Tears of the Begums: Stories of Survivors of the Uprising of 1857 by Khwaja Hasan Nizami

Author:Khwaja Hasan Nizami [Nizami, Khwaja Hasan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette India
Published: 2022-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

20

Two Princes in the Jailhouse

Mirza Tegh Jamal is now around eighty years old. He was a strapping nineteen-year-old man in the ghadar of 1857. He remembers everything that happened before the ghadar and describes the events as if they happened yesterday!

Mirza Tegh Jamal is the son of Mirza Fakhru, the second heir apparent. The first heir apparent of Emperor Bahadur Shah was his eldest son, Mirza Dara Bakht. After Mirza Dara’s death, Mirza Fakhru was appointed as the heir apparent.

Mirza Fakhru was a very religious and pious prince. Had the monarchy of Delhi remained, he would have gone down as an excellent and upright emperor.

However, even the most righteous become wayward and are led astray in their youth. Mirza Fakhru was the son and heir of the reigning emperor of Hindustan who had no one or anything to fear, when playing hide and seek with pleasures of youth. At that time the Lal Qila was infamous for the wayward ways of its princes and their predilection for courtesans.

So, if Mirza Fakhru got swept away by the passions of youth and committed a mistake it was not considered anything extraordinary or out of the way.

Mirza Tegh Jamal was the result of this very interesting first and secret mistake. His mother did not bear any other children after him.

The other offsprings of Mirza Fakhru, such as Mirza Farkhanda Jamal, were from his legally wedded wives. That is why Mirza Farkhanda was awarded a pension of one hundred and fifty rupees by the British, but Tegh Jamal did not even get five rupees.

Tegh Jamal had a cheerful and pleasant personality. He felt no sorrow at not getting a pension or not being acknowledged as a prince. He would relate the tale of his parents’ love affair with so much enthusiasm and enjoyment as if he was absolutely unconnected to it. Even though, he was a living example of the exaggerated and infamous, secret love stories that flourished in the Lal Qila.

Tegh Jamal says, ‘Ammajan was sixteen years old and Abbajan was a little older than thirteen when their romance started.’

When he was asked how a thirteen-year-old boy could have a romantic liaison with a sixteen-year-old girl he would reply with a straight face, ‘Just as an eighty-year-old man falls in love and professes his passion for a sixteen-year-old young girl!

‘We Mughals matured very fast. Mughal girls would often attain puberty at the age of ten or eleven and boys would reach puberty at the age of twelve or thirteen and start thinking of and indulging in romance and love making. I found more passion in myself at the age of twelve than I do in eighteen-year-olds today.’

Tegh Jamal continued, ‘Ammajan was the daughter of a kahar, porter. My grandmother was considered one of the most attractive kaharan, female porter, in the Lal Qila. She was a favourite of Akbar Shah II, who showered his favours on her. But my grandmother’s charms were not a patch on mother’s beauty and coquettish airs.

‘Though Ammajan was

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