[Times readers and government documents have
provided new information about a family who for decades convinced journalists
and Indian officials that they were royalty.]
By
Ellen Barry and Suhasini Raj
 |
|
Prince
Cyrus, Princess Sakina and a servant in 1998 on the roof of the
Malcha
Mahal in New Delhi. Credit Barry Bearak/
The
New York Tim
|
For 40 years, a reclusive family in Delhi
presented itself as the last surviving heirs to the princely state of Oudh,
which once ruled a swath of northern India. The three of them — the mother, and
her adult son and daughter — were an incredible story, living in a ruined
palace in a forest, a living link to India’s ancient, traumatic past.
In November, The Times published an
investigation of the family’s true origins, revealing that their claims of
royal lineage were in large part invention. They were an ordinary family
displaced by Partition, the bloody separation of Pakistan and India in 1947.
The Begum, or queen of Oudh, was actually Wilayat Butt, the widow of a
Pakistani civil servant. Her son, Prince Cyrus, was actually Mickey Butt; her
daughter, Princess Sakina, was Farhad Butt.
After the article ran, The Times received
hundreds of letters and emails, including a few valuable leads that helped
unearth more information about the family. Special thanks to two sharp-eyed
readers, Venkat Singh and Iftikhar Drabu, who contacted us with new
information. Here is some of what we’ve been able to find out since then.
1) How was this Pakistani family able to
return to India, 15 years after Partition?
Wilayat Butt and her children were Pakistani
citizens, but they used political connections to secure the right to resettle
in Kashmir, where she and her husband had family roots, a dogged effort that
was documented in a 58-page dossier by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs.
In petitions starting in 1962, Mrs. Butt
argued that she faced persecution in Pakistan because of her political
activism. She claimed that her husband, a top official at Pakistan Aviation,
was fatally poisoned in 1951; that one of her sons was killed in an “Air Force
plane crash”; and that she had suffered “inhuman tortures” at the hands of the
authorities after she publicly confronted Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra
over the status of Kashmir.
“As long as we lived there, our lives,
property, future and everything was constantly in danger due to the conspiracy
and the policy of the ruling authorities to ruin us, just because of difference
in political views,” she wrote.
She makes no mention of any connection to the
royal family of Oudh.
She also omits any mention of her oldest son,
who was a decorated officer in Pakistan’s Air Force — a fact that would have
unsettled her Indian patrons — and says nothing about the existence of family
and property in Pakistan.
The dossier suggests Indian officials were
split on what to do about the family. “We are of the view that there appear to
be no reasonable grounds on which she could base her claim to resettle in the
Jammu and Kashmir State,” an Intelligence Bureau official wrote.
But she was viewed sympathetically by senior
officials in Jammu and Kashmir, including an old friend who had become the
state’s leader. In July 1963, the government concluded that Mrs. Butt and her
children should be allowed to legally remain in India on a year-to-year basis,
“subject to good behavior,” but that they would not receive Indian citizenship.
So their legal status was tenuous.
2)
Why was she so well-connected politically?
Before Partition, Mrs. Butt and her husband
had been active in Kashmiri politics, and had struck up a friendship with G.M.
Sadiq, who later became the leader of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, said
Iftikhar Sadiq, 52, the official’s grandson.
She continued her activism in Pakistan, where
she argued for Kashmiri independence, and served as president of the All-Jammu
and Kashmir Muslim Conference. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister,
mentions her in a memoir as an activist who was particularly troublesome to Mr.
Bogra, Pakistan’s third prime minister.
Mr. Nehru describes her as “a Kashmiri woman
by the name of Bhat who did a lot of mischief.”
In 1954, she confronted Mr. Bogra at a public
event in Karachi and argued with him about Kashmir. Family members said she was
subsequently arrested and confined for six months to a mental hospital in
Lahore. Some relatives said she received electroshock therapy there.
After she left Pakistan for Kashmir, she
lived under the patronage of Mr. Sadiq, her old friend. “They used to be very
close to the ‘who’s who’ who mattered here in the valley at that time,” his
grandson said. “In those days, people used to really care about these bonds.
They used to develop them into personal relationships — they would never get
rid of them.”
3)
When did she first publicly claim she was the Begum of Oudh?
The family stayed in Kashmir from 1962 until
the early 1970s, living in housing provided by Mr. Sadiq. It was during that
time that Mrs. Butt told neighbors she and her children were the heirs to Oudh.
She would not allow her children to associate
with the neighbors, saying they were royalty and the neighbors were
“commoners,” said Sabia Rashid, 56, an ophthalmologist who lived a few doors
away. She had even ordered workers to demolish the interior walls of her house
so that the children could play cricket inside, Dr. Rashid said.
“She looked like the witch from ‘Hansel and
Gretel,’” Dr. Rashid said. “She would not talk to anybody. People were scared
of her.”
She lived with two sons and a daughter, who
made no claim to royal lineage, Dr. Rashid said. Her daughter, Farhad, who was
then known as Marzia, told neighbors they were a Jewish family who had moved to
Kashmir from Iran. The youngest, a boy known as Raza, was the friendliest, and
a talented cricketer.
Mrs. Butt and the two younger children left
Kashmir in the early 1970s. Her departure seemed to coincide with the death of
G.M. Sadiq, her patron, in 1971.
“I remember my grandaunt saying once, ‘She
left, and she never came back, and they never knew where she was,’” Iftikhar
Sadiq said. “Maybe she felt she didn’t have anyone to fall back on.”
Her older son, known as Assad, remained in
the government house in Kashmir in near-complete isolation. Years after the
rest of the family left, his body was discovered in a state of decomposition.
Dr. Rashid said it was widely believed that,
left alone in the abandoned house, he had starved to death.
3)
What happened then?
Mrs. Butt and her two youngest children
relocated to Lucknow, and demanded the restoration of the properties of Oudh.
They now called themselves Begum Wilayat, Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza.
They became objects of pity, said Satya Pal
Malik, who was a member of the state parliament in Uttar Pradesh when he went
to visit them at the Lucknow train station, “with the belief that they must
belong to the royal family.”
“Actually, she was the creation of the local
press,” Mr. Malik said. “She never told me that she was from the royal family.
But to look at and talk, they were good looking. Even the children were very
beautiful looking. So it would seem, that yes, they are blue-blooded people.”
Eventually, state officials offered the
family a house, but Mrs. Butt was haughty and rude, Mr. Malik said, even to
those who were trying to assist her. They eventually relocated to a train
station in New Delhi.
Officials from Uttar Pradesh continued to
work on their behalf for permanent housing. Ammar Rizvi, a high-ranking state
official who was then with the Congress Party, said he had briefed Indira
Gandhi about the case, and that she also felt sorry for them.
“She was a very kind, very generous person,”
he said. “She said, ‘Ammar, see to it that she is not put to any
inconvenience.’”
Mr. Rizvi said he was never certain whether
there was any basis to the claim, because the family said all their documents
had burned in a fire. No one in the government had seen proof.
“Maybe some of her relatives might have some
relationship, contacts with him, only God knows,” he said “Unless I know for certain,
I cannot blame her, and I cannot accuse her, and I cannot pass any verdict.
That would be unfair.”
He said he lost contact with the family when
they were resettled in Malcha Mahal, the ruined 14th-century hunting lodge
where they lived until their deaths. Mr. Rizvi said the fate of the family made
him profoundly sad.
“It’s sort of a psycho case,” he said. “Like
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho.’ They thought themselves to the real successor or
heir apparent to the throne of Oudh. That was the tragedy.”
Ellen Barry is The Times's New England bureau
chief. She has previously served as The Times's Russia and South Asia bureau
chief and was part of a team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for International
Reporting. @EllenBarryNYT
Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as
an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based
in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014.