Becoming Mughal in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Bhopal Princely State

Abstract

In 1861, Nawab Sikandar Begum, the female ruler of Bhopal, toured Northern India for six months. The journey and its narration in the Taj al-iqbal (1873) were part of a broader project of princely self-fashioning aimed at both indigenous and British audiences. Taking the example of the Begums of Bhopal, this article engages with debates about travel and its relevance to the emergence of a nationalist imaginary, but also of its continuity with alternative visions in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The paper draws upon the insights of revisionist literature on princely states, which stress that princes at the mercy of British power nevertheless remained figures of indigenous authority, retaining a precarious autonomy in their territories. The Begums of Bhopal were able to turn their status as ‘loyalists’ towards consolidating a ‘Mughal’ aesthetic by recruiting artists, scholars and poets to underscore the state's autonomy.

Keywords:

• princely state
• Mughal
• travel
• tarikh
• Bhopal
• nineteenth-century India

Notes

¹ Bhopal was commonly ranked alongside Hyderabad in this fashion. See, for example, Thomas Henry Thornton, General Sir Richard Meade and the Feudatory States of Central and Southern India: A Record of Forty-Three Years’ Service as Soldier, Political Officer and Administrator (London/New York/Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898), pp. 109–10.

² Shah Jahan suggests the moment of transition occurs during her father Jahangir Muhammad Khan's reign (r. 1837–44), while Sultan Jahan points to a moment in Sikandar Begum's regime (r. 1844–68). Nawab Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal tarikh-i riyasat-i Bhopal (Kanpur: Matba‘-i Nizami, 1873), Part III, p. 95; and Sultan Jahan Begum, An Account of My Life (Gohur-i-ikbal), (trans. C.H. Payne) (London: J. Murray, 1912), pp. 5, 8, 17.

³ Claudia Preckel, ‘The Roots of Anglo-Muslim Co-Operation and Islamic Reformism in Bhopal’, in Jamal Malik (ed.), Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 73; and Claudia Preckel, Begums of Bhopal (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, Roli Books, 2000), chapter on Sikandar Begum.

⁴ Sultan Jahan Begum, An Account of My Life (Gohur-i-ikbal); and Sultan Jahan Begum, Hayat-i Shahjehani. Life of Her Highness the Late Nawab Shahjehan Begum of Bhopal (Bombay: Times Press, 1926), p. 80.

⁵ Sultan Jahan Begum, An Account of My Life (Gohur-i-ikbal), pp. 5–6.

⁶ Uma Yaduvansh, ‘Administrative System of Bhopal under Nawab Sikandar Begam (1844–68)’, in Islamic Culture, Vol. 41 (Oct. 1967), pp. 205–32.

⁷ Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘The Buildings of the Begums of Bhopal: Islamic Architecture in a 19th Century Colonial Indian Princely State’, paper presented at the symposium, ‘Patronage and Production of Art and Architecture by Women in South Asia in the Modern Era’, Shangri La Center for Islamic Arts and Culture, Honolulu, 18 May 2008. I am grateful to the author for sharing this paper with me.

⁸ See, for example, Thornton, General Sir Richard Meade and the Feudatory States of Central and Southern India, p. 129.

⁹ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 7.

¹⁰ Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 119.

¹¹ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal; Nawab Shah Jahan Begum, The Taj-ul Ikbal Tarikh Bhopal, or, the History of Bhopal (trans. H.C. Barstow) (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1876). Both the Urdu and English versions have been consulted for this article. All translations from the Urdu are my own.

¹² C.E. Luard, Imperial Gazetteer of India: Central India (Calcutta: Supt. of Govt. Print., 1908).

¹³ See, for example, ibid.; Muhammad Rizvi, Mukhtasar tarikh-i riyasat-i Bhopal ma‘ tasavir: mar‘uf bih akhtar-i iqbal (Bhopal: Matba‘-i makhzan al-‘ulum, 1897) Matba‘ Makhzan al-‘Ulum, 1897); and Muhammad Amin Zubairi, Begmat-i Bhopal: ya‘ni riyasat-i Bhopal ki das begmat ka mufassil tazkirah aur unke shandar karnamon aur farman ravai’i ki 1100 hijri se maujudah zamanah tak ki musalsal tarikh (Bhopal: Matba‘-i Sultani, 1918).

¹⁴ Sultan Jahan Begum, An Account of My Life (Gohur-i-ikbal).

¹⁵ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part III, p. 42. The English-language edition held in Doe Library at Berkeley was originally a gift to Colonel J.D. Hall, commandant of the Bhopal Battalion.

¹⁶ See, for example, Ashfaq Ali, Bhopal, Past and Present: A Brief History of Bhopal from the Hoary Past up to the Present Time (Bhopal: Jai Bharat Publishing House, 1981); Shaharyar M. Khan, The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000); Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (London: Routledge, 2007); and Preckel, Begums of Bhopal.

¹⁷ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part I, p. 1.

¹⁸ Stephen Frederic Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483–1530) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 25.

¹⁹ On the role of ‘colonial knowledge’ and the shaping of social categories in the colonial period, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

²⁰ Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 32, no. 4 (Oct. 1998), p. 916.

²¹ Nile Green, ‘Idiom, Genre and the Politics of Self-Description on the Peripheries of Persian’, in Nile Green and M. Searle-Chatterjee (eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 202–19.

²² For discussion of the Awadhi case, see Richard Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–1801 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980); Juan R. Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); and Michael Herbert Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987). For the Hyderabad example, see Munis D. Faruqui, ‘At Empire's End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 1 (2009), pp. 5–43.

²³ Nile Green, ‘Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 67, no. 1 (2008), p. 189.

²⁴ Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710–1780 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).

²⁵ Stewart Gordon, ‘Legitimacy and Loyalty in Some Successor States of the Eighteenth Century’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison, WI: South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978), pp. 286–303.

²⁶ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part I, p. 4.

²⁷ Ibid., Part I, p. 10.

²⁸ The text of Bhopal's 1818 treaty with the Company is available in many sources, including the Taj al-iqbal itself. See Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part I, p. 33.

²⁹ Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 165–210.

³⁰ Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, ‘Writing and Reading Tod's Rajasthan: Interpreting the Text and Its Historiography’, in Jos Gommans and Om Prakash (eds), Circumambulations in South Asian History: Essays in Honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), pp. 251–82.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Fiona Groenhout, ‘The History of the Indian Princely States: Bringing the Puppets Back onto Centre Stage’, in History Compass, Vol. 4, no. 4 (1 July 2006), pp. 629–44.

³³ Aya Ikegame, ‘Space of Kinship, Space of Empire’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 46, no. 3 (July 2007), pp. 343–72.

³⁴ Kavita Saraswathi Datla, ‘Making a Worldly Vernacular: Urdu, Education and Osmania University, Hyderabad 1883–1938’, unpublished dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2006. See also Alison MacKenzie Shah, ‘Constructing a Capital on the Edge of Empire: Urban Patronage and Politics in the Nizams’ Hyderabad’, unpublished dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

³⁵ Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

³⁶ Ian Copland, ‘What to Do about Cows? Princely versus British Approaches to a South Asian Dilemma’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 68, no. 1 (1 Jan. 2005), pp. 59–76; and Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage.

³⁷ Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’; Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Pamela G. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

³⁸ Barbara N. Ramusack, Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

³⁹ Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2002); Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market of Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule’, in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 1–22.

⁴⁰ Velchera Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Circulation, Piety and Innovation: Recounting Travels in Early Nineteenth Century South India’, in Markovits, Pouchepadass and Subrahmanyam (eds), Society and Circulation, pp. 206–56; and Anand A. Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), esp. Chap. 3.

⁴¹ Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, no. 2 (1 April 2002), pp. 293–318.

⁴² Ibid., p. 296.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 298.

⁴⁴ Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Discovering India: Travel, History and Identity in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India’, in Daud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 192–227.

⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 199–200.

⁴⁶ Jacques Pouchepadass, ‘Itinerant Kings and Touring Officials: Circulation as a Modality of Power in India, 1700–1920’, in Markovits, Pouchepadass and Subrahmanyam (eds), Society and Circulation, pp. 240–74.

⁴⁷ Narayani Gupta, ‘From Architecture to Archaeology: The “Monumentalizing” of Delhi's History in the Nineteenth Century’, in Jamal Malik (ed.), Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History, 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 53.

⁴⁸ Manu Goswami, ‘“Englishness” on the Imperial Circuit: Mutiny Tours in Colonial South Asia’, in Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 9, no. 1 (1996), pp. 54–84.

⁴⁹ Narayana Rao and Subrahmanyam, ‘Circulation, Piety and Innovation’, pp. 206–56.

⁵⁰ Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, ‘Out of India: The Journeys of the Begam of Bhopal, 1901–1930’, in Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 21, no. 3 (June 1998), pp. 263–76.

⁵¹ Shah, ‘Constructing a Capital on the Edge of Empire’.

⁵² Sikandar Begum's account of the haj is available in English translation, and has been reprinted with an introduction by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. See Sikandar Begum (Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, ed.), A Princess's Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum's A Pilgrimage to Mecca (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007). A summary of Sikandar's ‘diary’ is also provided in the Taj al-iqbal.

⁵³ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 38.

⁵⁴ Ibid., Part II, p. 21.

⁵⁵ Ibid., Part II, p. 32.

⁵⁶ Sultan Jahan Begum, An Account of My Life (Gohur-i-ikbal), p. 11.

⁵⁷ Zubairi, Begmat-i Bhopal, p. 54.

⁵⁸ Khan, Begums of Bhopal, p. 107.

⁵⁹ Francis Robinson, ‘The Muslims of Upper India and the Shock of the Mutiny’, in Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 138–55.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 150.

⁶¹ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 25.

⁶² Ibid., Part II, p. 32.

⁶³ Goswami, ‘“Englishness” on the Imperial Circuit’.

⁶⁴ This is made abundantly clear on many occasions in the text. One example may be found in the extended description of the ceremony surrounding the British gift of the pargana, Bairesia, including the text of Sikandar Begum's grateful acceptance speech. Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 17.

⁶⁵ Gupta, ‘From Architecture to Archaeology’.

⁶⁶ Thomas Metcalf, ‘Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860–1910’, in Representations, Vol. 6 (Spring 1984), pp. 37–65.

⁶⁷ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 29.

⁶⁸ Ibid., Part II, p. 31.

⁶⁹ Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises.

⁷⁰ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, p. 24.

⁷¹ Ibid., Part II, p. 35.

⁷² Ibid., Part II, pp. 24–5.

⁷³ Ibid., Part II, p. 27.

⁷⁴ Zubairi, Begmat-i Bhopal, p. 53.

⁷⁵ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part II, pp. 32–5.

⁷⁶ Ibid., Part II, p. 31.

⁷⁷ Salim Hamid Rizvi, Urdu adab ki taraqqi men Bhopal ka hissah (Bhopal: Bhopal Press, 1965), p. 147.

⁷⁸ Annemarie Schimmel, ‘A Nineteenth Century Anthology of Poetesses’, in Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Professor Aziz Ahmad (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 51–8.

⁷⁹ For a careful analysis of the politics and consequences of Shah Jahan Begum's controversial marriage to Siddiq Hasan Khan, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess’, in American Historical Review, Vol. 116, no. 1 (Feb. 2011), pp. 1–30.

⁸⁰ Rizvi, Urdu adab ki taraqqi men Bhopal ka hissah, p. 72.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 237.

⁸² Faruqui, ‘At Empire's End’, p. 36.

⁸³ Rizvi, Urdu adab ki taraqqi men Bhopal ka hissah, p. 71.

⁸⁴ Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 347.

⁸⁵ Shah Jahan Begum, Taj al-iqbal, Part III, pp. 40–59.