India's impoverished royals reign in shadows
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NEW DELHI — In a centuries-old hunting lodge hidden on the fringes of India's capital, in a room where pigeons fly among hand-carved pillars and Persian carpets rot in the gloom, a princess dreams of a long-gone kingdom.
And lights. That would also be nice.
"We have been left in darkness. We are hemmed in by affliction," said Princess Sakina Mahal, whose family, as rulers of the Kingdom of Oudh, once reigned over a large swath of central India. These days, royal rule doesn't extend beyond the crumbling, 700-year-old stone building she calls home.
The hulking lodge, built by a long-dead sultan and concealed deep in an overgrown park, has no doors and no electricity. Pools of black mold grow on the ceiling; weeds sprout on the roof.
But Sakina is still a princess. "The decline is there, but our vanity shall never fail," she said, her clothing elegant but frayed, her voice rising to an unsettling urgency. In the shadows, her brother, Prince Riaz, nodded. "It shall never fail, though the regal ruination is before you!"
The past few generations have been devastating for the House of Oudh (pronounced a-wadh), reducing it to this pair of middle-aged royals whose grasp on reality can seem as fragile as the rusting sign out front warning, "Intruders Shall be Gundown."
But they are far from alone. Decline is familiar to all of India's 565 royal families, a fact of aristocratic life that accelerated dramatically after independence from Britain in 1947.
The various royals — the maharajas and maharanis, nawabs, begums, nizams, princes and princesses — have seen their powers stripped away, their land seized. Their "privy purses," the payments from British colonial rulers and then the Indian government, have been cut off.
Struggling to stay afloat, they've sold off piles of jewelry, fleets of Rolls-Royces and armories of heirloom hunting rifles.
Some have found their way. A handful have become powerful politicians, and a few are business leaders. Quite a number have turned family palaces into hotels that sell hazy memories of the British Raj. Still others are professional celebrities, lending their names to polo tournaments sponsored by Chivas Regal or Hyundai and frequenting newspaper gossip pages.
But most of the old aristocrats have disappeared into obscurity. They may carry weight where their families once ruled, but in the wider world most are simply well-named nobodies struggling to keep up appearances.
As India has changed around them, Princess Sakina and Prince Riaz haven't even tried to keep pace. They seldom leave home. Descended from rulers who invaded India centuries ago from Persia, they distrust other Indians — whom they refer to derisively as "subcontinent persons" — and speak to them only when they must.
"Time means nothing to us here," said the prince.
Compared to his vociferous, insistent sister, Prince Riaz is a quiet, almost ghostly figure. While she declaims on the family's history, he listens silently. But he's also the more worldly. He's traveled abroad and is the person who comes down the path to meet the siblings' infrequent visitors. It's Riaz who goes into town when they need to sell another rusting heirloom to raise money.
He spends a lot of time on the roof, with its vistas of the skyscrapers of modern New Delhi.
"If I have this view, why would I need commoners as friends?" he asked.
"Ordinary people settle for ordinary things," Sakina said. Then, as it often does, her voice slips into a speechlike cadence, and she's almost shouting: "Ordinariness is not just a crime, but it is a sin. Yes! It is a sin!"
The siblings, both in their mid-40s, have created their own royal island. Inside, it's just the two of them, a half-dozen snarling, slate-blue mastiffs they smother with love, and an ever-decreasing collection of heirlooms.
While they're clearly struggling financially, they won't even consider finding work.
"We dislike even to mingle with commoners," Riaz said.
Instead, their lives revolve around their late mother, Princess Wilayat Mahal. Dead for a decade, she remains the most powerful presence in the lodge.
Princess Wilayat said she was a great-granddaughter of the last ruler of Oudh, a concubine-loving king the British deposed in 1856. Over the next century, his descendants frittered away his fortune and disappeared from view.
But in 1975, Princess Wilayat forced her way onto the Indian consciousness, moving into a New Delhi railway station with her children, five servants and 12 dogs.
They stayed for nine years, first on a platform and then in a VIP portico, as the princess tried to embarrass the Indian government into giving her a home fit for royalty. Officials eventually succumbed and gave her the hunting lodge.
But there's no happily-ever-after to the princess' story. The move to the ancient building — built by a sultan unrelated to the House of Oudh — seems to have presaged a slip well beyond eccentricity. Feeling she had never achieved sufficient grandeur, the elder princess eventually committed suicide.
It's easy to pity them, this pair of royals trapped by their own sense of superiority.
But they'll have none of that.
"We are not going to ask anyone for anything," said Sakina. "The government should have the sense to know how we are living over here. They are blind? They do not know we are in darkness?"