The dynasty of the living dead

For decades, reporters were obsessed with the aristocratic family who lived in Malcha Mahal, a medieval hunting lodge without electricity or running water, in Delhi’s Ridge forest. [Begum Wilayat Mahal and her children Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza (who called himself Prince Cyrus) claimed to be descendants of the last nawab of Awadh Wajid Ali Shah and his freedom fighter wife Hazrat Mahal. For a decade before they moved into the dilapidated lodge in 1986, they had occupied the first-class waiting room of the New Delhi railway station demanding that some of the properties of the erstwhile House of Awadh, usurped by the British in 1856, be restored to them. Wilayat allegedly committed suicide by swallowing crushed diamonds in 1993. But Sakina and Ali Raza lived there for the rest of their lives, more than two decades.] The siblings only gave interviews to foreign journalists, but you spoke to Ali Raza for a story published in 2014.

Abhimanyu: There was this rumour that Sakina had died.

I used to cover minorities and the city for a small newspaper, so it kind of fell on my beat. I could never compete with the mainstream. I didn’t have the resources to go for the big stories, so I used to keep an eye out for offbeat stories.

So, Sakina had died. I picked it up from the internet, someone had written about it in a blog, and I thought I would just check. I managed to call Ali Raza. He spoke to me a couple of times. And I knew he used to give interviews to foreign journalists — so I sometimes wonder if I had asked Aletta to come with me, maybe he would have met me. But it didn’t happen, it was only phone calls.

Ali Raza died in 2017. You were able to visit Malcha Mahal after that — tell us about the monument and your trips to it.

Abhimanyu: We must have made quite a few trips, at least a dozen. The place was a mess. There were faeces everywhere, and cobwebs, a lot of clothes. There were bits of paper with phone numbers, and flyers for art exhibitions. There were also newspaper cuttings — they were interested in the environment and foreign news, especially about Israel-Palestine. Their whole life was scattered there in these bits and pieces.

Aletta: A BBC journalist broke the news of Ali Raza’s death, approximately one month after he had died. Abhi went a few days after that. But for a very long time, the things remained there — because even two years later, when we went to Malcha Mahal with Kasim [who worked as their servant for many years from their time at the railway station to the early years at Malcha Mahal], there were still clothes lying around and he could point out, ‘this belonged to Sakina, that belonged to me’. But very quickly, the more valuable things disappeared.

Abhimanyu: The dining table. And the carpets were cut up, I think, over a period of time and then taken.

The New York Times’ journalist Ellen Barry uncovered the mysteries of the Mahal family in 2019. Her widely read Jungle Prince of Delhi story concluded that the family had no connection to the royal family of Awadh. You have been able to find, astonishingly, that Wilayat’s claims were not exactly false. When did you decide to turn your research into a book?

Abhimanyu: After the Ellen Barry story came. I wanted to respond in some way because I felt that there were some loopholes in it. And by then. I had already gotten in touch with Kasim, and he agreed to talk to us.

Aletta: We were already working on a piece about Malcha Mahal, including the history of the House of Awadh and the royal family that lived there, for Atlas Obscura. But when the Ellen Barry story came out, the editors also thought that we should make it even more about the monument and less about them because we could not go against the story or compete with it.

We knew there was more to it, that if we want to really do the story, then we have to dig more into it.

How much did you know about the story at the time?

Aletta: The Pakistan and Kashmir connections especially. Kashmir was completely missing from the story, it only came in the follow-up story [published by NYT two months later]... but we already knew about it. But I don’t think at that point we had heard the name of Inayatullah Butt [Wilayat’s husband], for example. In Ali Raza’s photo ID, which we found after his death in Malcha Mahal, his father’s name is mentioned as Raja Hussain.

Abhimanyu: But it was confusing also — were they Sunni or Shia? Barry presented them as if they were Butts [which would make them Sunni Kashmiris] but the House of Awadh was Shia. So it created a doubt until we realized later that Wilayat was both.

Wilayat and her children spent over a decade in Kashmir where, you write, she transformed from the leftist activist that she had been in Pakistan to the royalist that she would eventually become. You were able to unearth such explosive details about their lives. But there are still missing gaps. Why do you think that is?

Abhimanyu: I think the missing gaps are because of politics. [The first Prime Minister of Pakistan] Liaquat Ali Khan’s murder remains unsolved. And, I think, because of whatever had happened, there were other mysterious things... like how Inayatullah died.

Aletta: In Kashmir especially the unclarity is, why were they allowed to resettle? There was a lot of suspicion and political discussion at that time against Muslims from Pakistan to resettle especially in Kashmir. These were also questions the family were asked. Sakina had a fight in school with someone who was questioning her: Is your family involved with this murder? Do you even have a passport? Why are you here, basically? It’s still not completely clear. The explanation has been that they had personal connection to Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq — and, who knows, Shaikh Abdullah, which could not be proved from whatever material we could find but only from the family history.

Even as they are revealed as a family whose story was shaped by intergenerational trauma and major historical events like Partition, the “crazy” of the story still stands — there are delusions and mental illness. How did your view of them change as you accessed more and more pieces of the puzzle?

Abhimanyu: Even in the beginning, I was not thrown off by her eccentricity or her delusions because I don’t think that those discredit everything she said or did. I was willing to see where she might be right and where it is a delusion.

Nobody is crazy 24x7. There are moments of lucidity.

But I started to see her as a metaphor for the underbelly of domestic nationhood and democratic politics — because she fell in that dark black hole of the whole thing. For a person like that — being Shia as well as Sunni — who goes to Pakistan and faces issues with identity. Then, she suffers a trauma. She comes back. Then, she goes to Kashmir, which is again at the edge of nationhood. And the way things developed, she had all these hopes from both India and Pakistan in the early days. In Pakistan, she was participating in nation-building for women and for Kashmir. She must have seen how political forces take over, and an individual can be relegated to a corner.

They were just cast away because they didn’t fit into this whole project of nationhood.

My favourite section of the book is about Sakina’s memoir, copies of which she distributed to people they met, and was dismissed as unreadable. You’ve quoted heavily from it, and I, like you, found it poetic — “we now consider ourselves the dynasty of the living dead” — there’s a beauty and sadness to it. Tell me about the experience of reading it.

Abhimanyu: It was quite intense. Her broken syntax didn’t throw me off, I was more than willing to make sense of it. But it’s very depressing. It circles around Wilayat’s death. At one point Sakina simply gives up, especially after Ali Raza burns the mother’s corpse. There is real madness here at times. Some parts are extremely hard to read. It gets a bit convoluted, especially where she’s actually writing poetically.

But other parts can be understood. There are interesting tidbits: their relationship with the mother, how Sakina stopped combing her hair, about Kashmir... The actual details of historical events, their history knowledge, was quite accurate. Her emotional judgments are correct.

Aletta: Her descriptions of her brothers really correspond with what other sources told us independently. For example, the description of Asad [Sakina and Ali Raza’s brother] as being “different” — people in Kashmir describe him as different, more soft-spoken, and she describes how he was the one who chose his mother’s clothes. And that Ali Raza had a temper, which everyone said.

This is a story at the intersections of many social and cultural histories of the subcontinent. There’s the British annexation of Awadh in 1856, the first war of independence in 1857, the issue of Kashmir going back to the 19th century, independent India, Pakistan, Partition, princely states and privy purses, Sunni-Shia issues... and even the family’s roots in Iran. It’s such a vast canvas. When did you decide it was time to stop looking?

Aletta: Before we found it, we didn’t know we were going to find that she had a connection to Kashmir and Awadh. We had decided that it was going to be the last trip to Pakistan, and to round up the book with whatever we had found.

Abhimanyu: At that point, we had reached quite a few conclusions. But there was frustration because we needed somebody to confirm them. So, it was a relief to hear from Aletta about the source she found in Pakistan. In the last months, we weren’t uncovering anything radically new, so we finished the book. The things we are learning now, don’t change the narrative in any dramatic way.

We came to peace with a few of the dead ends. Some things are with the government. Some, because of the distance that history has created, are absolutely uncoverable now — like the Hazrat Mahal bits, whether she had an illegitimate child or not.

Aletta: And with the Kashmir section, we had already kind of fulfilled our mission to find out who they were as people before.

It might be possible to discover more about Ali Raza. We saw a copy of his passport — he had travelled to Egypt and to Greece. It’s all related to the roots they claimed, coming from Persia. His travels were in the 1980s and I think he was searching for his roots far away, very deep in history.

Later, I met a lady who worked at the Dutch embassy in the 1990s and used to hang out with Ali Raza. But I only met her after the book went to print, so it was too late to include it. And it doesn’t change the narrative but gives an extra perspective into the life of Ali Raza in the late 1990s.

She took him out to art galleries, he went to her house, she visited there also. They talked about a kind of a real life for him. They talked about if he could possibly do something with Malcha Mahal, to make it into a residency, to host guests, to make some money out of it. They were thinking about all of these things, and it didn’t work out, and she had to leave the country and, he couldn’t come. She also told me later that when she moved out of India, she gave a lot of her furniture to Ali Raza.

And she said, she was kind of the first person he had met in five years, after his mother had died. They were isolated and broken and so completely affected by their mother’s death. But he came out of that deep end of mourning. With her, he was dreaming again about something else. It didn’t work out, but he was dreaming about it.

Abhimanyu: He could have moved abroad and have had a better old age. But I think she was a bit put off by his volatile temper, and demands.

It’s interesting how Wilayat transferred her delusions to her children. They were educated, came from an elite family with connections, they could have made real lives for themselves...

Aletta: I still find that hard to understand completely. I understand her background, but you’re right that the kids, they were in Kashmir, they went to school. And in Promilla Kalhan’s Hindustan Times article from the railway station in 1975, they said they had ambitions to become doctors. They must have been in their early twenties by then. So at that age, when you’ve come that far...

You can also wonder, if at that time somebody had made an effort — like the lady in the 90s — to kind of get them out of there, if it could have happened for them. But then they had such a deep attachment to their mother, maybe that made it hard.

If she had accepted a house in Lucknow in the 1970s [which the government had offered to placate her], maybe it would all have turned out differently. But then they had already dealt with so much disappointment in Kashmir that, I don’t know, you cannot blame them for making a bad decision so much as well.

Abhimanyu: Society failed them at some level... When somebody’s identity is so scattered — Shia, Sunni, Kashmiri, Indian, Pakistani — you cannot be accommodated. It’s just too much navigating these really drastic ideas drastically different from each other... some people slip through the cracks. And she was up against this kind of historical development in which her identity and everything was going to be reduced to a cipher.

She may have been possessive. There were marriage proposals for Sakina. She didn’t go ahead with that. For Assad also there were marriage proposals. She may have been a bit possessive about her children. And yes, it’s a personal flaw, but many people are — when their children get married, they interfere in their marriages and things like that. But the things that Wilayat was up against made her flaws seem monstrous.

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.