Princes of Yesterday, Ordinary Citizens Today: Muslim Landed Elites in Contemporary India

46 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Fall 2010 Princes of Yesterday, Ordinary Citizens Today: Muslim Landed Elites in Contemporary India Omar Khalidi* Like other religious communities, Muslims in India are quite naturally divided along class lines, despite exhortation to the ideal of equality among the believers. Before independence, the princely families provided much of the vocabulary that characterized journalistic writings about India: romance, glamour, color, pageantry, pomp and ceremony. Like the maharajas, the various Muslim landed elite families of the Mughals, and their off shoots, the Nizams of Hyderabad, the nawabs of Awadh, Nazims of Bengal, the Begums of Bhopal, and numerous others depended on just one source of income: revenue from land and nazr, cash presentations from their nobles. Within the hierarchy of the landed elites, the dynasties that ruled the “princely states,” were at the top. Further subdivision was by the territorial size: Hyderabad, Jammu & Kashmir were at the top, others were then graded by the number of gun salutes the British entitled them. Next in line were the Paigahs of Hyderabad, the taaluqdars of Awadh, and the petty principalities’ rulers spread over the country. How are the descendants of the nawabs faring economically today? Did they adjust well to the dawn of democratic, egalitarian India? The short answer is some have done well, but the majority has not. Leaving aside the Nizam of Hyderabad’s descendents, who are a class by themselves, how are others doing since independence? *Omar Khalidi, PhD, is an independent scholar based in Cambridge, Mass. His most recent works are Muslims in Indian Economy, 2006; Khaki and Ethnic Violence in India, revised second edition forthcoming in 2009; and numerous journal articles. He may be reached at okhalidi@mit.edu 47 (I) Just before the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company forces defeated Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore in 1799. The British exiled the Sultan’s children first to Vellore, a city that lies between Bangalore and Chennai, then to Calcutta. Of Tipu’s 12 sons, only Ghulam Muhammad is notable. He built a mosque named after his father in Calcutta that survives to this day. Two of Ghulam Muhammad’s descendents became sheriffs of Calcutta, mainly ceremonial positions in 1891 and 1913. Since the early twentieth century, the economic situation of Tipu’s progeny deteriorated. Some were forced to beg on the streets of Calcutta and other parts of Bengal. Other descendents demanded the central and state governments of India to grant them lands or pension for their progenitor’s role in fighting the British. To determine the exact number of legitimate descendants of Tipu and their present conditions, the government of Karnataka constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Prof. Sheikh Ali, a historian in Bangalore which presented its report in 2000. The press has not reported about the implementation of the Report. Documentaries and TV serials have been made about him and a bicentenary of death celebrated in 2009, oddly not a decade earlier which should have been the actual bicentenary. Tipu has been celebrated by both Indian and Pakistani nationalists as the first hero of resistance to the British. He is among a handful of persons simultaneously honored with commemorative postal stamps in both India and Pakistan. Yet his progeny has not adapted well to changing circumstances in India. Similar is the case with the descendants of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. When the 1857 uprising failed, the British killed numerous male members of the royal family. After a show trial, Zafar was banished to Rangoon, Burma, in 1858 along with his Queen Zeenat Mahal. Bahadur Shah died in exile on 7 November 1862. He was buried in Rangoon and the site has since become a dargah, shrine. The Emperors’ descendants from various wives dispersed into disparate parts of India, some headed as far south as Hyderabad. Qudratullah Shihab, a Pakistani bureaucrat revealed that one person claiming to be the direct descendant of Bahadur Shah Zafar asked the Lahore Fort as compensation for Red Fort as a migrant from Delhi to Lahore! Every so often the Indian press reports about a descendant here and there eking...