A Royal Riot – The Mystery of the ‘Royal’ Family of Awadh

14 minutes read

“Let the world know how the descendant of the last nawab of Oudh is treated.”

Begum Wilayat of Awadh

This rather perplexing story takes form and launches sometime in the early 1970s. But its origins could be traced to a few decades earlier. For over 40 years, journalists chronicled the life of the eccentric and mysterious ‘royal’ family of Awadh, as the people of the country grew more and more fascinated by their story. Before the English East India Company annexed most of the kingdoms, the Indian sub-continent was filled with flourishing and powerful kingdoms. One such kingdom belonged to the Nawab of Awadh (‘Oudh’ the anglicised term), located in current day Uttar Pradesh, India. Our story begins its journey in the ancient palaces of the fast declining kingdom of Awadh, whose last king Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, was deposed by the British in an unfashionable and humiliating manner. The Nawab’s death in a rather obscure and heart-breaking manner in 1887 meant that the official royal family of Awadh had now come to an end. Or so we thought. About a century later, history would repeat itself in the same heart-rending and poetic manner, only this time the main premise would be sprawled across the bustling city of New Delhi.

The buzzing atmosphere of the New Delhi railway station was shaken up even more when a woman appeared on the platform, seemingly out of nowhere, and announced herself as Wilayat, the Begum of Awadh. Wilayat made her intentions very clear from the beginning itself – she wanted all the old properties (including the vaults, the shrines and the palaces) that once belonged to the royal kingdom of Awadh, to be restored to its rightful heirs, her and her children. Unloading an entire household at the platform, Wilayat settled in the V.I.P. waiting room of the station. She had brought with her – carpets, potted palms, a silver tea set, Nepali servants in livery, glossy Great Danes, and two grown children in their 20s, Prince Ali Raza and Princess Sakina. Her children addressed her as “Your Highness”.

Wilayat at the New Delhi Railway Station in 1983

With a rather imposing personality and striking appearance, the Begum was tall, broad-shouldered, wore a sari of dark, heavy silk within which he held a gun. Settling down on red plastic chairs, the trio made themselves comfortable and began their decade long wait at their new home – the railway station. Father John, a catholic charity worker who frequently distributed food at the station recollects, “Sitting, sitting like yogis… The children were strangely submissive, reluctant even to accept a banana without their mother’s permission.They were more obedient than the dogs. They were absolutely under her control.” The Begum’s behaviour was odd and striking from the very beginning itself. Truly believing herself as the carrier of the royal Awadhi blood, she refused to entertain audiences and ensue a direct conversation. Instead, she demanded that all queries be written on embossed stationary, placed on a silver plate and then be carried to her by a royal servant who would proceed to read them out loud. When the station master troubled her, she threatened to kill herself by drinking snake venom. Saleem Kidwai, a historian who documented the Begum and her family noted, “The Nepali servants, they would walk on their knees.”

Wilayat, Sakina and Cyrus at their temporary housing on the railway station entertaining guests, mainly foreign correspondants; 1975

Soon enough, the government decided to intervene. The attention on this ‘royal’ family and their spectacle was growing, so much so that the Indira Gandhi government finally had to make direct contact with them. The widespread coverage of their ‘house’ on the railway station threatened a civil unrest from the Shiite community of Lucknow if they started believing that she was being abused. In order to nip this royal riot in the bud, the government of Uttar Pradesh sent Ammar Rizvi, an aide to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, with a heavy sum to offer Begum Wilayat. Back in those days, ₹10,000 was indeed a very big sum. Even so, she got angry, threw the envelope filled with cash on the ground and said that she would not accept the sum, stating that it was too less an amount. In the following months, the government and Mr. Rizvi tried to offer her a luxurious 4-bedroom apartment in Lucknow, but she refused yet again, saying that it was too small. With the government getting more and more anxious as the Muslims mobilised themselves around her, Wilayat found an effective channel to make her case – foreign correspondents.

As headlines flashed across newspapers across the world, the Begum finally managed to grab the global centre stage. The Times wrote, “India Princess Reigns in Rail Station,” while People magazine reported her declaring, “Let the world know how the descendant of the last nawab of Oudh is treated.” The United Press International reported that with her growing popularity, as journalists began flooding her residence at the railway station and people wrote letters expressing their outrage towards the government, the Begum too began imposing strange demands such as, she “could only be photographed when the moon was waning.” Soon enough, Indira Gandhi was forced to accept their claim and grant the royal family an ancient piece of residence. In 1984, Begum Wilayat Mahal, Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza were granted use of the 14^th century hunting lodge – Malcha Mahal. Their destinies would certainly take a turn now, but history would be left with an even more intriguing question in its folds – who were these royals and were they truly what they claimed to be?

The Malcha Mahal, also known as Wilayat Mahal, a former Tughlak era hunting lodge, built in 1325

Almost a decade after she first appeared on the railway platform, Wilayat Mahal left her temporary residence and moved into Malcha Mahal, never to be seen in public again. It was later reported that Wilayat had killed herself in October 1993 by crushing the family diamonds and pearls and consuming it, a concoction known as the ‘drink of silence’. Her children had (unsuccessfully) embalmed her body themselves and cremated it around a year later. Now this is where the story takes an interesting turn. Ellen Barry, a New York Times journalist published an article in 2019, uncovering the story of this ‘royal’ family that had shaken up the world more than three decades ago. After a lot of unanswered calls and several failed attempts at contacting the family, Barry finally managed to get in touch with Cyrus, also known as Prince Ali Raza, and arrived at the entrance of the Malcha Mahal. Another curious practice followed by this family was that they would only invite and be interviewed by foreign correspondents. The signboard at the entry of their residence read, “INTRUDERS SHALL BE GUNDOWN.” Situated in the middle of a thick and dense forest, this rapidly deteriorating hunting lodge was surrounded by an ornate wrought-iron fence. When one looked at it, it was almost impossible to believe that an entire family had lived in it for over three decades, and that too a royal one! A large pack of monkeys, jackals and other wildlife guarded the area surrounding the mahal.

Cyrus opening a path to the Mahal through the iron fences installed around the house; 2016

Upon arriving, Barry was greeted by a shrunken version of Prince Cyrus who, upon being questioned, ranted for a while and complained of being harassed by a criminal gang. “He was flinging his hands wide, declaiming and then dropping to a dramatic whisper, as he spoke of the decline of the house of Oudh.”

“I am shrinking,” he said. “We are shrinking. The princess is shrinking. We are shrinking.”

During a 1996 visit by Reuters to the family’s home, Princess Sakina spoke rather candidly to the journalists (Video courtesy – The New York Times/Reuters)

His sister, Princess Sakina, he claimed, wasn’t in Delhi at the moment. After conversing with him for almost 9 months, Ellen Barry made her way towards Lucknow where the family had resided in the 1970s. The residents of their erstwhile neighbourhood informed Barry that everyone had dismissed the family as imposters. Even the descendants of the Awadhi royal family in Kolkata had rejected their claim. During one of Barry’s visit to Cyrus’s residence, he handed her a book written by his sister, Princess Sakina, documenting their lives. When Barry saw it, she noticed immediately the haphazard manner in which it was written – unreadable handwriting, grammatical and punctuation errors and a language that seemed to belong an era gone-by, with flourishing poetry-like couplets. Sakina also mentioned that she had originally intended to follow her mother into suicide, but refrained from doing so on account of her brother. In one such description she writes, “ABOUT PRINCE CYRUS RIZA MY BROTHER WHAT STEP SHALL HE FOLLOW? MY SILENT SINCEREST SILENCE HAS A WISH THAT PRINCE SHOULD BE BLESSED WITH HAPPINESS.” One night, Cyrus revealed that his sister had indeed passed away 7 months ago, and telling no one, he buried the body himself.

Prince Cyrus, Princess Sakina and a servant in 1998 on the roof of the Malcha Mahal.

After Wilayat’s death in 1993, the children would set aside a place for her at the dining table every day

Three months after her last encounter with Cyrus, Barry received news that the Prince had passed away. After prodding around for a while, she discovered how he had died – dengue. His hallucinations as a result of the fever were intense, one such instance wherein he was seen trying to wheel his bicycle down the road, shaking violently. The guard at a nearby military facility said that he refused to be taken to the hospital. Cyrus suffered for almost eight days. Barry writes, “A boy, sent up to check on his welfare, saw him stalking the property half-clothed, naked from the waist down, or shivering under a mosquito net. Then, after a day or so, no one saw him, and the boy found him dead, curled on the rock floor.”

Cyrus in 2016

A messy and deserted Malcha Mahal after Cyrus’s death sometime in 2017

With the last member of the so-called ‘Royal Family of Awadh’ now dead, Ellen Barry launched a proper investigation into the true origins of the family. Her first step towards uncovering their reality was entering Malcha Mahal in hopes of unearthing some clues. When she stepped into the now deserted and ghostly-quiet ‘palace’ Barry was greeted with the sight of papers and documents scattered all across the floor, dumped from the drawers and cupboards. Upon scrambling through the mess, she came across two things that stuck out to her. The first – a stack of receipts bearing evidence of regular and small-scale cash transfers from a city in the industrial north of England. The sender identified himself as a “half-brother.” The second – a delicate letter penned in blue airmail stationary, dating back to 2006. The manner in which it was written convinced Barry that it was written by a relative. Barry quotes certain contents of the letter in her article. “‘I am in so much pain that I cannot go to the toilet even,’ the writer began, and, after an extensive catalogue of physical ailments, went on to complain about the burden of providing continuous financial support for Wilayat and her children. He was obviously not a rich man. ‘For God’s sake, try to sort yourselves out financially, in case anything goes wrong with me,’ the writer told them, appending information for the latest Western Union transfer. ‘May God help us all.’ The letter was signed ‘Shahid,’ and it was sent from an address in Bradford, Yorkshire.”

From the left – a series of polaroids of Begum Wilayat, Prince Ali Raza and Princess Sakina

Now began the second phase of investigation, as Barry made her way towards Bradford, specifically the address mentioned on the letter. The man who greeted her starkly resembled Cyrus – the same ‘jutting cheekbones’ and ‘hawk nose’. He looked pale and sick and by the looks of it, spent most of his time on his bed. Beside it was a table on top of which lay pictures of Wilayat. Shahid lived with his wife of over four decades, Camellia. As conversation ensued between the two, Barry came to the realisation that this was Shahid, Cyrus’s older brother – Wilayat’s first born (who was still alive). The truth was finally brought to light.

Shahid and his wife, Camellia, outside their home in Bradford, England, in May

They were as normal and ordinary a family as one could be. Their father, Inayatullah Buttwas the registrar of Lucknow University. They once lived a life where they had housemaids, school uniforms, food on the table and a stable life. Their mother back then wasn’t a ‘rebel queen’, but a simple housewife. Prince Cyrus wasn’t Cyrus or Prince Ali Raza or ‘Prince’ anything, he was simply – Mickey Butt. As Shahid’s health began to decline steadily, he finally became more and more willing to narrate his story to Barry. On her last visit to his house, he told her that the origins of the story lay in the bitter memories of the Partition.

A much younger version of Wilayat Butt with her son Shahid

In August 1947, when the Partition of India took place, the family which resided in Lucknow at the time, had a prompt decision to be made. Wilayat was at her happiest in the city and refused to leave. But the situation worsened and when Inayatullah was attacked one afternoon, the family immediately moved to Lahore. Wilayat grudgingly followed her husband, but her obsession with Lucknow and all that they had left behind only grew. When Inayatullah died suddenly soon after, she had no one to hold her back anymore. Shahid said that at a public appearance once, she confronted the Pakistani Prime Minister and slapped him. Almost immediately, she was put in a mental hospital in Lahore for six months, the only way to avoid a prison sentence. He recounts what it was like to visit his mother there – “It was horrible. Women tied up with chains. One poor girl was chained up to a wall. It was four chains. And she was swinging. And spitting at everybody who went past.” Wilayat was also given electroshock therapy, according to some of her relatives, along with certain injections. When she was finally set free, she packed all her belongings – carpets, jewellery and the like – and took her young children and fled to India. Soon after, when he was 14 years old, Shahid ran away and then emigrated to Britain. Here, in India, the family of three took on new identities. Farhad became Princess Sakina, occasionally Princess Alexandrina; Mickey became Prince Ali Raza, and later called himself Prince Cyrus; and plain old Wilayat Butt became Begum Wilayat. What happened next, you already know.

Wilayat and her daughter Sakina

During the course of her investigation, Barry also found out that Wilayat had an older son, her oldest child, Salahuddin Zahid Butt, a Pakistani air force pilot who had bombed Indian positions in the 1965 war. Although he died in 2017, she reached out to his wife Salma who lived in Texas. Beside her, Cyrus also had two older cousins who still resided in Lahore – Wahida and Khalida. All of them seemed to communicate the same story. No one ever believed Wilayat’s claim to the Royal family of Awadh to be true. The cousins remembered Wilayat as a wild and volatile young woman. Salma said, “She thought she was the princess of Oudh, but this was never, ever. We never heard this history about the princess of this, the princess of that. She obviously had some mental disorder.”

Wilayat at the Malcha Mahal

A final question which some of you may be thinking of too – how did Wilayat return to India so easily after over 15 years? In the early 1960s, Wilayat began filing petition after petition to be able to legally resettle in Jammu and Kashmir, a place where both her and her husband had roots. A 58-page dossier by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs documents this in detail. Wilayat claimed that her husband, a highly ranked official at Pakistan aviation had been fatally poisoned in 1951 and that one of her sons had been killed in an “Air Force plane crash”. She further went on to say that she had been persecuted in the country because of her political activism and that she had suffered “inhuman tortures” by the government of the country after she publicly confronted Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra over the status of Kashmir. She made no mention of her oldest son who was a decorated officer in the Pakistani Air Force, or of her alleged connections to the house of the Awadhi royal family.

Mickey Butt, a.k.a Prince Cyrus, as a much younger man in the 1980s and 1990s

Her exact words in one of her petitions to the Indian government – “As long as we lived there, our lives, property, future and everything was constantly in danger due to the conspiracy and the policy of the ruling authorities to ruin us, just because of difference in political views.” While the government was split on whether or not she should be allowed to relocate, they ultimately decided to allow her and her family to legally remain in India on a year-to-year basis, “subject to good behaviour,” but that they would not receive Indian citizenship. Prior to the partition of the country Wilayat and her husband had been extremely active in Kashmiri politics and had formed a friendly alliance with G.M. Sadiq, who would go on to become the leader of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In Pakistan, she continued her activism and advocated for the independence of the state. She also served as the President of the All-Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s First Prime Minister, also makes a mention of her in a memoir where he describes her as, “a Kashmiri woman by the name of Bhat who did a lot of mischief.” When she first arrived in Kashmir, Wilayat lived under the patronage of her old friend Mr. Sadiq, which is how she slowly began to regain her footing in the country.

Cyrus now lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in this cemetery

And now, the story finally draws to a close. A chapter which began at a railway station in New Delhi finds its roots a long way back in the deadly Partition of the country. The Butt’s life story is an extremely fascinating and interesting one – one which is scattered across the globe. Although it took 40 years for the truth to be brought to light, this ‘royal family’ had certainly convinced most of the world of its regality. Ellen Barry too, through the course of her investigation and personal conversations with ‘Cyrus’, struck up an unlikely friendship with him. Wilayat, Sakina and Cyrus now lie in unmarked graves and places somewhere in Delhi. But their story is a heart-rending and poignant one. While their claims to royalty might have been false, they certainly did stir up a royal riot which managed to bring about a brief halt in this busy and bustling country.

Image and Video Credits – The New York Times and Reuters

Sources:

The Jungle Prince of Delhi – The New York Times

Mystery of the Royal Family of Oudh Unravels a Bit More – The New York Times