HT reviewer Saudamini Jain picks her favourite read of 2025
An astonishing book on the family of aristocrats who lived for decades in Malcha Mahal, a medieval hunting lodge in Delhi’s Ridge
I’m baffled by how such few people have read or even know about The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy by journalists Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar. This astonishing book unravels one of Delhi’s most infamous mysteries: the family of strange aristocrats who lived in Malcha Mahal, a medieval hunting lodge in Delhi’s Ridge, like ghosts in the ruins, without electricity or running water, for decades.
Begum Wilayat Mahal and her children Sakina and Ali Raza (who called himself Cyrus, well, Prince Cyrus) claimed to be descendants of the last nawab of Awadh Wajid Ali Shah and his freedom fighter wife Hazrat Mahal. In the 1970s, Wilayat and her adult children occupied the VIP waiting room of the New Delhi railway station, demanding that some of the properties of the erstwhile House of Awadh, usurped by the British in 1856, be restored to them. They lived there — Persian rugs, silver, servants, dogs, and all — until 1986, when the government gave them the crumbling Malcha Mahal to placate them. After Wilayat’s death (she apparently by swallowing crushed diamonds in 1993), Ali Raza and Sakina lived there for two decades until their deaths — his is 2017, hers a few years before. The press was obsessed with them. They gave interviews only to foreign journalists. And nobody really knew much (of the truth) about their lives before they had landed up at the railway station.
Until 2019.
The New York Times journalist Ellen Barry, over the course of several interviews, developed a friendship with Ali Raza. In the Jungle Prince of Delhi — reported in India, Pakistan and the UK — she pieced together a fascinating account of the family. The story (and podcast) was widely, even virally, read. Mira Nair bought its film rights for an Amazon series. Barry’s conclusion though essentially was that the family had no connection to the royal family of Awadh.
But as it turns out — as Andre and Kumar found out — Wilayat’s claims were not exactly false. The House of Awadh is scrupulously reported, meticulously researched and very sensitively handled. It pieces together Wilayat’s life: the wife of the registrar of Lucknow University, then a leftist activist advocating for women and Kashmir in Pakistan where she slapped Mohammad Ali Bogra, the then prime minister of the country, at a public gathering in 1954 — and where she suffers several personal tragedies including the death of her husband under mysterious circumstances. She eventually returned to India. Wilayat and her three children lived in Kashmir for a decade. In this time, she transformed into the outlandish delusional royalist that she eventually became.
The book is pieced together through sources that had not been accessed before. A 1975 Hindustan Times story, which included many truths about their lives — their real names, ambitions and so on — because their minds and circumstances had not yet completely unravelled. Andre and Kumar also found Kasim, one of the family’s many servants from their days at the railway station and the early years at Malcha Mahal, who provided and verified details of their lives in those years. They learnt about Asad, Wilayat’s responsible elder son who died young but who had managed the family’s finances and affairs. They read Sakina’s book, which Barry had dismissed as unreadable, and found in its chaotic narrative, plenty that was accurate and a portrait of the psychology of this family. They found the family’s personal relationship with Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq and potentially Shaikh Abdullah. And ultimately, family connection to Wajid Ali Shah through Wilayat’s mother.
This book is essentially about the fracturing of the self, the disintegration of the psyches of this woman and her children as they are faced with the tidal political and cultural changes of the subcontinent and the weight of history. Their lives and minds shaped by the British annexation of Awadh, the first war of independence in 1857 and its aftermath, Partition, Kashmir, the issues of princely states and Muslim identities...
It’s stranger than fiction, poetic in its tragedy. I read it in February, and I still find myself talking about it. This is a book for the years.
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.