Re: Mir Jafar's Descendants

The Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan
January 12-18, 2001

http://www.thefridaytimes.com

The last scion of Mir Jafar
Khaled Ahmed's A n a l y s i s

[Humayun's memoir is a journey of relentless disenchantment with
Pakistan and the personalities who ruled it, including his close friend
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who also married an Iranian lady just like Iskander
Mirza. He loved his father and prides himself over the fact that he
amassed no wealth through corruption, but remains heart-broken over his
surrender to the seductions of Nahid Afghamy who became Humayun's step-
mother while his real mother was cruelly sidelined and made to suffer
for the sins of Iskander Mirza.]

 Humayun Mirza is the surviving son of Pakistan's first president,
Iskander Mirza, and lives in Washington as a retired World Bank
employee. He has written a book about his father and about the nawab
background of his family. It is full of revelations about Pakistan and
the personalities who ruled it. It is also a saga of riveting detail
about a princely clan who arose and declined in Bengal in a few
generations. In Pakistan, the princely background of Iskander Mirza has
been vaguely known. Iskander Mirza himself wanted to hide it because he
grew up learning to hate it. Humayun Mirza discovered his connection to
Mir Jafar and decided to dig up the details.

>From Plassey to Pakistan takes up the tale in 1716 when Murshid Quli
Khan became the Nawab Nazim of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. He was sent to
be the diwan of Bihar by Akbar the Great. In 1716, Akbar's descendant
Muhammad Shah named him governor of Bengal and allowed him to rename
his capital Murshidabad. He was the first Nawaz Nazim of Bengal, Bihar
and Orissa. Murshid Quli Khan married his daughter to an officer in his
army, Aliverdi Khan, who was also distantly related to him. Soon
Aliverdi Khan was accepted as the next Nawab Nazim by the declining
Mughal court. Aliverdi Khan was under attack from the Marathas and the
Nawab of Oudh. As he had no male offspring, he named his grandson,
Siraj al-Daula his successor.

When Aliverdi Khan died in 1756, Siraj al-Daula was only twenty.
Important officers of the court who had sworn loyalty to his succession
were Mir Jafar, commander-in-chief of the army, who was married to
Aliverdi's half sister; Jagat Seth, the court banker; and Rai Durlabh,
the chief minister. But unsurprisingly, Siraj al-Daula was of unsteady
temperament, given to sudden fits of rage and acts of great savagery.
He insulted the courtiers of his grandfather, threatening Jagat Seth
with circumcision and removing Mir Jafar from his job. But in 1756,
Siraj al-Daula attacked and took Calcutta and allegedly put 147
Englishmen in a jail which is remembered in history as the Black Hole
of Calcutta. The insulted courtiers including Mir Jafar were first
greatly frustrated by this victory but later decided to secretly join
Clive against the young Nawab Nazim.

Siraj al-Daula's temperament and inexperience of military matters soon
converted victory into retreat. Clive then marched on Murshidabad and
fought what became known as the battle of Plassey where Mir Jafar was
committed to not opposing Clive through a secret treaty. Clive won with
3,000 troops against Siraj al-Daula's 50,000, and the culprit was rain
which waterlogged the gunpowder of the Bengali army. The book
establishes that Mir Jafar did no more than 'stand neuter' in the
battle. The later interpolation that he turned on Siraj al-Daula after
aligning with him is supposed to be wrong. Post-1947 historians
discovered that the Black Hole of Calcutta was a myth concocted by the
British. They somehow arrived at another conclusion that Siraj al-Daula
was a hero who offered resistance to British imperialism only to be
betrayed by his treasonous courtiers.

So widespread was this 'revision' of history that undivided India
included it in the new nationalism raising its head as a movement to
free India from the British. Mir Jafar was made the epitome of perfidy
that the British were able to enlist to defeat the true Indian. This is
what Iskander Mirza must have grown up learning and decided to disown.
British India was no place to ferret out the real truth about Mir Jafar
and his compulsion to go against a cruel Nawab Nazim. Therefore he
decided to simply erase his family background from his mind. It fell to
his son, after his retirement from the World Bank, to read the true
account of what happened at Plassey and re-own his legacy by going to
Murshidabad to look for his relatives.

What the author finds incontrovertible is that a fleeing Siraj al-Daula
was caught by Mir Jafar's brother and brought to Murshidabad where Mir
Jafar's son Miran (whose personality disorder could be no less than
Siraj al-Daula's own) put him to death and dragged his mangled body in
the city streets.

Syed Muhammad Mir Jafar Ali Khan was of Shia-Arab descent, a migrant
from the holy land of Najaf in Iraq. In 1783, the Company made him the
Nawab Nazim of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa and began the process of nibbling
away at his patrimony - a pattern of creeping occupation followed by it
throughout India. There was another pattern that dovetailed with this
strategy: the internecine local networks which succumbed to the
opportunism of marginal concessions offered by the Company to get the
better of rival rulers. No one is to blame, looking at the whole mess
today. The local landscape was deadlocked with petty wars which went
back centuries. The British had to trade and couldn't do it without
taming the local marauders. They found no morality in India and tried
to introduce none, but ended up consolidating a crazy quilt of a
country into a centralised state which began to provide a partial
representation to the common man by the time it was made free.

Humayun Mirza has the guts today to say that after the British went
away in 1947 India went back to being the mean subcontinent it was. It
became two states, then three, then settled down to the complex game of
corruption, perfidy and betrayal. He focuses on Pakistan and traces the
seeds of Plassey grown to full bloom in its soil, every leader a Siraj
al-Daula or Mir Jafar without, unfortunately, the final solvent of the
colonising British. In his seventies, Humayun Mirza retains his good
looks and a fair complexion. He spoke to a group of Pakistani
journalists in a restaurant in Washington in November this year. He
spoke without any trace of a Pakistani accent and betrayed an
objectivity of outlook unknown in South Asia.

Humayun was brought up by his father like a son of the nobility. He
went to the best schools in India including the Doon School, from where
he was sent to the UK to be trained as an accountant. He returned to
Karachi and was placed in the PIDC after doing a stint in a an
insurance company. During this time he met the daughter of a powerful
American ambassador to Pakistan, Hildreth, in the city's social
register which included Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He was dashing. He was a
sportsman (cricket and sword-fencing) and an amateur pilot in addition
to being an adept hunter. His next academic milestone was Harvard
Business School where he emerged among the top five students. He
married Hildreth's daughter, but was reluctant to surrender his
Pakistani citizenship as a precondition to getting a prize corporate
job. He finally joined the World Bank after being interviewed by its
famous president, Eugene Black.

His American marriage did not work. His next marriage, arranged in
Karachi, did not work either. He does not know to this day why his wife
ran away from his house in Washington while he was out on a tour. Her
family had been insisting that he resign his job in the World Bank and
return to Pakistan to join politics. His third marriage was to a Latin
American lady. His daughters from two marriages today hold his private
life together. His World Bank job did not survive the presidentship of
McNamara who expanded the organisation and took in people of
questionable merit. Among these people was a group of
Pakistani 'economists' whom he describes with great contempt. Their
doyen was Muhammad Shoaib who made his proteges slave for him. He made
Shahid Hussain tend his garden in return for his patronage, a prospect
that he also unsuccessfully held out to Humayun. Humayun retired on a
handsome pension a little before his time because he found McNamara's
Bank simply unpalatable.

It was after his retirement that he ran into someone in the UK who
asked him if he would be interested in his British relatives. These
relatives went back to the Mir Jafar family tree through Nawab Nazim
Mansur Ali Khan who had gone to London to plead his case against
creeping dispossession by the Indian government. He ended up living
there like Maharaja Dileep Singh, falling into another series of debt-
traps that finally pauperised him. It was during his London sojourn
that he attached himself to two Englishwomen who bore him additional
offspring. Everybody landed up finally in Musrshidabad, where the scene
was further complicated by regular sexual liaisons with Abyssinian
slave girls. A time came when the Nawab Nazims were reduced to being
pensioners living in Calcutta.

It was the marriage of the dissolute Mansur Ali Khan (1829-1984) with
Shams Jehan Begum (d.1905) which gave rise to Humayun's side of the
family. The offspring of this marriage was Khursheed Kudar Iskander Ali
Mirza whose son Syed Fateh Ali Mirza married into the Tayabjis. It was
Dilshad Begum Tayabji (d.1925) who decided not to bring up her son Syed
Iskander Ali Mirza in the Nawab Nazim tradition. Iskander Mirza was
probably more consciously reared in the Tayabji tradition of public
service. This is disclosed in the book when the Quaid acknowledged the
services of Dilshad Begum to Indian society when he first interviewed
Iskander Mirza. Iskander Mirza was married to a lady of Iranian
extraction, Rifaat Shirazi, Humayun's mother. This was perhaps the
juncture where Iskander Mirza was quietly made to forget that he was in
the direct line of Nawab Nazims of Murshidabad.

Humayun's memoir is a journey of relentless disenchantment with
Pakistan and the personalities who ruled it, including his close friend
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who also married an Iranian lady just like Iskander
Mirza. He loved his father and prides himself over the fact that he
amassed no wealth through corruption, but remains heart-broken over his
surrender to the seductions of Nahid Afghamy who became Humayun's step-
mother while his real mother was cruelly sidelined and made to suffer
for the sins of Iskander Mirza.

================================================================================

Reuters
Tuesday, September 23, 2003; 8:09 AM 

>From Princess to Penury for Indian Royal 
By Myra MacDonald 

MURSHIDABAD, India (Reuters) - Syeda Nasim Ara grew up as a princess,
enjoying the wealth inherited from her ancestor who two centuries
before earned enduring notoriety by betraying his Indian Muslim
masters to the British.

Now her family is scattered across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and
she faces a life of penury, the fate of many royals whose lands once
covered about half of the subcontinent.

"I had a great life and now it has come to this," she says, close to
tears as she explains how her family has had to rent out one room of
the crumbling family home to the local cable television company to
make ends meet.

Now 63 years old, she remembers a lifestyle so feudal and so refined
that family members were scolded if they forgot to say "good morning"
to the servant.

She winces as she walks past two men from the cable company, stripped
to the waist and oblivious to her presence.

Satellite dishes litter the courtyard where once eight palanquin
bearers used to wait on her family.

Syeda Nasim Ara is a direct descendant of Mir Jafar, an Indian
nobleman who switched sides at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, handing
victory to Britain's Robert Clive and paving the way for two centuries
of British rule.

In the royal capital of Murshidabad, 138 miles north of Calcutta, his
family built fabulous palaces and Islamic monuments, many now
crumbling into ruins.

When the British rulers left in 1947, the princely ruler of
Murshidabad was given the same choice as others of his kind -- join
secular but mainly Hindu India or Islamic Pakistan.

PAKISTAN FLAG RAISED FIRST 

With Murshidabad's large Muslim population, the locals at first
assumed the state would go to Pakistan and hoisted the Pakistani flag
on independence day, only to be told a day later they were actually
joining India.

For Nasim's family, independence marked the beginning of a dispersal
across the subcontinent.

Three sisters and two brothers went to live in what was then East
Pakistan -- modern day Bangladesh -- which borders the district of
Murshidabad.

But all but one brother fled to Karachi in Pakistan after Bangladesh's
war of independence in 1971 which brought a backlash against
Urdu-speaking Muslims from the Bengali-speaking majority.

The family used to keep in touch, but troubled relations between India
and Pakistan, now modern nuclear-armed rivals, made phone calls and
letters difficult.

The last letter from Karachi came four years ago. 

"Partition was like breaking a body into pieces. They have broken our
hearts into pieces," says Nasim.

FROM PARTITION TO PENURY 

Worse was to come for the royal families who after independence were
given a state pension in return for handing over their lands to India.

In 1970, facing a financial crisis, then prime minister Indira Gandhi
ordered the abolition of this so-called "privy purse," forcing many
royals into penury.

"We used to live in a golden period," says Nasim. "There has been no
justice for the ruling families."

Mir Jafar, though, is still remembered in India, his exploits a
cautionary tale for the future.