April 14, 2002

THE French journalist Kenize Mourad has led a truly extraordinary life, first of all as the lost daughter of an Ottoman princess and a Talukdar of Oudh, the Raja of Kutwara. Secondly, as a journalist, covering the world’s trouble spots. In 1987, she published her first novel De la part de la princesse morte, based on the dramatic life of her royal mother, who came to British India as a bride and died of septicaemia in Occupied France. The novel was received with widespread acclaim and turned Kenize into a celebrity, overnight. “The novel changed my life,” Kenize said. “I did not need a regular job anymore. I could write what I wanted and work freelance, which is very difficult in France otherwise.”

The great-granddaughter of Sultan Mourad V, Kenize now spends winters in Paris and summers in Ireland, at her quiet, seaside cottage, where she does most of her writing. Her first novel, which has now been published in Pakistan as Memories of an Ottoman princess, (a much better title than the UK original Farewell princess) is being adapted into a one-woman stage play, to open in Paris this September. Her second novel Les jardins de Badalpur, a sequel to the first, came out several years ago and is drawn from her own life, though Kenize asserts that it is fiction, nevertheless.

“It is about people in search of an identity between East and West,” Kenize says. “In the end, the heroine Zahra understands that identity is neither family, nor religion nor country, but it is humanity and human beings. You share an identity with people with the same outlook and ideas, anywhere in the world.”

Zahra is brought up in the West, but is totally oriental by blood, as is Kenize herself. At 21, Zahra comes to India, for the first time, to meet her father, the Raja of Badalpur in Lucknow. She goes through many difficulties and cultural conflicts. Ultimately, her father agrees to gift her a garden in Badalpur that her late Turkish mother loved. This provides Zahra with a great sense of roots and belonging. But her brother seizes it, when their father dies, and Zahra has to re-asses her relationship to her family and indeed, India.

Les jardins de Badalpur, has not been translated into English as yet, for Kenize was angry over the English translation of her first novel; its translator, an Englishman, had given many phrases a racist slant and deleted 60 “anti-British passages”. Kenize had to have this rectified, but she says the English version still does not do justice to the original. Even so, Memories of an Ottoman princess makes quick, enjoyable and fascinating read. Researched from newspaper archives, it covers a grand sweep of history from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and European power-politics, to the upsurge of nationalism in French Lebanon and British India.

At the heart of it is a young woman - Sultana Selma - whose life and aspirations are thwarted, at every step, by the march of politics and time. In Turkey the book was much in demand and serialized in the newspaper Hurriyet, though passages critical of Ataturk were not translated.

“It was the first time that anyone had written about the end of the Ottoman Empire from inside the palace and not from the foreign, Kamalist or official point of view,” Kenize says. “Kamal I admire a lot, because he saved Turkey from being divided among the European powers, but I have tried to show that the Sultan was not so bad and that Kamal was not an angel either.”

Maulana Shaukat Ali arranged the marriage between Kenize’s parents. Kenize’s Ottoman mother had been exiled from Turkey, when she was still a girl and educated at a convent in Beirut. She grew up to be extremely beautiful “blonde with green eyes”, but she could only marry “a prince, a Muslim and a wealthy man”. This combination was available only in Egypt or India. “In India, my mother thought she would lead the same life as her cousins Princesses Niloufar and Dure Shahwar, who had married into the Nizam’s family,” Kenize says. “Instead she found herself in a closed purdah society. She took it badly.”

In the novel, the conflicts and difficulties Selma faced are described with great sensitivity. There are vivid contrasts between the cosmopolitan life Selma has enjoyed in Beirut and the alien, archaic, purdah society that she is plunged into in Lucknow. She also finds that her well-travelled husband, the Raja of Badalpur, has many contradictions. He cannot break away from age-old family traditions, though aspects of him are also modern.

“I was born in Paris at the beginning of the war,” Kenize said. “My mother was afraid of traditional Indian medicine and hakims. She asked my father to have the baby in France. He agreed. He sent her with an old eunuch who had followed her from Turkey. My father was to join her later, but war broke out.”

Then the Nazis occupied Paris. Kenize’s mother couldn’t contact India. She also held a British passport and was afraid of being caught. Her money ran short and she died in pitiable circumstances. The eunuch saved Kenize. He took her to the neutral Swiss Consulate. Her father was informed, but it was impossible for him to come to France. The Swiss Consul and his wife took Kenize in and often called her ‘La petite princesse”.

They wanted to adopt her when they were transferred at the end of the war. Her father refused. He wanted her back, but India was in turmoil and it was sometime before he sent two women to fetch her. She had been left with Catholic nuns, who regarded Islam and India with fear. They hid her. Eventually Kenize’s father was persuaded that it was best not to disrupt her life in France until she was 18. By then, he had also remarried and had two sons and a girl was not that important.

Kenize was never shown the letters that he wrote to her as a small child. She was told that he did not want her. She said: “They wanted me to be a French girl and a Christian. They thought it would be better if I forget about India, otherwise I would be very torn. But I could not forget. I was always dreaming of this father. I thought he owned huge jewels, as in a fairy tale.”

An elegant, determined woman, Kenize was brought up by an elderly French couple who were more “like grandparents”. They sent her to a good school and spoilt her, but Kenize remained lonely and confused and always felt ‘different”. Finally, she revolted and demanded her father’s address, which was given to her with much reluctance. She was an impoverished left wing student at the Sorbonne, having broken away from her French family, when she made her first contacts with her Turkish relatives. She recalls her amazement at being received by her bejewelled cousin, Princess Niloufar. in a splendid Parisian apartment and greeted with the words “How are you princess?”

Kenize’s life has been filled with stark contrasts and ironies. Her first trip to Turkey, aged 28, was particularly emotional. She has described it in a recent photographic book Living in Istanbul, in which her text also covers other aspects of that fabled beautiful city.

“I arrived in this town which I thought was ‘mine’ and yet I was a foreigner. People would show me pictures and emblems of the Ottoman past, as if I was a tourist. I felt like crying. Then in the Topkapi, during a guided tour with other foreigners, I kept touching the furniture which my great-grandfather had used. The guide told me I had no right to touch them and I felt so bad. Then we went into the gallery and he said something about Sultan Mourad V and I corrected him. I couldn’t help myself. He asked me “How do you know?” I said that this was my great-grandfather. The old guide kissed my hand and called the other guides. So at last I felt I was ‘home’.”

Kenize first met her father in 1962. She arrived in Lucknow and found herself living a life similar to her mother’s, except by then, Lucknow was crumbling, its aristocracy divided by Partition and impoverished by land reforms. Kenize found the do’s and don’ts of a semi-purdah existence rather enchanting at first and then rather tedious, though she loved the companionship of the women and the affection they showered on her. She realized that she had felt so alien in France, she says, because all that was “different” about her was in fact oriental.

For 20 years, Kenize tried to settle in either India or Pakistan. She simply loved Karachi in the 1960s because it was such an open minded city and where her Phupi, Begum Kaneez Wajid Khan, lives. But in the end she realized that what she could do best was to write about South Asia and the Middle East and explain it to the West. She speaks with immense passion and anger about the prejudices against Muslims in the West, particularly the media’s.

She is very critical of the fact that most journalists covering Afghanistan are based in India and are, therefore, biased when covering Pakistan. She is scathing about the BJP and the growing racism and intolerance in India.

As a journalist, she is extraordinarily resourceful too. She once infiltrated a fundamentalist Nazi-like RSS institution, but to her indignation her articles and photos were not published in France, because that was not an image of India that they were willing to accept.

Kenize’s career as a war correspondent began by chance during a trip to Pakistan, when the 1965 war broke out. She went to the front without proper papers and was almost thrown into jail. She can come up with stories of clandestine trips into forbidden territory in Chechnya, aerial bombing raids and snipers during Beirut’s civil war, fighting in the streets during the Iranian revolution and the terrifying moment when a young, nervous, 14-year old boy from the Pasdaran militia had a gun pointed to her head.

She says that if she is working, she is so absorbed in what she is doing, that she has no time to think of fear. Yet, there have been instances when colleagues have been killed, or she has seen arms and legs flying after a car exploded that she lost her nerve. Inevitably she combined her recent trip to Pakistan for a family wedding, with some work in Islamabad. Kenize is now working on a third novel about the Tartars. She also wrote the introduction to the French edition of The Begums of Bhopal by Shahryar Khan.

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