The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  The story resides in the mid-nineteenth century. The Nawabs of Awadh, who seized sovereignty in the region as agents of the Mughals, never actually enjoyed absolute power in their princely dominion. As was the case with Muslim rulers across the subcontinent, authority was, in fact, exercised in conjunction with old and new Hindu elites. In pre-Mughal Deccan, for instance, its sultans utilised brahmins and Marathas as their intermediaries with the masses, just as in Awadh the nawabs were served by kayasthas who operated their administration, and by legions of Hindu warrior ascetics (or Nagas) who waged war against their enemies. As the splendour of the nawabs grew, so too did the wealth and influence of these classes—the frenetic building of temples in Ayodhya in the eighteenth century, for example, had a great deal to do with the wave of prosperity enjoyed by the Hindu aristocracy under a thriving nawabi court, which also patronised pilgrim activity, revitalising the worship of Rama.

  It was the second nawab, Safdarjung, who, in return for military services, presented to a group called the Ramanandi Nagas money for the construction of a shrine to Hanuman at a spot about 700 metres from the Babri Masjid. In due course, a Hindu nobleman enabled the expansion of this structure into what is today called Hanumangarhi, described as a temple-fortress, and which in the nineteenth century possessed gifts from the Awadh crown that brought it a phenomenal 50,000 in revenue (worth many times that sum at today’s value). Scholars like Hans Bakker and Peter van der Veer note that Babri itself is believed to stand on the site of an eleventh-century Hindu shrine that was demolished and converted into a mosque by a Mughal general. Furthermore, old temple columns were said to have survived (though there is controversy on this subject), unwittingly also becoming pillars for the cause of ‘restoring’ the premises to its original use. In any case, the irony was that far from splitting men into irreconcilable enemies, till the mid-nineteenth century, Hindus and Muslims worshipped at Babri in peace. Each enjoyed custody of different parts of the compound and there was enough general harmony for this practice to carry on.

  The first communal conflict that Ayodhya witnessed occurred in the mid-1850s. On the face of it, this was a Hindu–Muslim feud. As we learn from The Anatomy of a Confrontation , a collection of scholarly essays edited by Sarvepalli Gopal, and other sources, Shah Ghulam Husain, a Muslim firebrand, claimed that Hanumangarhi stood, in fact, on the ashes of a mosque that dated back to Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign—in other words, just as Babri is supposed to stand on the ruins of a temple, this Hindu shrine occupied a space that earlier housed a mosque. Husain’s call to ‘reclaim’ the mosque was answered by enough men to result in a violent clash soon afterwards. The Muslim party was not just repulsed; we read how the Hindus took the skirmish into Babri next door, which Husain’s fighters had used as a base. In the course of events, seventy men were killed on the Muslim side. An attack on Muslim civilians and plunder of their property followed, with reprisals after some Hindus decided to make a grand display of slaughtering pigs on the day the seventy fallen Muslims were buried. It was, simply put, provocations galore and blood and violence everywhere.

  While this was superficially a Hindu–Muslim conflict, in reality matters were more complicated. Muslims in Awadh comprised about 12 per cent of the population; the vast majority within this minority was Sunni. The nawab, however, was of Shia persuasion, and the cream of courtly patronage was distilled in favour of the Shia super-minority. That the reigning nawab, the colourful Wajid Ali Shah (about whom we will read more in a subsequent essay), was also an enthusiast for Hindu traditions, in addition to the court’s general collaboration with Hindu elites, provoked the ‘arch villain’ Ghulam Husain and his ‘vile’, ‘disreputable’ followers to plot their attack on Hanumangarhi. This was, in other words, not only a move against the Hindus but also a Sunni rebellion against an unorthodox Shia nawab. While Husain’s plot was a failure, his place was soon taken by another zealot, the maulvi Amir Ali. And this man went as far as declaring a jihad to occupy Hanumangarhi and re-establish the mosque that was supposed to have existed within.

  Interestingly, the claim that there was a Muslim place of worship in Hanumangarhi may not have been incorrect, even if it was inaccurate in the vocabulary of its expression. While a committee constituted by the nawab found that there was never a mosque within the fort, it is likely that the Muslims were building on an earlier tradition when they enjoyed access to the shrine. Before the Ramanandi Nagas turned it into their military seat, the deity in the temple was worshipped by Hindus as Hanuman and by Muslims as Hathile, one of the five saints (panch pir ) of Sufism—Hanumangarhi, in other words, was a shrine that attracted everybody. It was not a full-blown masjid, but by preventing Muslim access to the shrine at some point, those in charge of Hanumangarhi inadvertently allowed grievances to mount. This, in turn, culminated in the imagined memory of a ‘mosque’ that required reclaiming, even if this meant shedding blood and sacrificing lives—an example of how extreme piety can quickly transform a shadow from the past into incontrovertible ‘fact’.

  In any case, when Amir Ali refused to accept the decision of the committee, the stage was set for battle. Armed with fatwas from Shia as well as Sunni clerics that declared Ali’s jihad unlawful, the nawab’s forces under British command intercepted him on his way to Ayodhya. Several hundred rebels lost their lives and their obstinate leader fell on the battlefield. Hanumangarhi was retained by the Hindus, while in Babri the British erected fences to separate the mosque from the platform where Hindus offered worship. What is curious, however, is that some date the first claim that the masjid sat on the spot of Ram’s birth to the mid-1850s—precisely the time when Muslims claimed Hanumangarhi was ‘originally’ a mosque, and Hindus, in their counter-claim, reminded them of a temple upon which Babri is supposed to have been built.

  The matter may never be satisfactorily resolved. So perhaps the best lesson we can learn from the last time a mob went to destroy a place of worship in Ayodhya, before the tragedy of 1992, is that at least on that occasion, those in power did not stand by idly; that, instead, they did their duty and protected the temple from destruction, something that cannot be said of those who watched quietly as a mosque was razed a hundred years later by a terrible, monstrous mob.

  A FORGOTTEN INDIAN QUEEN IN PARIS

  She lies buried amidst sepulchres that house the remains of many who are still famous. There is Jim Morrison on the premises, the American rock legend whom trains of tourists come to pay homage to, like pilgrims bearing flowers. Edith Piaf, the waif who sang her way to greatness, finds her peace nearby, as does Frederic Chopin, the composer whose pickled heart waits in Warsaw but whose body dissolves in the French capital. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson rests here, and in the vicinity is a man believed to have been sired by Napoleon. Oscar Wilde’s sculpted grave competes with Marcel Proust’s neat bed of stone, and many more still are the artists, writers and persons of esteem who crowd the hillside cemetery that is Père Lachaise in Paris. And amongst them all, under a platform of rugged rock, lies this tragic Indian woman. Her name and cause have been largely forgotten, but since 1858, she has been here, longer than many of her revered neighbours. Tourists walk by with cameras, oblivious to her unmarked square existence. But every now and then, there is a stray visitor who arrives on a quest: to locate the final resting place of that remarkable woman, the last queen of Awadh.

  I was that visitor in the winter of 2017, when I trekked up Paris’s most famous graveyard to look for this forgotten tomb. The lady appears in yellowed old books by several names. She was to some Malika Kishwar, while others knew her as Janab-i Aliyah, Her Sublime Excellency, mother to the ruler of ‘Oude’, Wajid Ali Shah. In 1856, when the British deposed the nawab from his ancestral seat in Lucknow, his family departed for colonial Calcutta with all the money they could gather and what dignity they had left. But while the son (a ‘crazy imbecile’ in the eyes of his oppressors) prepared to fade quietly into history, the mother was determined to win back that which was her family’s
by right. That very year, this woman who knew little beyond her sequestered palace, set foot on a ship, determined to sail to England so she might speak—woman to woman—to the English queen in person. After all, declared the middle-aged begum, Victoria was ‘also a mother’; she would recognise the despair her people had unleashed, and restore to the House of Awadh territory, titles and its rightful honour. And so proceeded Malika Kishwar, her health already in decline, braving cold winds in a foreign land, to plead the cause of royal justice.

  The mission was doomed from the start. Her advisers were many, and much was the money they sought for the privilege of their counsel. The results, however, were nowhere to be found. As the historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones records, Kishwar discovered quickly enough that Queen Victoria, in her grand ‘circular dress’, had little power to bestow anything more than polite conversation on her and her Awadhi line—when an audience was granted, they spoke about boats and English mansions, not about imperial treacheries and the unjust transactions in Lucknow. In the Houses of Parliament, things got worse. A prayer prepared at long last was dismissed on spurious bureaucratic grounds: the begum was to submit a ‘humble petition’, words that she failed to use in the document laid on the table. While her son reconciled to British imperium, the mother was obstinate in battle. So, when she wished to travel, they sought to dragoon her into acknowledging their suzerainty—if Malika Kishwar and her ménage wanted passports, she would have to declare herself a ‘British subject’. The begum refused to do anything of the sort, prepared, at best, to be under ‘British protection’. And legal quibbles aside, the Great Rebellion of 1857 compounded matters—there was now no prospect of relinquishing even a fragment of British power when the hour called for a demonstration of obdurate strength alone. Awadh was lost forever.

  The tide having turned, in 1858, the begum decided to return at last, defeated and unhappy in the extreme. But while in Paris, she fell ill and died on 24 January. The funeral was simple, though there was yet some dignity and state—representatives of the Turkish and Persian sultans gave the Indian queen the regard the British denied her and her line. A cenotaph was constructed by the grave, but it has long since fallen to pieces—when decades later, the authorities at Père Lachaise sought funds to repair the tomb, her exiled son decided from Calcutta that it was simply not worth his pension, while the colonial state was even less inclined to honour a difficult woman lying several feet underground in an alien European country. And so, since that time, in a graveyard full of magnificent memorials, the queen of Awadh has remained, a shell of broken stone sheltering her from the weeds and overgrowth that alone have made a claim upon her and the story that she tells.

  Others of her suite also suffered. A younger son travelled with her, Sikandar Hashmat by name. He died in England, and was carried to join his mother in her unmarked grave. A grandson’s infant child was also buried within, turning the tally in Paris to three. But it was in London that one more of the delegation fell, this one a baby princess, born to Sikandar Hashmat from his Rajput wife on British shores. I walked around a dull little place called Kilburn to look for this grave. And there, in a cemetery, after an hour amidst tombs set in the soggy English ground, I found a memorial to the child: Princess ‘Omdutel Aurau Begum’, who died on 14 April 1858, a few months after her grandmother who was once a queen. But Omdutel, all of eighteen months, enjoys a minor triumph where her royal grandmother had none—lying by a pathway in that cemetery in Kilburn, her grave at least bears her name. The begum, on the other hand, has become to the passing tourist a plinth on which to rest, smoking a cigarette and gazing at a horizon full of the dead, till a stranger might appear to tell how beneath them are the remains of a fascinating woman—pieces of one of history’s unhappy tales.

  THE STORY OF WAJID ALI SHAH

  In 1874, The New York Times dispatched a correspondent to India to survey the life of a fabulously wealthy man. Once he had been an even wealthier monarch, but by the time the journalist arrived, he had already spent decades in vastly reduced conditions, having lost his territories and squandered much of his money. From a kingdom the sise of Scotland, Wajid Ali Shah now reigned over only an estate in Calcutta. The sheer number of followers cramped into his premises, however, gave some impression of pomp—the grounds hosted over 7,000 people, including prostitutes, household guards and dozens of disgruntled begums, not to speak of a menagerie of monkeys, bears and 18,000 pigeons. ‘The Ex-King of Oude’s mimic kingdom’, the Times called the establishment, and that is precisely what it was: a pale imitation of vanished glories.

  Wajid Ali Shah was a creative, difficult and interesting man. Born in 1822, he wore his hair in ringlets and dressed in robes that coyly exposed his left nipple. His early years were unremarkable but for his interest in music, dance and poetry—and for the ample proportions of his royal person. By the time he succeeded to the throne of Awadh in 1847, a state carved out of the crumbling Mughal empire, he had already produced works such as the Darya-yi-Ta’ashshuq (The River of Love) and the Bahr-e ‘Ishq (The Ocean of Affection). His plays were sensational productions that took months to put together, and every now and then the Shah threw grand parties—the Yogi Mela of 1853 saw his gardens opened to the masses, with everyone instructed to dress in saffron. In 1843, he directed a play on the Hindu deity Krishna, with four of his wives playing milkmaids and prancing around on stage.

  Predictably, the heavily starched, studiously avaricious British were displeased. ‘The Heir Apparent’s character holds no promise of good,’ it was noted. His ‘temper is capricious and fickle, his days and nights are passed in the female apartments and he appears to have resigned himself to debauchery, dissipation and low pursuits’. This, of course, made for a wonderful excuse for annexation, so that even when the Shah made efforts to govern his kingdom well, producing an administrative manual called the Dastur-i-Wajidi , the British preferred to dismiss him as an imbecile. Less than a decade after his succession, when he was told in 1856 that his kingdom would be absorbed into British territory, the Shah cried, ‘Why have I deserved this? What (crime) have I committed?’ There was no clear answer, but one hint lies in the fact that the East India Company owed him large amounts in debt. Why bother repaying a loan when liquidating your moneylender was a more comfortable option?

  Some of the blame did lie with the Shah. He loved gun salutes from the British, but when it came to actually protecting his honour by fighting the annexation of his kingdom, it was his elderly mother who made more of a real (if abortive) effort by travelling to London (as we saw earlier). While the old lady died in an alien country, her son agreed to become a pensioner of the East India Company. Once Wajid Ali Shah commanded 60,000 soldiers, but now he was reduced to a life of domestic frustration and chauvinistic rage. There was a time when he saw himself as a modern-day Krishna, a hero whose brilliance attracted women by the hundreds. But as his biographer Rosie Llewellyn-Jones notes, ‘For all his passionate love poetry, Wajid Ali Shah may have been one of those men who enjoy the pursuit and capture, but do not actually like women very much.’

  Perhaps this stemmed from when he was sexually abused by a nanny at the age of eight, or perhaps there were other reasons. About one wife he wrote: ‘Day and night I would loiter around her like one possessed.’ But in 1849 he was dismayed to learn that what he got in return from this darling was gonorrhoea. He liked dark women, and an African wife was cheerfully named Ajaib Khanum (Strange Lady). Another consort, Sally Begum, a descendant of a Mughal prince from his Anglo-Indian wife, was five years his senior, while of the eight women he divorced at his mother’s insistence, one, the redoubtable Begum Hazrat Mahal, stayed on in Lucknow and waged war against the British in 1857; this lady too had more spirit than her ex-husband.

  Having settled in Calcutta, Wajid Ali Shah got down to practical matters. In the next two decades, he divorced fifty of his remaining wives, but in 1878 when he tried to get rid of twenty-seven more in a single shot, the British responded with embarrassment—h
e could not simply shed begums, he was informed. The man responded with exasperation: ‘But the women are old and ugly!’ When asked who should care for them, quick came his reply: ‘The Government.’ By 1880, the principal queen was ‘living in adultery’ with someone else, possibly from sheer desperation—the king was a miser and thought a monthly allowance of 90 to his oldest son was perfectly generous when his own income was 12 lakh every year. The British, in turn, hadn’t quite counted on the man living so long and costing them grand amounts in pension.

  When in September 1887, the Shah finally died, there was a general sense of relief not only among the authorities but also in his camp. ‘His ladies were nearly as numerous as his animals,’ the governor general’s wife recorded. ‘They [depart] at the rate of seven or eight a day… the slaves of an hard-hearted old man who cared more for his cobras and his wild beasts than he did for them.’ The Shah had once been heir to a kingdom and to a large fortune—a decade after Awadh’s annexation, it was found that the British still owed the ex-king £2 million. He had reigned in style and patronised the arts. He was an inheritor who, were he not entrapped by prejudice and by colonial machinations, might have gone down as the creator of an even greater legacy. His downfall, however, turned him into an unhappy tyrant bent on preserving a miniature copy of his past—a past that came at the cost of depressing those who stood by him when calamity struck, and who only too late learnt that Wajid Ali, the Shah, had long predeceased Wajid Ali the embittered pensioner.

  VICTORIA MAHARANI AND INDIA

  On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria formally extinguished the fires of the great rebellion of the preceding year with a historic proclamation. Two pages of grandiloquent text was all it took to inaugurate a new chapter after the ‘mutiny’, and possession of India was transferred from the bloodied hands of the East India Company to the custody of the British Crown. Everything was infused with the moral legitimacy of a maternal sovereign, her words offering a world of guarantees, from territorial integrity for princely states to freedom of religion for the masses. Writers on all sides descended into ecstasies about this ‘Magna Carta of Indian Liberties’, though bureaucrats in actual command prevented too liberal an interpretation by the queen’s new subjects. But for all that, the proclamation generated a sweep of goodwill across the board—a clean slate for colonial officers, and hope for India’s earliest generation of nationalists. And in the meantime, Queen Victoria herself was transformed, becoming India’s own Victoria Maharani.