THIS is the story of three royal ladies — Mughal King Akbar Shah’s mother Qudsia Begum, his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal and paternal aunt Daulat-un-Nisa Begum — and how they tried to influence the nominal monarch’s dealings with the British, and might have succeeded had they not been confounded by intrigues in the Red Fort itself.
The scene is set in 1811, when Charles Metcalfe was appointed Resident to the Mughal Court in Delhi by Governor General Lord Minto. Delhi was then the frontier capital of British India, a watchtower surveying the kingdom, and the centre of a great web of imperial diplomacy that stretched into Punjab, Rajputana, Nepal and beyond, right into the states of Central Asia.
As Resident, Metcalfe was very much on his own in an office where precedent was useless and his decision was all-important. According to historian Michael Edwardes, the British in India at that time were unfettered by regulations from higher authorities, except in general outlines of policy. In this atmosphere, Metcalfe had to deal somehow with a shadowy king in whose name he administered the vast Delhi territory. The king was willy nilly content with being a pensioner, maintained by the British out of sentiment but ignored out of policy. Such an attitude was, however, quite alien to the Indian political consciousness. As long as the king lived in his palace — pensioner or not, with or without real power — the dignity of his position somehow remained untarnished.
The actual position of the Red Fort was miserable in the extreme. Little could be done, since there was no money to keep the vast number of buildings in a state of repair. Another heavy load on the pension was an immense number of imperial poor relations and descendants of past emperors, salateen, who were incapable of making a living for themselves, existing in a half-starved and half-naked condition. This the reader must know to understand the story of this “little-known episode from history.”
Akbar Shah was constantly trying to squeeze more out of the British and rarely succeeded. He was assisted in this exercise by the three ladies mentioned in the beginning. All three would attend his talks with the Resident, sitting behind a large curtain. They did more than talk, for they were deeply interested in the matter of succession to the throne. It was Mumtaz Mahal’s desire that her son, Mirza Jahangir, should be named heir apparent. He was Akbar Shah’s third son. The British, following their own custom, preferred the eldest, but the Mughals had never subscribed to the law of primogeniture, and the king wanted recognition of his right to nominate his successor.
To the imperial ladies, this seemed a suitable opportunity for the Akbar Shah to assert his supremacy over his nominal “ministers”, the British, and they sent an envoy to Calcutta to place their views before the Governor General himself. Although the G.G. refused to pass over the claim of the eldest son, the king and his female advisers announced a date on which Mirza Jahangir was to be installed as the acknowledged heir.
Resident Metcalfe was instructed by Lord Minto not to attend the ceremony. Akbar Shah might have been willing to give into the British viewpoint, but not the ladies. They decided, without telling the Resident, to send another mission to Calcutta. The mission was led by one Raja Babu Pran Krishna, accompanied by a Muslim nobleman. Both were greedy time-servers, and left behind a friend to transmit glowing tributes of their success to the king. One is really amazed at the most bizarre conspiracies to delude the king and the ladies, and by their extraordinary gullibility.
One day, the king heard that his agents had called on the Chief Justice in Calcutta who had “wrung his hands with grief” on hearing how badly Metcalfe was treating the royal household. It was also reported that the Chief Justice had made a representation to the G.G. who had then dispatched a strongly worded reprimand to Metcalfe. Of course, no such thing happened. As if this was not enough, the king was informed that the Chief Justice was going to England to intercede with the British Government for the king.
The ultimate in deception was reached when a report was sent that the Chief Justice had advised the mission to proceed to London to put their case before the King of England in person. “So, God willing, off we go to London by way of Bombay,” they wrote. They asked for money for the expenses, and got it. Finally, their confederate in the palace informed that they had sailed.
Because of his spying network, Metcalfe obtained copies of all the mission’s letters before they even reached the king. At last, armed with this evidence, he went to the king and advised him “to relinquish the torment of his life, the nagging desire to effect impracticable changes, and reconcile himself to his position.” The king’s mother refused to be beaten. Qudsia Begum and Mirza Jahangir went secretly to Lucknow, to ask for help from the semi- independent Nawab of Awadh. This, too, came to be known to Metcalfe, and he stopped the increase in the king’s allowance until he showed repentance. Mirza Jahangir was made a state prisoner in Allahabad and died there after a few years of excessive drinking.
All this produced one important (though disastrous for the king) result. The British attitude towards the Mughal family was clearly defined for the first time. Akbar Shah was bluntly told that he would be acknowledged as monarch within the area of his palace and no more. This was fine, but the actual problem of paying deference inside the palace and disregarding it outside was serious. Metcalfe and later residents did their best to ignore the king, except on ceremonial occasions, but the outside world, the Indian world, would not do the same.
It was not until 1857, after the war of independence that the matter was finally settled, and the last King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was sent to die in exile.
