Suleiman, After Vanvas

After the old raja’s death in 1974, his son, the present raja, launched a long struggle to reclaim his inheritance. He petitioned prime ministers from Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi, and fought a series of court battles that finally ended in late September 2005 with a Supreme Court judgement. In its landmark decision in a case called Union of India and Another versus Raja Mohammad Amir Khan, the court gave directions to release the properties to the only living heir of the late raja. In the months since then, the raja has been busy trying to get back possession of his properties, many of which have been occupied by the government all these years.

The Mahmudabad assets make an impressive list. There’s the Metropole Hotel, occupying 11 acres of prime flat land in Nainital, built by the British in 1880, and purchased by the current raja’s grandfather in the 1920s. It’s now back in possession of the family. Another jewel in the Mahmudabad crown is a Lucknow landmark and architectural gem built by his grandfather in 1919—the Butler Palace, which includes a lake. The raja now plans to turn it into a heritage hotel and reveals that top hoteliers, including those who restored the Neemrana properties, have shown a great interest. "But I may do it on my own," he says.

Valuable real estate of which the raja has yet to get possession include the Lawrie Building and the Mahmudabad Mansions in Hazratganj—Lucknow’s main shopping hub. Then there are sprawling acres scattered across what was once the kingdom of Awadh. In his family’s ancestral seat, Mahmudabad, the raja now owns a sugar mill on 80 acres of land, a textile mill on 30 acres, the Jawaharlal Nehru Polytechnic on 50 acres and five lakes. In the town of Sitapur, he now becomes the legal owner of the district magistrate’s residence on 17 acres, the superintendent of police’s residence on seven acres, the chief medical officer’s bungalow on 13 acres, in addition to a huge chunk of the town’s civil lines and 70 acres of urban and rural land. In Lakhimpur district, he gets around 60 acres of urban and agricultural land, including the SP’s bungalow. In Barabanki district, there are 40 acres encompassing a degree college. What is the combined worth of the assets? "Value is a relative thing," replies the raja, revealing the typical disdain of his class for commercial calculations. "God knows the value. These are all encumbered assets. And how do you value a history, a past?" Property dealers, however, give estimates upwards of Rs 200 crore.

Yet the tale of the House of Mahmudabad is more than the value of their miraculously restored assets, a tale that cannot be reduced to real estate figures and property prices. It is a tale that reveals those old wounds, some self-inflicted, which North Indian Muslims still bear—a tale of divided family, of a search for a Land of the Pure that would remain elusive. It is about the fast-fading elite nawabi culture of Lucknow, now swamped by mercantilism and the competing forces of caste and communal politics. It is about the loss of a way of life, of manners, language, a people and a culture. It is the saga of a family whose history is closely intertwined with that of India’s march to freedom and Partition. The props in this story are a magnificent but decaying fort, an ancient library filled with small treasures, a fading old palace with labyrinthine corridors in Lucknow’s Kaiserbagh; and now, suddenly, fabulous riches.

Raja Mohammad Amir Khan, known as Suleiman bhai, is a diminutive, elegant figure who has long been a fixture in Lucknow society. He has been seen as the epitome of high Shia culture in a city now known for breeding political mediocrity. With his elaborate courtesies or adabs, the purity of speech, be it in Persian, Arabic or Urdu, the impeccable Oxbridge English, he is the last of a fading breed of Lakhnavis, known for their tameez (manners) and tehzeeb (culture). The uninitiated may see him as a caricature of Lakhnavi culture; the old residents of the city see him as a repository of Awadh Shia traditions. He is not a polo-playing raja, with an English nickname and a stiff upper lip. His family is known for its scholarship and establishment of several institutions of learning.

But equally, old residents and modern Indian historians know the Mahmudabad family for its dramatic history. Taluqdars settled in the region of Mahmudabad—now in Sitapur district—and were given the hereditary title of ‘Nawab’ by the Mughal emperor Akbar. During the great rising of 1857, the forces of Mahmudabad fought with Begum Hazrat Mahal against the British, and were defeated just as the last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, was exiled to Calcutta. In order to demonstrate the "magnanimity and compassion of the British towards their defeated enemies", the family was settled in an old palace built by Wajid Ali Shah in Lucknow’s Kaiserbagh, now known as Mahmudabad House. The family continued to prosper and build institutions such as the Amir-ud-Daula College in Lucknow (1888), the Amir-ud-Daula Library, Lucknow, and Colvin College in Mahmudabad, besides being one of the founders of Lucknow University and King George’s Medical College.

As one of the most prominent families of the region, they were inevitably associated with the Nehru family from nearby Allahabad and the Indian National Congress. The 1916 Lucknow Pact was signed in Mahmudabad House, Kaiserbagh. But it was the current raja’s father, the late Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan, who would change the family’s trajectory. "(Mohammed Ali) Jinnah was a close friend of my grandfather and took my father under his tutelage," says Suleiman bhai. His father would eventually become one of Jinnah’s most ardent supporters, and treasurer of the Muslim League. The son recalls: "Yet he first chose to remain an Indian after Independence. Instead of Pakistan, he headed to the shrine of Imam Hussain in Karbala, Iraq." Having witnessed the horrors of Partition, the raja sought a religious sanctuary. Ten years later, the old raja acquired Pakistani citizenship while his wife and only son remained in India.

Subsequently, the raja became something of a wanderer. He lasted in Pakistan only four years and, towards the end of his life, chose to live in London. There he worked for nine years as paid director of the Islamic Centre before his death in 1974. Meanwhile, the great properties of Mahmudabad were seized by the Custodian of Enemy Property in India. It was after his father’s death that Suleiman bhai took up his legal battle. Decades later, the central question that must haunt him is: why did his father choose Pakistan? Was it merely because it was known that the zamindari system would be abolished in India and preserved by Pakistan, which some see as a state created by reactionary feudal forces? Replies the raja: "Material goods did not interest him greatly, else he would never have abandoned so much in India. In fact, he wrote critically of the feudal classes."

The raja sees his father as symbolising dialectical tension in a man. "There was a sense that the British had deprived Muslims of political power that may explain his early enchantment with the idea of Pakistan. Yet he was a tormented soul, restless, unhappy and always disappointed."

The family’s tortured history has been a magnet for writers, and Suleiman bhai has played host to the best and the brightest—V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple. Naipaul writes in India: A Million Mutinies Now, "Amir (the current raja) was born in 1943. When he was two years old his ears were pierced. It was the custom in Muslim countries for slaves’ ears to be pierced: the piercing of Amir’s ears meant he had been sold to the Imam: the child had been pledged to the service of the Shia faith."

Later, of the journey to Iraq in 1948, as the subcontinent was being partitioned, Naipaul writes: "They went, in Iraq, still with Indian passports, to Karbala...sacred ground to Shias. On this sacred ground there arose in the father’s mind some idea of having his son become an ayatollah, a Shia divine." But the raja would change his mind and give his son a secular education after all. La Martiniere in Lucknow, it was (later he would attend university at Cambridge). "Culture upon culture," writes Naipaul.

Vikram Seth too had been a guest for two weeks at Mahmudabad House. The powerful character of the Nawab Sahib of Baitar House in A Suitable Boy is clearly based on the Mahmudabad clan. In the build-up to a scene, where the custodian of evacuee property arrives with a notice, Seth writes: "With Partition things had changed. The house had become lonely. Uncles and cousins had dispersed to Karachi or Lahore.... The gentle Nawab sahib remained. He spent more and more time in his library reading Roman history or Persian poetry or whatever he felt inclined to on any particular day."

For all the new possessions Suleiman bhai will now reclaim, the greatest wealth of the family is still stored in the Qila (fort) at Mahmudabad, a two-hour drive from Lucknow. In mid-February, the Qila briefly regained vestiges of its lost grandeur when it was all lit up for a Bollywood crew—Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan had arrived there, to shoot for J.P. Dutta’s Umrao Jaan.

We had gone there a few days earlier. The raja escorted us through a great gate into a vast courtyard, then through huge halls that have clearly seen better days. William Dalrymple described the Qila’s air of decaying splendour in The Age of Kali: "It was magnificent but the same neglect which had embraced so many buildings in Lucknow had taken hold of the Mahmudabad Qila. Dust lay thick underfoot, as if the qila was some lost castle in a child’s fairy tale." As the raja took us up a winding staircase, he explained: "We sold and lived. What could one do but sell one’s treasures—chandeliers, paintings and artifacts?"

We reach the top floor of the tower. Like the library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one is walking through corridors of ancient volumes and manuscripts. Blow off the dust and discover treasures—a 150-year-old volume of Shakespeare, all the old editions of Punch carefully bound, every Indian district gazetteer, an entire wing devoted to Persian and Urdu literature. The library was started in 1868. "Now I can preserve these books which are my biggest inheritance," says Suleiman bhai.

It is Moharram, the long period of mourning for Shias, and the raja must address a majlis at his Qila. Minutes before, he is recounting to Outlook his long legal and political battle. "I petitioned everyone, saying my mother and I are Indians, not ‘enemies’. I have been a Congress MLA. Yet the battle dragged on." He accepts that the land ceiling act and related laws will come into effect on some agricultural lands. "I am not a strongman who is forcing tenants to vacate after so many years. I’m looking for an honourable renegotiation of terms," he says with deliberate vagueness. "I am perhaps not as practical as I should be. I hope I don’t make a mess of it."

The raja then dons his black robes, sits gracefully on the pulpit and recites a marsia, epic poems written in memory of the heroes of Karbala, composed by his father: "Himmat ke sile ko aam karna hai hamein (We have to make tales of heroism commonplace)<>i/Maidan-e-waghah mein naam karna hai hamein (We have to make a great name in the battlefield)/Rona hi nahin hai asl maqsad (To shed tears is not our purpose)/Kuch isse bhi badh kar kaam karna hai hamein (We have to achieve tasks greater than these). As the majlis proceeds, tears roll down the raja’s cheeks.