“There was blood all over the place.”Īround this time, Wilayat identified a far more effective way to make her case: foreign correspondents. “Poor passengers, they were looking at the whole scene,” he said. Rizvi visited during Muharram, an annual ritual of mourning, and found her surrounded by pilgrims, flagellating themselves with chains to which razor blades had been attached. Rizvi tried to persuade the begum to accept a four-bedroom house in Lucknow, but she refused, saying it was too small. She said no, she would not go, the amount was very little.” The notes were flying everywhere, and my public relations officer had to catch this note here, that note there. “But she got angry and threw the envelope. “In 1975, that was a big sum,” he recalled. He recalled handing Wilayat an envelope with 10,000 rupees so that they could set up a household in Lucknow. They addressed her as “Your Highness.”Īmmar Rizvi, an aide to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was sent to New Delhi as a liaison. She also had two grown children, Prince Ali Raza and Princess Sakina, a son and a daughter who appeared to be in their 20s. waiting room, and unloaded a whole household there: carpets, potted palms, a silver tea set, Nepali servants in livery, glossy Great Danes. The begum declared that she would stay in the station until these properties had been restored to her. The core of the city is still made of Oudh’s vaulted shrines and palaces. The British annexed it in 1856, a trauma from which its capital, Lucknow, never recovered. Oudh (pronounced Uh-vud) was a kingdom that no longer existed. She appeared, on the platform of New Delhi’s train station in the early 1970s, seemingly from nowhere, announcing herself as Wilayat, Begum of Oudh. Why summon a journalist if you don’t want to be written about? How It Began For this, he said, I would need the permission of his sister, Princess Sakina, who was not in Delhi. When I asked if I could publish our interview, he balked.
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. He ranted a little, complaining of persecution by a criminal gang.
I recognized quotes from articles I had read, written by colleagues from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times. When I asked about his family, he launched into an animated speech about the perfidy of the British and Indian governments. My idea was to interview the prince and write the story.
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