The jungle prince of Delhi
For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the heart of the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story, says Ellen Barry. But was it true?
On a spring afternoon in 2016, when I was working for The New York Times in India, I received a telephone message from a recluse who lived in a forest in the middle of Delhi. It was passed on by our office manager. “Ellen have you been trying to get in touch with the royal family of Oudh?” she asked, adding: “It was quite strange! The secretary left precise instructions for when you should call her – tomorrow between 11am and 12 noon.”
I knew about the royal family of Oudh, of course.
They were one of the city’s great mysteries. Their story was passed between tea sellers and rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers in Old Delhi. In a forest, they said, in a palace cut off from the city that surrounds it, lived a prince, a princess and a queen, said to be the last of a storied Shia Muslim royal line. There were different versions, depending on whom you spoke to. Some people said the Oudh family had been there since the British had annexed their kingdom, in 1856, and that the forest had grown up around the palace, engulfing it. Some said they were a family of jinns, the supernatural beings of Arabian folklore.
One thing was sure: they didn’t want company. They lived in a 14th-century hunting lodge, which they surrounded with loops of razor wire and ferocious dogs. The perimeter was marked with menacing signs. INTRUDERS SHALL BE GUNDOWN, said one. But every few years, the family agreed to admit a journalist, always a foreigner, to tell of their grievances against the state. The journalists emerged with deliciously macabre stories, which I have studied admiringly. In 1997, the prince and the princess told The Times that their mother, in a final gesture of protest against the treachery of Britain and India, had killed herself by drinking a poison mixed with crushed diamonds and pearls.
I could see why these stories resonated so. India was a country imprinted with trauma, by the epic deceit of the British conquest and then the bloodbath of the British departure, known as Partition, which carved out Pakistan from India and set off convulsions of Hindu-Muslim violence. This family, displaying its own ruin, was a physical representation of all that India had suffered. A few grainy photographs of the siblings had been published: they were beautiful, pale and high-cheekboned, but also somehow ravaged, harrowed.
Nearly every day, dropping my children at school, I drove past the narrow road that led into the middle of the forest, which was surrounded by an ornate wrought-iron fence. The woods were so thick that it was impossible to see much, and inhabited by gangs of monkeys. At night, you could hear jackals howling.
The day after I got the message, I dialled the phone number. After a few rings, someone picked up, and I heard a high-pitched, quavering voice on the other end. On the following Monday, as instructed, I asked our driver to take me into the woods at 5.30 in the afternoon. The woods themselves were a bit magical, a thicket in the middle of a city of 20 million people. British colonial officers had introduced mesquite trees in the 19th century, and they had spread rapidly, swallowing pastures and roads and villages – everything that had been there before. We drove farther, until the tree canopy was tormented, thick enough to block out the light.
The person on the phone had told me to leave the car at the end of the road, and to come alone. This did not surprise me: the Oudh family refused, famously, to meet with Indians. I asked the driver to wait at a distance and stood in the woods, somewhat awkwardly, holding my notebook and wondering what came next. Then the bushes rustled, and a man appeared. He was elfin and wore high-waisted jeans. He had high cheekbones with hollows beneath them and wild grey hair that stood up in tufts.
“I am Cyrus,” the prince said. It was the high-pitched voice I had heard on the phone. He spoke in bursts, like a person who spent most of his time alone. Then he turned and led me into the woods. I tried to keep up, stepping over a tangle of roots and thorns, and climbed a flight of massive stone stairs leading to the old hunting lodge. It was half-ruined, open to the air, and surrounded by metal gratings; one steel bar was loose, and the prince moved it aside with a great clank so that we could enter.
I stepped into spare, medieval grandeur, a bare stone antechamber lined with palm trees in brass pots and faded, once-elegant carpets. On the wall hung an oil painting of the prince’s mother swathed in voluminous, dark robes, her eyes closed as if in a trance. The prince led me up to the roof to show me the view. We stopped at the edge of the building, gazing across green treetops to the dusty city, shimmering in the heat.
My idea was to interview the prince and write the story. When I asked about his family, he launched into an animated speech about the perfidy of the British and Indian governments. I recognised quotes from articles I had read, written by colleagues from other newspapers. He ranted a little, complaining of persecution 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.” But when I asked if I could publish our interview, he baulked. For this, he said, I would need the permission of his sister, Princess Sakina, who was not in Delhi. I would have to come back.
The story began with his mother. 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. Oudh (pronounced Uh-vud) was a kingdom that no longer existed. The British annexed it in 1856, a trauma from
which its capital, Lucknow, never recovered. The core of the city is still made of Oudh’s vaulted shrines and palaces. The Begum declared that she would stay in the station until these properties had been restored to her. She settled in the VIP waiting room, and unloaded a whole household there: carpets, potted palms, a silver tea set, Nepali servants in livery, glossy Great Danes. She also had two grown children, Prince Ali Raza and Princess Sakina, a son and a daughter who appeared to be in their 20s. They addressed her as “Your Highness”.
The Begum was an arrestinglooking woman, tall and broad-shouldered, with a face as craggy and immobile as an Easter Island statue. She wore a sari of dark, heavy silk and kept a pistol in its folds. She and her children settled on red plastic chairs, and waited. For years. The Begum’s behaviour was imperious and dramatic. She refused direct conversation, demanding that queries be written on embossed stationery, placed on a silver platter and carried to her by a servant, who read them aloud. If the station master gave her any trouble, she threatened to kill herself by drinking snake venom. Government officials scrambled to find her somewhere to live, but were rejected. She attracted attention from the media, and officials feared the Shia population in Lucknow could explode into civil unrest if they believed she was being abused.
Foreign correspondents arrived, one after another, and readers began to send letters from all corners of the world, expressing outrage on her behalf. In 1984, her efforts paid off. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi accepted the family’s claim, granting them use of a 14th-century hunting lodge known as Malcha Mahal. They left the train station roughly a decade after they first appeared there. Wilayat never appeared in public again.
My responsibilities in New Delhi included a great many diplomatic receptions and buffet dinners, which I found exhausting. So I found it a relief to drive into the forest and sit on Cyrus’s porch, eating pistachios and watching motes of pollen circulate in the sunlight. In a meandering, roundabout way, I was trying to excavate his past. I felt flattered that he allowed me in, again and again, when so many others had been turned away. And yet something also nagged at me about the little family unit, the way they seemed to have scoured away any relationships from before their appearance at the train station.
When our conversations had gone on for about nine months, I travelled to Lucknow, a large city in northern India that was the cradle of the Oudh dynasty. I was there for an unrelated story, but I knew that Cyrus had lived there with his mother and sister in the 1970s, so I went to the neighbourhood where I had heard that Oudh descendants lived. There, to my surprise, the old-timers remembered Cyrus and his family. But they told me, almost as an aside, that they had been dismissed as impostors. The Oudh descendants in Kolkata, where the nawab died in exile, had also rejected their claim. And there were questions Cyrus himself seemed unable to answer. Where was he born? Who was his father? How do you crush diamonds, anyway?
One night Cyrus called me, howling unintelligibly, to tell me that his sister had in fact died seven months earlier. He had told no one, burying her body himself. He had lied to me about it for months, and seemed a bit ashamed by it. He said that I should never visit again, and also that he was so lonely. I waited a few days, and then showed up with a Filet O’ Fish from McDonald’s. Our relationship seemed to knit itself back together. He asked me to procure him a gun and a girlfriend, which I did not; and a tarpaulin and a recording of Fiddler
on the Roof, which I did. He was solicitous and a little corny, with pop culture references that seemed to date from the 1960s. Once, he asked me to kiss him on the cheek – his skin felt fragile, like tissue paper – and he told me that it was the first time he had been kissed in ten years. “When you are over here, my heart goes doopity doo, Sophia Loren,” he said. He even said I could write something about him, as long as I didn’t go into much detail. When I replied that I have to tell the truth, he said, “OK, you have to tell the truth. Then again, there is a hole in the bucket, Harry Belafonte.”
We had been going on like this for 15 months, and I was due to leave India soon to take up a new assignment. This sort of exchange made up the balance of our final conversations: I was trying to get him to reveal something about his origins – anything, really – and he was twisting away from me. In our last conversation, a few hours before I boarded a flight for London, he asked me how someone could get word to me, should he die. I asked if he planned to commit suicide, like his mother. “So far, I am going to preserve myself,” he said. I think I hugged him goodbye – but that was the last I saw of him. Three months later, I got a message on Facebook from a friend at the BBC, saying Cyrus had died.
was the guards at the military facility next door to the palace who later told me how he died. Three weeks after we said goodbye, he was seen trying to wheel his bicycle down the road, shaking violently. An electrician from the military facility helped him to his feet, and he staggered back to the hunting lodge. He asked for a bottle of lemonade and an ice cream. One of the guards said it seemed to be dengue fever. His illness lasted eight days. 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.
I climbed the stone stairs to Malcha Mahal with a kind of curiosity that was in some ways like greed. I had returned to India for a few days, to see what I could find among Cyrus’s possessions. I had become curious – OK, obsessively curious – about how a family with wealth and status had become lost in the forest. About who they were. Cyrus and his family had lived through a great historical rupture: the country’s division. My sense was that the answer lay there, in an act of government that disrupted the lives of half a continent. But what made me think I could track the answers down after all these years? This is what was going through my head as I leafed through his letters, looking for a birth certificate, a passport, something that anchored this family in the factual world.
Two things genuinely surprised me. The first was a stack of receipts for regular, small transfers of cash through Western Union from a city in the industrial north of England. The sender identified himself as a “half brother”. The other thing was a handwritten letter sent in 2006. It was cranky yet intimate, conveying both annoyance and concern. “I am in so much pain that I cannot go to the toilet even,” the writer began, and, after a catalogue of physical ailments, went on to complain about the
“She settled in the VIP waiting room and unloaded a whole household there: carpets, potted palms, Nepali servants, Great Danes”
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 letter was signed “Shahid”, and it was sent from an address in Bradford, Yorkshire.
I returned to London with three real leads. The letter from Yorkshire. That name, Shahid. The Western Union receipts, testament that someone had been caring for Cyrus and his family all these years. I took a train to Bradford, and walked to the address on the envelope. It was a grey, windblown day, and the walk took me past pawnshops, Chinese takeout joints and dinky yellowbrick houses, nearly all of them occupied by immigrants from India and Pakistan. I arrived at a small, neat house surrounded by a large collection of ceramic garden gnomes, teddy bears, mermaids and fairies.
The door swung open, and before me stood a man in tiger-print pyjamas. He was barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, and looked to be in his mid-80s. He did not look well: his eyes were rheumy, his chest sunken. But he had Cyrus’s face, the same jutting cheekbones and hawk nose. He led me inside, showed me to a chair and then lay down on a cot. His movements were laborious. He glanced without expression at the photographs I had brought with me. When I offered to play him a recording of Cyrus’s voice, he shook his head in refusal, saying it would be too painful. Beside his sickbed were two framed pictures of Wilayat. This was Shahid. He was Cyrus’s older brother. And now, finally, there were some facts.
They were, or had been, an ordinary family. Their father had been the registrar of Lucknow University, Inayatullah Butt. My friend’s name was not Prince Cyrus, or Prince Ali Raza, or Prince anything. He was plain old Mickey Butt. In this house in West Yorkshire, I had found it: the identity that Cyrus and his family had worked so hard to keep secret. Shahid, who spent his adult life working in an iron foundry, could remember a life before Oudh, when they had housemaids and school uniforms. When their mother was not a rebel queen, but a housewife.
Shahid ran away when he was about 14, then emigrated to Britain and rarely mentioned his mother’s claim to the royal house of Oudh. When I asked him about that story, he was evasive. He said he wasn’t even sure whether he was Indian or Pakistani. “I’m so confused, I don’t know who I am,” he said. “I am like a bird, a long-lost bird, a lost lamb.” Trying to get Shahid to speak about his mother and siblings was painful. As my visits to Bradford continued, he was becoming sicker and sicker – with lung cancer that had metastasised to his lymph nodes. On my fourth visit, the last time I saw him, his voice was raspy, but he told me more than he ever had before. The story, as he told it, began at Partition.
On 3 June 1947, the British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced that the withdrawal of the British Empire would create two independent nations, with Pakistan carved out for Muslims. Lucknow’s educated Muslims began slipping away overnight, headed for Pakistan’s new capital. There were letters promising juicy promotions. And there were, on the other hand, rumours of violence if they stayed. Shahid’s parents had to make an immediate decision between India or Pakistan. His mother, Wilayat Butt, had never been so happy as she was in Lucknow. She was fiery and strong. She simply refused to leave.
But then came one afternoon in the crumbling elegance of the nawab’s city. Shahid’s father – a man in distinguished middle age, wearing wire-rimmed glasses – was riding his bicycle home when he was surrounded by Hindu youths, who beat him with hockey sticks. He decided to move the whole family to Pakistan, where, in the great reshuffling, he had been offered a job overseeing the new country’s civil aviation agency.
Wilayat followed her husband, Shahid told me, but she never accepted his decision to leave India. She was obsessed with what she had left behind. In her mind, the grudge sprouted and germinated, and her behaviour became volatile. Then her husband suddenly died. Now with all restraining influence gone, furious over the loss of her property, she accosted Pakistan’s prime minister in public, Shahid said, and slapped him. This changed things for her. She was no longer a well-connected widow, but something shadier. She was confined to a mental hospital in Lahore for six months – the only way to avoid a prison sentence. Shahid remembers visiting her, among the wails and curses of the patients. “It was horrible,” he said.
When she was free, Wilayat gathered up her youngest children, packed trunks with carpets and jewellery, and smuggled it all back into India, with the goal of reclaiming her property. Shahid set out with them but eventually walked away. He could not put into words why he left. His story flickers out here – earlier this year, Shahid died in the front room of his house. It was Partition that ruined his mother, set her on the course towards the ruined palace, he had told me. “We had to start all over again,” he said.
In the early 1970s, still emptyhanded, and increasingly bizarre in her behaviour, Wilayat announced to the world that she was the queen of Oudh, demanding the vast properties of a kingdom that no longer existed. An ordinary grievance had metastasised to become an epic one. The family took on new identities: Mickey became Prince Ali Raza, later calling himself Prince Cyrus; his sister Farhad became Princess Sakina, or Princess Alexandrina. They no longer made any mention of their Pakistani relatives, or the spacious family house in Lahore that was waiting for them should they return. Maybe they forgot it existed. They seemed to shed their past entirely.
The rest of the story you already know. They were so convincing, and so insistent, that for 40 years people believed them. So there it is: I have plundered their secret. Cyrus would have hated it. He refused to answer questions about his past; it was one of the essential themes of our friendship. I try to imagine how he would react to all this. I’m sure this article would have crushed him. And yet, why do you invite a journalist into your life, if you do not expect this to happen?
In search of some answers, I visited the public cemetery where he had been buried as an unclaimed body, assigned the number DD33B. Unclaimed bodies are marked only with chips of stone, and small mounds extend in all directions, to the vanishing point. In the clerk’s office, I was approached by a man named Mohammad Aslam Chowdhury, a seller of electrical wiring from Old Delhi. He presented a plastic folder and showed me its contents. It was filled with newspaper clippings about Cyrus’s death. He said he carried the clippings to remind himself how swiftly earthly glory passes. “If a person like this has gone into oblivion, and had this death of anonymity,” he said, wonderingly, “what can you say about the death of a commoner?”
“Shahid ran away when he was 14, emigrated to Britain and rarely mentioned his family”