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Begum Hazrat Mahal’s life was in every sense extraordinary. Fully aware that historical fiction must mirror the times in which the story is located, Kenize Mourad has woven a tale of love into the matrix of history.

She championed with unmatched zeal the cause of Awadh and India during the country’s first war of independence in 1857. Risen from nowhere, the fourth wife of Wajid Ali Shah battled the British and steered her state for two unforgiving years.
India remembered Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi but passed by another freedom fighter: Hazrat Mahal.
It is this story that Kenize Mourad brings to life in her latest book In the City of Gold and Silver. But Mourad’s life is itself an alluring tale. A Frenchwoman of Turkish-Indian parentage, Mourad, currently touring India to promote her book, is the granddaughter of the last Ottoman ruler, Murad V, and Raja Hussain Ali of Kotwara in UP.
Of her four books, three deal with women — her mother, herself and now Hazrat Mahal. “It is easier to get under the skin of women,” she says. In writing about the Begum, “I am moving against prejudice, building a bridge between East and West, trying to reconcile the qualities and uniqueness of these two worlds. Identity is not country, religion or politics but people with whom you share values. Lucknow displayed the syncretism of two cultures, which is why I try to emphasise this fusion.”
Her novel is the fruit of extensive research. Begum Hazrat Mahal’s life was in every sense extraordinary. Fully aware that historical fiction must mirror the times in which the story is located, Mourad has woven a tale of love into the matrix of history. “I don’t invent, I recreate,” she declared.
“The liberty I have taken is her love story. Hazrat Mahal was intelligent, strong, she empathised with the poor, she was a kind of Robin Hood. She met Raja Jai Lal every day. I imagined that these two good-looking young people must have fallen in love... a biography of the Begum would have been dry. In a novel you give more space to people’s hearts and minds.”
Mourad’s canvas is large but her focus is Hazrat Mahal. The Begum (she was Muhammadi before her marriage) popularly known as the “soul of India’s revolt” against the British, belonged to a modest artisan family. Orphaned early and raised by an uncle her life changed one day when she recited a poem and earned the admiration of the Nawab. Shortly afterwards, she became his fourth wife. From here begins her complex story.
Starting with life in the palace, its intrigues and gossip and the birth of her son Birjis Qadar, her journey shifts course when the artistically inclined Wajid Ali Shah is exiled to Kolkata. She begins by listening to the plentiful rumours around her as retold by her eunuch and faithful servant, Mammoo.
In a dramatic move, she arranges for a clandestine meeting with Raja Jai Lal Singh and outlines a plan to rescue her husband. The rescue never happens, but she does hear to her dismay that the Nawab is pursuing pleasure in exile, and her dreams about him begin to evaporate.
Eleven-year-old Birjis Qadar is made the new king and Hazrat Mahal the regent. Mourad traces her growth as a woman, administrator and political strategist with immense sympathy.
Initially content to listen and learn, Hazrat soon takes command of a turmoil-ridden state, conducting civil and military meetings. She abolishes certain taxes, reinstates the revoked rights of taluqdars and “the complex system of loyalty that had for centuries bound (them) to the peasants”, returns land to farmers, and becomes the rallying point of the freedom struggle. In a whirlwind of activity, she mobilises people, distributes food, punishes traitors, saves fleeing British refugee women and children, discards her purdah, even leads her men into war and earns the total devotion of her subjects. True, she hardens and remains uncompromising till the end. But she never wavers from her secular stand.
This is what the gold and silver of the title is all about: the “sophisticated symbol of Hindu-Muslim culture” that defined the glory of Lucknow. Mourad quotes William Russell, the London Times correspondent who was there before the assault on the city: “No city in the world, not Rome, nor Athens, nor Constantinople, can be compared to its stunning beauty. A vision of palaces, minarets, azure and gold domes, cupolas, colonnades, long beautifully proportioned facades, rooftop terraces... Are we really in Awadh? Is this the capital of a semi-barbarian race? Is the city built by a corrupt, decadent and vile dynasty?”
Jai Lal, who fights alongside her, enters her life, and for the first time, Hazrat Mahal falls in love. She has now to manage the thrust of a new emotion, which, as regent, she must keep hidden. It’s a desperate struggle in her mind — love, war, reign, enemies, betrayals and the advancing British. Bringing up her son recedes into the background; this is left to her friend Mumtaz.
The book begins languorously, echoing the pace of life in Awadh. Mourad’s observations are keen, her love of detail obvious: cuisine, music, rituals, architecture, layout of palaces (“bigger than the Louvre and the Tuileries combined”), even satire and mimicry of the British and their attitude towards Indians (lazy, sensual, to be pitied), rescues, executions, the number of cannon in each battle, the number of dead and, above all, dates. The micro and the macro fuse in descriptions of the rebellion and in the different responses of princely states, drumming up an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, and imperceptibly propelling forward the story of Awadh and Hazrat Mahal.
While Mourad’s heart is clearly with India, she paints a balanced picture of the double-dealings, greed, spying and violence on both sides. No one is naive in this war.
Alternating between situations and conversations on the British and Indian sides, she writes an absorbing account of the sack of Lucknow: the zoo, ancient monuments, palaces and religious buildings; the Residency was fortified, ditches dug, walls erected, cannons positioned, supplies brought in, even as social barriers persisted through the days of terror among the British living inside the compound. Carnage and hideous torture are equally practised on both sides with nonchalance or vengeful fury.
But perhaps the most chilling is a quote from Charles Dickens which Mourad says she found in an archive in London: “I would like to be commander in chief of India,” wrote the great novelist. “I would like to strike terror into this oriental race and would proclaim that, on God’s orders, I would do everything in my power to wipe their breed — guilty of so many atrocities — off the surface of this earth.”
Despite the wealth of characters in the novel — Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, Nana Sabib, Tantiya Tope, Raja of Mahmudabad, Malika Kishwar among others — who, mostly, stand as one in the struggle, Awadh falls and Hazrat Mahal flees, taking shelter in different places. Her final halt is Nepal where the king, an ally of the British, keeps her a prisoner. She dies in 1879, at the age of 48, never returning to her homeland, still a staunch believer in the syncretism she held so dear.
Kenize Mourad’s novel may take artistic liberties by planting a love story in a historical landscape, but in the spirit that sustains it, she is true to herself, and to India.