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‘The House of Awadh': The exile and echoes of Begum Wilayat Mahal, the queen of nowhere
'Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me...'
— Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra (Act V, Scene II)
In 1993, in a dilapidated hunting lodge tucked inside Delhi's Ridge Forest, Begum Wilayat Mahal 'swallowed crushed diamonds' and died. A tragic yet deliberate act of defiance, it eerily resonated with Cleopatra's penultimate moments in William Shakespeare's play, Antony and Cleopatra, where the Egyptian queen chooses to die by asp bites rather than be paraded on the streets of Rome by Caesar. Like Cleopatra, Wilayat refused to let a colonially divided, post-imperial world strip her of dignity and possibly the last remnants of royalty. However, this is where the similarity between them ends. Wilayat's story is not granted a regal ending – it is one of exile, bureaucratic suspicion, political apathy, and fractured memory.
A life in transit
In The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy, authors and journalists Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar give a stirring, objective, yet sensitively written account of Wilayat Mahal's life and the generations of history she carried, contested, and reimagined, perhaps reconstructed too. Part oral history, part political inquiry, and part elegy, the book is divided into three segments – 'Memory', 'History', and 'Identity' – perfectly poised on an uneven terrain of remembrance. Anchored first in the dispassionate and professional rigor of historians and the tenderness and warmth of personal human experience later, André and Kumar unearth the checkered lives of Wilayat Mahal and her children – Sakina and Ali Raza – 'the self-proclaimed royals of Awadh (Oudh)' whose claims of descent from Wajid Ali Shah and Begum Hazrat Mahal were challenged, ridiculed, and dismissed by both the Indian and international press together with humanity at large.
Wilayat Mahal, along with Sakina and Ali Raza, spent over a decade at railway stations – at the Charbagh station in Lucknow, then in the first-class waiting room of New Delhi Railway station – turning waiting rooms into stations of protest or defiance. These waiting rooms became surreal placeholders that screamed both royalty and rootlessness. Before moving to Delhi in the 1970s, Wilayat and her children had stayed for some time in Kashmir in the mid-1960s. Later in Lucknow, Wilayat claimed Chattar Manzil as her ancestral home and demanded restitution for the annexation of Awadh by the British. In a tussle between legitimate or illegitimate claims, personal and public memory, and fundamental rights to a decent life, the reader is drawn into a world where imperial legacies collide with post-colonial neglect, and memory becomes both weapon and wound.
Doubly erased
The House of Awadh situates Wilayat's story in the realm of the long afterlife of colonial disruption: the abolition of princely states, the dissolution of Privy Purses, the partition of families and identities across India and Pakistan. In this shuffle of geopolitics, personal histories are often erased or never documented – especially those of women who do not fit easily into officially sanctioned narratives. Wilayat Mahal emerges as a figure of protest: a Shia woman who refused state accommodations in Lucknow and instead demanded a return of her kingdom. The web of conflicts and confusions gets thicker. Wilayat's name was not included in the pensions list for the royals and their descendants, an omission both political and symbolic. This detail is crucial not because it debunks her claim, but because it adds texture to it – foregrounding the tangle of kinship, gender, and legitimacy in both pre-colonial and post-colonial India.
In this context, it is important to understand Wilayat's social and religious identity. A Shia woman, who claimed direct descent from Hazrat Mahal, but whose actual ancestry, as the book details later, traced her lineage to a certain Zohra, a mu'tah (temporary) wife of Wajid Ali Shah (who had hundreds of wives), opens doors to further controversies. This connection, through the maternal line and via Shia traditions, was doubly removed and scorned in the eyes of the state. As a Shia, and a descendant of Zohra – also a grandchild of Wajid Ali Shah – Wilayat's link to royalty was not easy to accept or validate. Mut'ah marriages, temporary in nature and considered illegal by Sunni orthodoxy, were often dismissed as akin to prostitution. Hazrat Mahal herself had been one such wife (referred to as a concubine), making their roles in resistance even more subversive.
The authors' commitment to following every clue – from Zohra's mut'ah lineage to Asafi Kothi in Sheesh Mahal – is exemplary. They excavate not only the ruins of palaces but also the layered wounds of inheritance, belonging, and trauma. Wilayat's story, the authors suggest, is not in the facts but in the 'cracks of memory'. From Lucknow to Kashmir, to Karachi, the authors traverse the complex geographies of a family and its fractured identity. Inayatullah, Wilayat's husband, once the Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University, migrated to Karachi after Partition with four sons. Wilayat, reportedly the second wife, and her children were looked down upon – again, doubly marginalised for their gender and historical lineage.
A trailing shadow
Kumar and André's deep dive into the historical context of Awadh – its annexation, the legacy and significant role of Hazrat Mahal in the Revolt of 1857, the dissolution of the princely states, and the fallout of Partition – is as thorough as it is moving. What they achieve is not just a biographical excavation, but a rebalancing of how we perceive madness, protest, and feminine agency in post-colonial India.
Wilayat's life, as the authors show, uncannily mirrored that of Hazrat Mahal – not just in resistance but in its tragic arc. Hazrat Mahal, a formidable leader of the 1857 Revolt, had led armies against the British and sent delegations to London to protest the annexation of Awadh by the East India Company. Her mission failed. She died in exile in Kathmandu, and her dreams remained unfulfilled. Wilayat's lifelong protest against the same historical wrong also ended in futility – her claims never fully acknowledged, her requests never quite granted, her memory left to rot along with the ruins of Malcha Mahal. Her fight was less about restoration and more about recognition.
This is where the book's most powerful and poignant subtext lies: how women's memories, oral histories, and lived experiences are routinely invalidated only because they don't complement or validate official records. Wilayat's insistence that her family was wronged may never have been fully provable, but it was not a figment of imagination either. There was truth, however fragmentary, in what she claimed. And that truth, this book argues, deserves its place in our historical imagination.
The authors let Wilayat's contradictions to breathe: a woman fiercely protective of her identity, who once broke the locks at Sheesh Mahal to reclaim what she said was hers; a woman of noble defiance and psychological fragility, who planted a neem tree at Malcha Mahal as a marker of rootedness in a land that refused to see her as one of their own. The book neither confirms nor denies her royal claim; instead, it interrogates the very frameworks – bureaucratic, journalistic, and colonial – that attempted to define her. Was she a fraud, a revolutionary, or a symbol of post-colonial displacement? The book refuses any definite resolution, and in doing so, offers something far more valuable: nuance.
Malcha Mahal – a site of madness and memory
In 1985, the family was granted residence in Malcha Mahal – a 14th-century Tughlaq-era hunting lodge. The palace had no electricity, no water, no guards. Home to bats, snakes, Wilayat's pedigreed dogs, fine china dinnerware, and an air thick with grief, it was a place of haunting decay. By the time the family moved into Malcha Mahal, they had already endured decades of homelessness and societal derision. Wilayat died there. So did her daughter, Sakina. And in 2017, Prince Ali Raza – also known to some as Cyrus – died alone in its decrepit halls – his demise marking the ultimate end of the family line.
During their time at the New Delhi Railway Station and Malcha Mahal, the family was harassed by local boys and goons, highlighting the vulnerability of their situation. The neglect was not just administrative but societal. Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation (1961) finds an echo here and, in the book too, in how melancholy and grief were used as tools to discredit and isolate. Wilayat's narrative was alternately romanticised and dehumanised – hailed as a mysterious, melancholic royal one day, dismissed as a delusional imposter the next. The foreign press dubbed her a ' fake queen,' 'mentally ill,' 'fraud' – a treatment reminiscent of Bertha Mason, the so-called madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), whose dissent is pathologised. And like Bertha, Wilayat was often locked away – first metaphorically, by a public that found her claims inconvenient, and later literally, through brief arrests and state confinement. The Indian state too oscillated between dismissiveness and discomfort, rarely addressing the deeper roots of her demands.
The haunting decrepitude of Malcha Mahal is captured in fine detail. The accounts of Mohammad Kasim, a servant who stayed with the family, and of Asad, the eldest son who is almost absent, who helped Wilayat procure a cobra to keep the local goons at bay, add pathos and peculiarity to an already haunting tale. The imagery is unsettling but deeply humanising: a mother consumed by loss, a son retreating into silence, a daughter bearing the burden of an impossible past.
The House of Awadh is cautious not to view Malcha Mahal as a mere curiosity or a trivial spectacle for cheap thrills. The authors approach the site and its stories with empathy and historical awareness. Though in 2023, voyeurism took precedence as Malcha Mahal turned into a 'haunted walk' site for tourists. What emerges is less a ghost story and more an indictment – of how bureaucracies treat those who fall outside easy classifications, and how a family was relegated to the margins of a place that could have been home.
Kumar and André deserve praise for the breadth and sensitivity of their research. The book is, after all, not just about who Wilayat Mahal was, but what she came to represent: the disquieting gap between historical injustice and institutional response.
There is sentiment here, yes – but never sentimentality. The narrative walks the tightrope between respect and realism. Wilayat is not romanticised in the text; her acts are not portrayed as noble sacrifice but as deliberate, often desperate, choices made in a world that denied her a place and voice.
The House of Awadh is not just a biography of a forgotten woman or her eccentric children. It reads like a homage to all those – especially women – whose truths don't align with bureaucracy and whose griefs are too complicated for the news cycle. Wilayat Mahal may not have been Hazrat Mahal's direct descendant, but she was, unmistakably, her ideological heir. Her death, like her life, was a continuous protest. Wilayat had planted a neem tree outside Malcha Mahal, perhaps to remind herself that something could take root even in barren isolation.
Wilayat Mahal, in refusing to fade quietly, in demanding what she believed was rightfully hers, embodied a fierce tenacity. Not a fake queen, but a formidable woman.
