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History’s losers rarely get to write their own obituaries, and few have been written over more thoroughly than Wajid Ali Shah, the tenth and last king of Awadh. The annexers’ version, composed before the annexation to justify it, gave the world a debauched voluptuary, dancing while his kingdom rotted, and that cartoon governed the books for a century. The revision, built by historians working through the Persian and Urdu records and the king’s own enormous literary output, has recovered a different figure, a gifted, conscientious, impossibly situated artist king whose real offence was possessing a rich kingdom that his ally had decided to take. Both versions must be laid on the table, for the argument over this one man is the argument over the whole colonial transaction.
Born in 1822, Wajid Ali Shah came to the throne in 1847, formed by the most refined court in India, and his early reign, the records show, was energetic, reorganising the army, hearing petitions in person, reforming the courts, until the British resident’s interventions made clear how little of the kingdom was actually his to govern. What was undeniably his was the culture, and there he reigned absolutely. He was the great patron and practising master of Kathak, staging at his Qaisarbagh palace the rahas, the theatrical spectacles of Krishna’s dance that he wrote, scored, and choreographed himself, appearing in them as Krishna, a Shia king dancing the cowherd god, the tehzeeb’s confluence embodied in the sovereign’s own person. He composed thumris under the pen name Akhtarpiya, and the most famous song attached to his name, Babul mora naihar chhooto hi jaye, sings a bride’s farewell to her father’s house and was heard by everyone who came after as the king’s farewell to Lucknow. His pen produced dozens of works, memoirs, treatises on music and love, an archive of self documentation almost no Indian ruler of the age can match.
The Company’s pen was busier. Colonel Sleeman’s tour of Awadh in 1849 produced the report of misgovernment that annexation required, a document modern historians read as advocacy as much as audit, and Dalhousie, completing his collection of Indian states, resolved that Awadh’s turn had come, not by the doctrine of lapse, for there was no failure of heirs, but by the older doctrine of the stronger party. In February 1856, General Outram delivered the treaty of abdication. Wajid Ali Shah refused to sign away his dynasty’s honour, placed his crown, by the accounts, in the resident’s hands, declaring that the Company might take what it clearly intended to take, and left for Calcutta to appeal to a justice that did not exist, while his mother sailed for London to petition a queen who would not receive her case. The kingdom passed without a shot, the pension was fixed, and the shot came the following year, from the kingdom’s disbanded soldiers, in the storm the next article details.
The king spent 1857 a prisoner in Fort William, locked up on suspicion while his wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, who receives her own article in this series, ruled rebel Lucknow in their son’s name, the dynasty’s fight conducted by its queen while its king wrote poetry in captivity, a division of labour history has found easier to mock than to understand. Released, pensioned, and permanently exiled, Wajid Ali Shah settled at Matiyaburj outside Calcutta and performed his strangest act of rule. He rebuilt Lucknow in miniature, imambaras, gardens, a menagerie of famous extravagance, the court’s musicians and cooks reassembled, Kathak and thumri sustained on the Hooghly for three decades, so that when he died in 1887, the culture of Awadh had survived its state by thirty years inside one man’s stubborn theatre, and Calcutta’s own culture, its music, its biryani with the potato of pensioned economy, carries the Matiyaburj deposit to this day.
The ledger closes where it opened, with the two portraits. The annexers’ Wajid Ali Shah justified an empire’s appetite, and the revision’s Wajid Ali Shah indicts it, and between them stands the documented man, neither saint nor cartoon, a ruler denied rule who governed the only kingdom left open to him, the arts, with a competence his conquerors never matched in their portraits of him. Uttar Pradesh keeps his memory the way the song keeps the bride’s, tenderly and with a sense of wrong, and the melody of Babul mora, sung by Saigal in a Calcutta film a half century after the exile began, remains the sound of 1856, a kingdom leaving its father’s house.
