It would be the only days, she writes, that the children could eat with their mother.
Sakina wrote in fact that they had no particular belief in traditional Islamic religious practices, which are, in general, rarely referenced in the book. At one place, Sakina writes that Wilayat Mahal did not care for Fridays so much, the holy day for Muslims, but preferred Saturday as the day for repose and contemplation.
But the other religious practices that Sakina says they followed and her references seemed somewhat bizarre at first and not Islamic—neither Shia nor Sunni. She mentions that both her mother and grandmother worshipped celestial bodies, especially the sun. For them, fire was the emblem of the deity.
She also writes that the family followed the beliefs of Sabaism, which stumped me at first. I had never come across the term before and an online search revealed little, especially its connection with Shia Islam, if any. Online entries seemed to suggest some connections with Egypt and Persia, and with a group of people mentioned in the Quran as Sabians who did worship the sun and the moon. There seemed to be a link to Zoroastrianism as well.
In an unrelated project at the time, I had begun some research on the writings of Russian philosopher Helena Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society—the headquarters for which are in Chennai. I had always found her a fascinating figure, with her interest in Indology, and her reputation as a psychic; I knew she had a connection with the Indian struggle for freedom through her friendships with Gandhi and Annie Besant.
It was while reading Blavatsky’s works (Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine) on the history of world’s religions that I stumbled upon the word Zabaism, which she described as an ancient religion. Things started to fall in place upon reading her connections between Zabaism/Sabaism/Sabeanism and Zoroastrianism.
Correspondence addressed to Wilayat Mahal. Photo: Abhimanyu Kuumar
Sabaism involves the worship of the heavenly bodies, and for which the sun or fire is the emblem of the chief deity. It is one of the earliest religions of the world, dating back to the pre-Christian era, connecting Persia and Egypt at one point of time in antiquity. Persia was connected to Mesopotamia as well, ruled over together by kings such as Cyrus and Alexander at different periods in history, along with Egypt. This entire region, including Arabia, is where all the world’s monotheistic religions originated.
The three Abrahamic faiths—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—have drawn something or the other from these ancient religions. As did Zoroastrianism, which predates the Abrahamic religions. In Persia, Sabaism, or such forms of astrology, gradually gave way to Zoroastrianisn, around the time of Cyrus the Great. Zoroastrianisn, which also features the worship of heavenly bodies and reverence for fire, which then was replaced by Shia Islam. However, Zoroastrian practices survived within Shia Islam too, in Iran and elsewhere, as scholars have noted. These include, for example, Nouroj, or Navroj, the Zoroastrian New Year, which is celebrated by Shia Muslims in Lucknow and other parts of India, too.
For most South Asian Sunni Muslims, the most important festival is Eid. In her book, however, Sakina gives that status to Navroj for the Awadhs: She says they celebrated it every year with narcissus flowers and a special lunch and tea. It would be the only days, she writes, that the children could eat with their mother; on all the other days, they ate separately.
The poetic, previously opaque sections of the book began to give me answers to some of the clues I had been looking for. Sakina invokes multiple times the Ahura Mazda, the God of the Zoroastrians, and also calls him Yazd, which is the Persian name for God.
Based on all this, I think it would be impossible to maintain that the Awadhs were Sunnis from Kashmir. The religious practices mentioned in her book include some from Shia Islam and some other references from Zoroastrianism and Sabaism, or let us say occult practices pre-dating the world’s major religions including Islam, all with a strong Iranian connection.
The account provided by NYT does not add up and it does not match what Sakina writes about their stay in Kashmir. Equally mysterious is the death of the brother, Asad. The NYT story somewhat confuses the siblings and cousins/step-brothers raised by Wilayat Mahal after her husband’s death.
Moreover, the account provided by NYT does not add up and it does not match what Sakina writes about their stay in Kashmir. Equally mysterious is the death of the brother, Asad. The NYT story somewhat confuses the siblings and cousins/step-brothers raised by Wilayat Mahal after her husband’s death.
As mentioned earlier, the NYT account first suggests that the family were Butts, Sunnis of Kashmiri origins, and originally lived in Lahore. Then they moved to Lucknow around in Pre-Independence times where they lived till Partition. They left for Pakistan around Partition times and lived there before seeking to come back to India, specifically Kashmir.
There are many loopholes in this narrative. The article states that the Awadhs were friends with G.M. Sadiq who rose to become Kashmir’s chief minister, and who helped them move to the region. But no detail is provided of this friendship. How did a family living in Lahore, and then Lucknow—far from Kashmir—strike this alleged friendship and maintained it, is not known. Sakina categorically refutes any such friendship, and rather says that Sadiq was hostile to them from the start and was perhaps behind the arson in their home which forced them to leave Kashmir. She blames the hand of Indian Intelligence behind this incident.
The NYT story further suggests that the family moved out from Lucknow following post-Partition riots. But this assertion is doubtful, too; scholars like Ashutosh Varshney and others have documented that Lucknow was peaceful during this period and no major communal clashes were reported.
A particularly dramatic scene is recounted by Barry’s source, Shahid:
Wilayat followed her husband, Shahid told me, but she never accepted his decision to leave India. She was obsessed with what she had left behind. In her mind, the grudge sprouted and germinated, and her behavior became volatile. Then her husband suddenly died. Now with all restraining influence on her gone, furious over the expropriation of her property, she accosted Pakistan’s prime minister at a public appearance, Shahid said, and slapped him.
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
The motives for this slap are somewhat contradictory. In one place it is suggested it was due to grief over husband’s death and government of Pakistan taking over their properties; in another place, it is suggested it was due to her ire over Kashmir’ status. In any case, how and why this transformation of an ‘ordinary housewife’ took place as Barry terms her into a radical firebrand activist, we are not told.
Barry’s account also states that the family managed to move to Kashmir, of their own choice aided by Sadiq. Sakina, however, maintains that they were forced to live there by Jawaharlal Nehru, who did not want them in Lucknow. Sakina writes that they had no interest in Kashmir nor felt any connection with it, except for occasional visits during vacations. It was an alien land for them, with alien customs and they wanted to leave for Lucknow as soon as possible.
Two contradictory things are further suggested about their stay in Kashmir without any proof or corroboration, based only on the word of Sadiq’s grandson—Iftikhar Sadiq—and a neighbour, in a follow-up NYT piece. It is said that Wilayat Mahal became active in Kashmiri politics for next ten years, but this is not corroborated by any other accounts in public domain. If she was active, she seems to have left absolutely zero impact, remembered by no one else from that period except for these testimonies. She seems to have made no other friends and acquaintances from the press who would have come out to have their say on the story. Sakina, on her part, maintains Sadiq did not want them there in the first place, and was hostile to them throughout their stay in Kashmir.
The other assertion is the people thought Wilayat Mahal was a ‘witch’ and the family was aloof, with few friends and that people left her and them alone. That would be very unlikely for a person living in Kashmir, of Kashmiri origins, and Butts in fact (as suggested). It would be much more likely a scenario that they would have friends as they were among their own people—if she indeed was politically active and had expressed solidarity for the cause of their Independence.
This is a grave accusation, based on questionable supporting proof and corroboration. Let us also remember that no government—India or Pakistan—has been sympathetic to the Awadhs.
The mystery of Asad’s death is also treated offhandedly by a follow-up NYT story by Barry and Suhasini Raj, titled Mystery of the “Royal Family of Oudh Unravels a Bit More”, once again on the word of Iftikhar Sadiq. He says after his grandfather G.M. Sadiq died, the family left the state with two children, but left Asad back in Kashmir. This is in complete contradiction to Sakina’s account, who claims that Asad died on July 23, 1980, while they were living at the station. Even Kasim told me that the family went to bury Asad in Lucknow after his death.
(I met Kasim again recently, and he maintains that Asad died in Lucknow. He also says that he had travelled to Lucknow with Asad who was leading the negotiations with the Indian government over properties.)
This is what an earlier story by Elisabeth Bumiller on The Washington Post—published in 1986—refers too. Bumiller visits the family in Malcha Mahal, soon after they move there, and sees a photo of Asad on the wall. She is told that Asad died ‘of sadness’. Barry’s more recent NYT account, however, claims that the Awadh’s left Asad to die starving alone in their house in Kashmir. Why should Wilayat leave her eldest son to die? Why not take all three? No reason is assigned. Did they have no neighbours to help? Asad was old enough to go out and seek assistance. Kasim told me Asad would get serious fevers at times, and died in such a state—in Lucknow.
There are other suggestions in the account that simply don’t add up. The number of brothers that Barry first suggests changes in later accounts, and their names are modified, too. Sakina maintains they were four children. For their alternate account, NYT cites no proof or papers.
There is also the curious matter of an autobiography of Nehru she cites from, without naming it, wherein, he purportedly called Wilayat Mahal ‘that Butt woman’ who made a lot of mischief in Kashmir. But Nehru died a sitting-PM, and he never wrote an autobiography of his years in office.
Much of Barry’s landmark account of this family comes from relatives from Pakistan, who were very likely children from Wilayat’s first marriage, of which Sakina speaks in her book. Her main source is Shahid, on deathbed, and corroborated by a couple of older, unsteady ‘aunts’, who are described as:
The cousins were hunched, birdlike women in their 70s.
Wahida had worked for many years as a teacher, and barely spoke. She seemed to communicate by slapping people, hard, across the face. She wandered from one of us to the other, looking for someone to slap.
Near the end of Barry’s story, reveals what she believes to be the family’s secrets, underscoring their ‘fraud’.
They took on new identities: Farhad became Princess Sakina, occasionally Princess Alexandrina; Mickey became Prince Ali Raza, and later called himself Prince Cyrus. They no longer made any mention of their Pakistani relatives, or the spacious family house in Lahore that was waiting for them should they return. They seemed to shed their past entirely, to come from nowhere.
In the follow-up piece, the NYT wrote that they were an “ordinary family displaced by Partition” and their royal lineage were “in large part invention”. This is a grave accusation, based on what does appear to be an impressive instance of investigative reporting—but when examined closely, there are still many more loose ends to the story. Let us also remember that no government—India or Pakistan—has been sympathetic to the Awadhs. And I suppose it would not please the British government to hear themselves being accused of loot and perfidy.
The governments were not innocent by-standers in this case. They had a tremendous power to conceal truth and spin narratives, if they do not like certain counter-narratives. Hence, the entire case of the Awadhs needs to be re-examined, before any judgements are passed based on selected leaks and quotes. It is especially important to be cautious, with a government in power that is particularly unsympathetic to Muslims.
Ultimately, I feel that the discourse around the Awadhs has taken a steep misdirection by solely focusing on whether or not they were royals. Even if they had committed a ‘fraud’, they had done so without any financial benefit. Even if they were deluded, they seemed to have caused the greatest harm to themselves, choosing a wretched and isolated life.
It is perhaps a more complicated ask to appreciate their humanity, to try and understand them as individuals, who, when all said and done, were not wrong in accusing the British government of treating the Awadhs unfairly from the very beginning. Post-Independence, the Indian government also displayed a high-handed treatment of princely kingdoms, with both Kashmir and Hyderabad as glaring examples of this case. Awadh, a Shia Muslim kingdom, already destroyed by the British, also suffered a similar fate.
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According to Kasim, it was on the ‘Rani Sahiba’ Wilayat Mahal’s insistence that they move to the Malcha Mahal from the railway station, even though no one else in the family was keen to do so. “We were also helped by a reporter from Indian Express, who intervened on the family’s behalf and spoke to authorities who cleared up the forest around the Mahal, so the family could live here.”
We pass by another room, where the floor is covered by bat faeces, and then on we move to the dining room where Kasim picks up a broken chair which belonged to the family. Its top and bottom parts come off in his hands.
Back at the residence for the last time, I stand with Kasim in a room adjacent to the entry to the Mahal, where there is also a tank to store water. Kasim says this is where the cooking too place; it also served as a washroom. The floor is strewn with old clothes, shoes, bedsheets, and cushion covers. “We used to go down from here to get water.” He points in front. “You can also see a small mosque there.” He used to sleep in this room at nights, he says, on a cot.
He starts to identify the clothes, mostly of western fashion: pairs of jeans, jackets, shirts etc. “I know what belonged to whom.” Wilayat Mahal stitched her own clothes, he says. He finds a yellow-green pillow cover with designs on the edges. “This was embroidered by Rani Sahiba. She used to do this in her free time.”
I ask him if it makes him sad to see their belongings lying in such a state. He finds a pair of dark blue trousers, scouring in the pile. “This used to belong to me.”
“I feel remorse,” he adds. “A tremendous remorse.”
We pass by another room, where the floor is covered by bat faeces, and then on we move to the dining room where Kasim picks up a broken chair which belonged to the family. Its top and bottom parts come off in his hands. Then, we are outside from the rear door of the Mahal, opening into the forest.
“Many peacocks used to come here. Rani Sahiba liked to feed them,” he says, walking briskly around the Mahal. “They used to come in droves.”
Photo: Abhimanyu Kumar
We spot the grave of a dog. There are some bones lying around, and several stones over a hole in the ground that had been filled back in.
Kasim used to bring meat for the dogs from Nizamuddin, he says. “There was one called Himalaya. Another was called Brahmaputra. The dogs were very loyal.”
In a walk around the Mahal’s circumference, Kasim picks up the tattered carpet lying in the darbar. “This is a very old carpet that they brought. It is from Iran. It used to cover the entire hall but looks like people have cut it up and taken away parts.”
Our tour in the Mahal is done. Finally, we take the narrow stairs going to the roof, and are outside in the sun, facing the expanse of forest around the dilapidated palace of the last Awadhs. Kasim looks around for a Neem tree which Wilayat Mahal had herself planted here, decades ago.
The tree is very much still there, still in full bloom. He breaks into a smile, as if he had met an old friend.
*With inputs and contributions by Aletta Andre.
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Abhimanyu Kumar is a journalist based in Delhi. He has written for various national and international publications in the previous decade and continues to do so. His first book of poems Milan and the Sea was published in 2017. His work on cow-related lynchings in India was featured in an anthology published in 2018 by Aleph. He runs a literary blog called the Sunflower Collective, now five years old. He is also interested in cinema and film theory, philosophy and history. You can find him on Instagram: @abhimanyujourno.
