Birjis Qadr

Birjis Qadr was crowned king of Awadh at eleven during the rebellion of 1857, spent thirty years in exile in Nepal, and was poisoned at a dinner in Calcutta. He was a son of Wajid Ali Shah, the king the East India Company had deposed and removed to Calcutta in 1856 on the grounds of misgovernment, an annexation that is one of the standard explanations for why Awadh rose so completely the following year. When Lucknow was taken by the rebels in July 1857 his mother, Begum Hazrat Mahal, had him proclaimed, and she governed in his name: she organised the siege of the Residency, held councils with the taluqdars and the sepoy commanders, and answered Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858 with a public rejoinder pointing out that promises of religious protection came from the power that had annexed the kingdom. British forces retook Lucknow in March 1858. Mother and son refused the terms offered and withdrew north, and were given asylum by Jung Bahadur Rana in Nepal, where Hazrat Mahal died in Kathmandu in 1879. Birjis Qadr was eventually pardoned and allowed to return to Calcutta in 1887 with a pension, having lived his adult life on charity. In August 1893 he and several members of his family were poisoned at a meal; he and two of his children died, and the case was never solved. His descendants remained in Calcutta and one branch was later at the centre of a long dispute over the family's claims. He wrote poetry in Urdu under a pen name, as his father had. Hazrat Mahal's tomb in Kathmandu was neglected for a century and has since been restored. India issued a stamp in her honour in 1984, and her son is remembered chiefly as the name in which she governed.

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