14-05-2025
Delhiwale: Last Mughal's wives
Delhi is a megapolis of graves. Entire neighbourhoods (including certain super-fancy hotels!) are raised on graveyards. In parts of the city, even ordinary houses are built around graves. Only a minuscule number of these centuries-old graves are privileged with elaborate tombs, belonging to saints and emperors.
Most other graves lie in anonymity, their identities lost to time. Exceptions exist, and a few of such lonesome graves belong to figures with notable status. Like the handful of graves that lie in the forgettable passage separating the all-marble Chausath Khamba monument from poet Ghalib's marble tomb, in central Delhi's Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti. Heritage walking tours step out from the former, and step into the latter, without bothering about the seemingly random graves littering the intervening space.
Almost nobody is aware that these are actually the graves of the last Mughal emperor's wives. Following the failed uprising of 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar was exiled by the British to distant Rangoon. Only one of his wives, Begum Zeenat Mahal, was permitted to accompany the unfortunate emperor. Like Zafar, she too died in that far-off land. But the emperor's other wives remained in a turbulent Delhi, fated to be buried in Nizamuddin Basti. This detail appears fleetingly in a tiny passage in Maulavi Zafar Hasan's book Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India. An ASI official, he had sourced this precious information from Stephen Carr's book Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi.
Today, these graves bear no inscriptions, but per the aforementioned authors, they mark the resting places of Zafar's wives Begum Ashraf Mahal, Begum Akhtar Mahal, and Begum Taj Mahal. Explaining the logic of their burial in this area, Ratish Nanda of Aga Khan Trust for Culture, who authored a two-volume catalogue of more than a thousand Delhi monuments, explains that Chausath Khamba happens to be close to the dargah of mystic Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the shrine venerated by the Mughals all through their rule.
Each of the 18 rulers maintained a connection with this Sufi terrain; either through pilgrimage, architecture or by making the ground their final resting place. (In fact, just before being arrested by the British, Zafar handed over the sacred relics that were in possession of the Mughal emperors to Hazrat Nizamuddin's shrine.)
Consequently, Zafar's wives—plus some of his daughters—found their posthumous homes within these sacrosanct acres (Zafar's younger brother Mirza Jahangir was luckier, being buried inside the premises of the aforementioned shrine).
This evening, a band of friends are huddled inside the Chausath Khamba monument. On becoming aware of the significance of the stones outside, they sombrely stand around the graves, offering their regards to the forgotten women of the Mughal royalty. See photo.
