A noble feud reflects India’s royal ambivalence (original) (raw)

LUCKNOW, India — Their tale begins in the 18th century, with an ancestor who served a Mogul emperor and an aristocratic family’s rise to immense wealth and power.

It ends with the two brothers-in-law, white-haired men living in adjoining apartments in a palace that long ago passed the point of crumbling, and both claiming the throne of a kingdom that hasn’t existed for 150 years.

The whisper of angry words echoes across tattered brick courtyards.

“I think he’s obsessed,” said Ibrahim Ali Khan, former oil company executive and the leading claimant to the title in question: Nawab of Awadh. “Once you realize you are not the nawab, and the whole town knows that you are not, even then you want it. What would you call it? You’d call it an obsession.”

His brother-in-law, though, calls it something else.

“There is this thing known as megalomania,” said Jaffar Mir Abdullah, the more recent aspirant to the long-gone throne. He is a former medical equipment salesman whose younger sister is married to Khan. More than anything, he is furious that Khan has made their fight public. “He needs consultation with a psychiatrist.”

Their 15-year feud, in a city once famed for its poets and artists, has become a matter for newspaper reporters and an ever-watching public, and a reflection of India’s deeply ambivalent relationship with its bewildering array of royalty, semi-royalty and lesser aristocrats.

Because if those aristocrats don’t matter at all in modern India, they also matter very much.

“Royalty is a very complex thing in this country,” said Malvika Singh, a magazine publisher who often writes about politics and culture. “What is modern? What is feudal? I think India is a mixture of all of these.”

Officially, at least, the assorted nobles – the nawabs, nizams, begums, maharajahs, maharanis, sultans, princesses and others – don’t amount to anything. India’s aristocratic families were stripped of their political power at independence, in 1947, and their feudal landholdings five years later. The final blows came in the 1970s, when they lost their government allowances and legal right to their titles.

“We had some very tough times,” said Khan, a courtly 63-year-old with sad, deep-set eyes and a comb-over, pouring whiskey as he told the story of Awadh. From memory, he lists the many rulers of the kingdom, which stretched across north India. He grows nostalgic as he talks of Lucknow, its last capital, and how it was famed for its gentility and its love of the arts. The kingdom disappeared when it was annexed by Britain in the 1850s, but the descendants of the ruler – the nawab – remained in the city as powerful landlords, living off the family’s riches.

Khan has faint memories of the last gasps of the old days, when there were eunuchs in the palace and 106 servants. He remembers clearly when many of those servants had to be let go, after the family’s feudal lands – they controlled 996 villages – were taken away in the 1950s. It was a time when socialist policies governed much of the economy, and wealthy royals got little sympathy.

“We had to sell our heirloom jewelry, and whatever land we had left. But we had to keep up a lifestyle, because for so many hundreds of years we’d been looked up to.”

He smiled solicitously, and gestured at the whiskey glasses: “Would you like some more water?”

In many ways, modern India seems impossibly different from the country Khan was born into, in 1947, as colonial Britain was granting independence to the subcontinent. India was the jewel of Britain’s empire, a place where English businessmen grew rich from timber, opium and tea, but where millions of ordinary Indians saw little but staggering poverty.

It was a colony where a confusing patchwork of 565 kingdoms were ruled by royals famed for their riches and their love of ostentatious spending. While the kingdoms were officially independent, nearly all major decisions were made in London.

Today, India is fiercely proud of being the world’s largest democracy, with a fast-growing economy and an elite desperate to shed the country’s reputation for poverty and illiteracy. Their vision of India celebrates millionaire entrepreneurs and Oxford-educated technocrats – and relegates the royals to entertaining wealthy foreign tourists in palaces-turned-hotels.

But the reality is more complicated.

The nobility may have no legal standing in modern India, but plenty still wield power. How could they not? Even stripped of their titles, most are still comparatively rich, and have generations of family connections to call upon.

Most important, they still captivate India.

“The West is obsessed with their royalty. The British are obsessed with their royalty. We’re no different,” said Singh. “People love the idea of royalty. We have not lost that despite Marxism and leftism and everything else that India has gone through.”

Certainly, many aristocrats have fallen on hard times over the years, unable to survive a world of university entrance exams and job interviews. Many more have simply put their titles behind them, dusting off the royal robes only for occasional weddings.

But for those willing to trade on their noble roots, there are also new ways to find success.

Dozens of politicians have won elections based on little but their aristocratic pedigrees. Royals, whether they use their titles or not, can be found in corporate boardrooms and on Bollywood soundstages. There are aristocratic university professors and aristocratic journalists.

And, in Lucknow, there are two angry brothers-in-law.

Conversations with both men tend to start in the early 1700s, when Awadh’s first nawab was an aide to the Mogul emperor. There are digressions into family trees of mind-bending complexity and often-contradictory explanations of how noble titles are inherited. There are tales about the Sheesh Mahal – the Palace of Mirrors – the once-ornate 18th-century mansion where both now live. The original palace, now little more than a crumbling shell that surrounds a maze of subdivided buildings, houses some 200 people in the shadow of long-gone elegance. Both men live in a century-old addition to the palace; Abdullah in a cluster of moldy, high-ceilinged rooms and Khan about 10 meters (30 feet) away in a more modern, freshly painted apartment.

But when discussions finally reach living memory, the cloak of politeness quickly gives way.

In separate interviews – once close friends, the two men seldom speak these days – Abdullah lashed out at Khan for everything from his mental state to his family’s real estate decisions. Khan, in turn, ridiculed Abdullah for his claim to be part of Awadh’s nobility.

“His grandfather married a second cousin of my father in 1917. The family had never seen the face of Lucknow before then” said Khan, sitting in his living room. “Then, in 1995, he starts calling himself a nawab!”

That is when the trouble began. In the 1990s, Abdullah began working with travel agencies that offered foreign tourists the chance to dine with nobility.

A friendly, potbellied man, Abdullah is a natural storyteller who enjoyed introducing tourists to Lucknow’s history. His brother-in-law, he said, is being pedantic about old aristocratic legalities.

“‘Nawab’ is not even a title now,” he said, arguing that many men in the family can now use the title. “This is the family of the nawabs. Not one nawab.”

Unless, of course, you’ve been raised to believe you are that one nawab.

“Being the eldest son, I got the title,” Khan said angrily. “If it was the old days, he would not have dared to call himself a nawab!”

He’s probably right about that. Local historians and journalists agree that Khan has the most right to title.

In downtown Lucknow, next to an old movie theater where discount clothing is now sold, a 90-year-old man sits at a desk in his small bookstore and talks about the feud.

Ram Advani’s shop has been a center of Lucknow’s intellectual life for decades, a home to generations of writers and historians. Royal infighting, he said, has been here for centuries.

If it might appear there is little at stake today for the nawab – no kingdom, no feudal land, no legal title – there is still a public that pays close attention to their powerless ruler.

“The people silently have respect for these aristocrats,” said Advani. There’s no public touching of feet anymore, no requests for blessings. But still, the nawab will be greeted on the streets of Lucknow with a certain quiet deference.

“These royals have lost even their titles,” he said. “Now, they just want that respect.”