Biographies of renaissance men are rarely slim merchandise. Take, for instance, Mirza Wajid Ali Shah (1822-87), the 11th nawab of Awadh. A polymath who invested fortunes, employed legions, and even made his own foray into innovations in dance and theatre, architecture, music, calligraphy, poetry. The nawab has left behind a legacy just as vast as his eclectic patronage. To document such abundance, even with a tome like the 1998 Urdu magnum opus Wajid Ali Shah Ki Adabi aur Sakhawati Khidmat, written by the late Kaukub Quder Sajjad Ali Meerza (1933-2020), can seem but the iceberg’s tip.
For the first time, Meerza’s survey has been translated into English by Talat Fatima. Wajid Ali Shah: A Cultural and Literary Legacy is not just a heritage project. It is a family affair. Meerza was the great grandson of the nawab. He was professor of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University when he wrote his forensically researched survey of his great-grandfather’s writings. Fatima is the nawab’s great-great-granddaughter, a direct descendant of Wajid Ali Shah and Begum Hazrat Mahal, two icons of the Indian resistance to the British East India Company in 1857.
A surfeit of the nawab’s contributions lingers in Lucknow and Kolkata’s urban landscapes and vernacular performance practices. They are preserved in the form of longhand manuscripts or printed volumes in personal collections, from Mahmoodabad in Uttar Pradesh to Berlin in Germany. They languish as rare books printed by independent Lucknowi publishers in libraries like Nawab Salar Jung in Hyderabad and the British Library in London.
Calcutta (now Kolkata), where the nawab was banished at the age of 34 after the annexation of his kingdom by Lord Dalhousie in 1856, is rarely seen as his second act. His name is accompanied by refrains of loss, impoverishment, and a narrative of some great irrevocable felling. He is often projected as the poster child of the Company’s final blow to India’s royal titans before the Crown took over. He was deposed in the name of being a bad administrator.
Our Raj hangover, coupled with a spirit of contemporary militant nationalism, impute a weakness on to the nawab for giving his kingdom away without a fight. What else do you expect from a “nawabi” (Bengali slang for the affectations of the aristocratic), weak in body, only interested in the frivolous arts? As if maintaining armies and fighting battles are the only ways to inhabit the post of head of state.
In the hands of Meerza and Fatima, Wajid Ali Shah has become an heirloom: a nawab whose largesse is restored, polished and represented to the world by his descendants. It bears clarifying outright what Meerza’s book is and is not. It is a deeply researched catalogue of the nawab’s writings, but not an entirely comprehensive compilation of his other contributions as champion of 19th century Awadhi fine arts and aesthetics.
The book has an interesting, frustrating architecture. A primer on Awadh’s religious and political evolutions, a quick course on the nawab’s ascent to the throne, his deposition, then exile and reconstruction of Lucknow’s culture in Bengal after 1857, a tight chapter on his “other” non-literary contributions—these are interspersed with revisionist interventions from Meerza, and in some small portion from Fatima. Both reinforce the “power” in Wajid Ali Shah’s soft powers against the gluttonous military-capitalist thrust of British colonialism.
These chapters are pithy, digestible slices of the nawab’s ethos and milieu that present him as a visionary renovator of Kathak, and inventor of rahas (dance dramas) and thumris, foregrounded against financial challenges that he faced leading up to and after 1857. But they merely feel like bookends to the belly of the book.
Here lies a yawning stretch of a chapter, some 300-odd pages, titled Writings, that sifts through almost the entire bibliography of Wajid Ali Shah with the monotonous trudge of a book historian. Mostly comprising texts written in Farsi or Urdu or mixed—with one text, a book of poems, Naajo, written in Hindi—Meerza gathers 42 of the nawab’s books and manuscripts from networks of rare book libraries and booksellers, archives and personal collections. He itemises with an impressive, albeit clerical, eye of a bibliographer every illustration, discrepancy and quirk (like verses in margins, type of imported ebony paper, pages lost to moths) without much photographic evidence that could make these archival findings thrilling to read.
To those previously unacquainted with Wajid Ali Shah as a litterateur, they will find a poet, playwright, theologian, historian, musicologist in this long chapter. The nawab was a prolific thinker. He was dedicated to playing with literary forms like the noha and the ghazal. He compiled letters written by the scribes of his begums, like Noor Zaman, who was the nawab’s mut’ai (contractual) wife, thus allowing a peek into their financial arrangements and some petty politics. His book of poems, Naajo, collects some Hindi songs the nawab wrote with Badshah Mahal Alam, and other musicians. Some of these songs were written in Bengali, which could only mean that exile did not snuff the nawab’s thirst for imbibing and transcribing culture across geographies.
This section, undoubtedly, is a treasure trove. But the vignettes of the nawab’s life they throw into relief are just that: shards awaiting cohesion. We confront a different Meerza here. In all other chapters, he takes on the cadence of an immersive raconteur, a correctional, comprehensive storyteller, someone akin to historians and scholars like Rana Safvi, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi or C. M. Naim. Somehow in this chapter, Meerza concedes to a scholarly tenor that breaks the flow of the smaller, more panoramic chapters.
This giant literary history is where Meerza trades in a wide-view framework for a microscopic marathon compilation of Wajid Ali Shah’s entire oeuvre. It changes the tempo of his prose: like a metronome starting to go arrhythmic.
There are times when Meerza’s compilation feels welcoming to readers who are uninitiated. Then there are times when readers may feel they are on the outskirts of a paleographic colloquy between Meerza and other experts of Awadhi literature and culture. Meerza often slips into assuming readers’ prior familiarity with the life and realm of Wajid Ali Shah. Perhaps, he meant his research to find lay readers but also other scholars of the nawab and Awadh, like him, who are familiar with the codes between the lines and are tightly coiled with him in the scholarly pursuit of proving and disproving sources, history, and literary interpretations.
Perhaps it was the premise of a holistic approach in the prefatory chapters that makes it feel like the book has reneged on a projected promise as a comprehensive biography of Wajid Ali Shah. Yet, Meerza is rarely the storyteller we need to reconstruct the nawab from his remnants and his excerpts. The scholar often steps in where the storyteller should stand. Narrative history is muddled by the transparent display of bibliographic methodology, till we focus not on the nawab, but on the processes undertaken to recover and reconstitute him.
Between Rosie Llewelyn-Jones’s epic retelling of the life of the nawab in The Last King in India (2014) and Sudipta Mitra’s Pearl by the River (2017), a lyrical, if slightly piteous, narrative of the nawab’s Bengali exile, Meerza highlights not the losses, displacements or frailties of Wajid Ali Shah, but the singular abundance of his prolific literary career. It intervenes in the extant narrative tradition of failure that limns modern frameworks of the nawab’s life. Yet, what is gained by such intervention is undercut by rhetorical choices that undermine what would have been a solid addition to this Anglophone triptych on Wajid Ali Shah published in the last decade or so.
This begs the question: Is mere translation sufficient for a work like Meerza’s? It is resplendent as a scholarly contribution. But Wajid Ali Shah is by no means a traditional monograph. For want of a better word, it is a “trade” book. Then, why this nagging feeling that we are presented with a catalogue meant for archive divers? What if Fatima was not merely the translator but also the editor of Meerza’s findings? What if she were to make the nawab’s “Writings” read like a profile or a literary history instead of plain bibliography, making Meerza’s research more digestible to the common reader?
Perhaps there is a future scholar of Awadhi history out there who might take a stab at these questions. Perhaps another renaissance awaits Wajid Ali Shah, the consummate renaissance man.
Rohit Chakraborty is a scholar and critic from Guwahati who lives in Kolkata.