08-30-2006, 02:40 AM
From Deccan Chronicle, News Plus Segment, 29 August 2006
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Bhopalâs Bourbons could have been kings
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The Localist : By Sudhir K. Singh
Bhopal: Bourbon who, ask many. A Bourbon in Bhopal, query even those with a nodding acquaintance with the regionâs history. An advocate making the rounds of the district court? With a Dutch wife running a commonplace English medium higher secondary school in a back alley of congested Jahangirabad? And a teenaged son wanting to make films like Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa? Amusing, perplexing if not altogether shocking. Talk of the perfect square peg in a round hole.
Indeed, âCâest moi,â burbles the amiable, portly, and utterly Indian <b>Balthazar Napoleon Bourbon IV, the 40-year-old scion of Asiaâs only surviving Bourbon clan, one of the six collateral branches of Europeâs most celebrated line of royals who presided over the fortunes of France from 1610 till 1792 before the most illustrious member of the clan, Louis IV, was put to the guillotine by Robespierre and his rogues during the peak of the Terror.</b> The Bourbon sovereignties also extended over Spain, the two Sicilies, and the duchy of Parma.
Though not quite in that enviable league, there was a time when the homegrown Bourbons, says Balthazar, owned virtually âhalf of Bhopalâ. <b>All that remains of the jagir, he bemoans, is 60 acres of farmland, a few shops, and a respectable haveli discreetly tucked behind the school premises.</b> âThe House of Bourbon,â as the entrance announces, was a transit point for members of the clan who came on elephants to attend the neighbouring church, Bhopalâs first. Even the coat of arms (a fleur de lis) adopted by the princely State of Bhopal was a Bourbon hand-down.
<b>Christianity, in fact, sneaked into the royal State of Bhopal wrapped in the coat-tails of the first Bourbon resident, Salvador de Bourbon (Inayat Masih), who settled here around 1783.</b> Both he and his son, Balthazar (great-grandfather of the present descendant) went on to become leading figures in the Bhopal court by virtue of their proximity to Wazir Mohammad Khan (great-grandson of Bhopalâs founder Dost Mohammad Khan), then the virtual ruler. It was Balthazar (Shahzad Masih) whose wife, Isabella, got the first church built in the vicinity.
A swashbuckling soldier and military strategist, the multifaceted talents of the firang were noticed, and he was appointed political counsellor to the formidable regent, Qudsia Begum, whose lover he became for some time after the death of her husband Nazar Mohammad Khan, son of Wazir.<b> It was Balthazar de Bourbon who was singularly responsible for ushering in in 1819 the 107-year-old rule of the four Begums in a conservative Muslim society where a womanâs only place was the harem.</b>
The deep debt of gratitude she owed Balthazar finds mention in the Hayaat-e-Qudsia. <b>Though Balthazar was poisoned by jealous Afghan courtiers in 1829</b>, Qudsia remained regent till 1837, and lived to see the rule of both her daughter Sikandar (1844-68) and grand-daughter Shahjahan (1868-1901) till her death in 1881. Balthazar was the first Bourbon to shake off his European trappings and become a pucca Oriental.
<b>Hence, the smooth morph into Shahzad Masih.</b> So well did life in Bhopal suit him that he even learned Persian and Urdu, penning verse in the latter under the nom de plume Fitrat. Wife Isabella transformed into Sarkar Dulhan, outliving her husband by over four decades. Son Sebastian (Ejaz Masih) briefly served as prime minister to Sikandar Jahan Begum. <b>Louis Rousselet, a French traveller, has an interesting account of a meeting with Isabella in his book Indian And its Native Princes published in 1875.
The presence of the Bourbons in India, however, goes further back. The very first, Jean Philippe, landed in the court of the Emperor Akbar in 1560. A cousin of Henri IV (the first Bourbon to rule France) and son of the constable of Pau in southern France, Jean fled his country after spilling the blood of a Gascon kin in what was a duel of honour. He escaped to Portugal, was captured by Turkish pirates, sold to the Otto-man emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, and set sail for India in the company of Abyssinian Christians.
Here the enterprising Gascon secured an audience with the emperor Akbar who impressed by his adventures appointed him commander of guns and sought his help in reorganising the army. Akbar got him married to a Portuguese beauty, Juliana Mascrenhas, sister of his Christian wife Maria. Akbar granted him a large estate in Shergarh, south of Delhi, where successive generations of Bourbons till Salvador lived in luxury.</b>
The sacking of Delhi by the Persian plunderer Nadir Shah in 1740 forced Salvador to move to Gwalior where he was made quiledar of the impregnable Gwalior Fort. And when the Fort fell to the Mahratta chieftain Mahadji Scindia, packed his bags for safe and serene Bhopal. <b>The Bourbon fortunes plummeted soon after the ascension of Shahjahan Begum in 1868. This was largely due to the influence of her second husband and consort, Syed Saddiq Hassan, a fanatical Wahabi who virtually pauperised the Bourbons by confiscating all their jagirs granted since the days of Shahzad Masih.</b>
This left the clan with no choice than to earn their livelihood by eking out a middle class existence as doctors, priests, nurses, or teachers. The blackballing of the Bourbons continued during the reign of Sultan Jahan Begum despite her secular mindset. Balthazar feels the Bourbons paid a heavy price for their great-grandfatherâs âaffairâ with the venerable Qudsia. Contemporaries thought it a vile conspiracy by a Christian to defile the reputation of a devout and just Muslim ruler. Around 1960, he says, they also lost possession of the Lakherapura palace in a family partition. The palace was later demolished.
Circumstances also compelled his father Salvador to earn his livelihood by taking up the legal profession into whose shoes has stepped the son.To most Bhopalis, the Bourbons remain nothing more than a slightly reclusive family (admission into their precinct wasnât easy) with a surname which closely rhymes with bon-bon. Blame it on their down to earth, unpretentious ways, unlike the des-cendants of the Nawabs.
But history, as the Pakistani diplomat Shaharyar Khan (great-grandson of Sultan Jahan Begum) once half-jokingly remarked, could have been tantalisingly different. Were it not for Balthazarâs backing, Qudsia would never have been Begum, and the East India Company might have ended up appointing Shahzad Masih nawab instead. In which case Bhopal might have been added to the list of Bourbon possessions.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Bhopalâs Bourbons could have been kings
Â
The Localist : By Sudhir K. Singh
Bhopal: Bourbon who, ask many. A Bourbon in Bhopal, query even those with a nodding acquaintance with the regionâs history. An advocate making the rounds of the district court? With a Dutch wife running a commonplace English medium higher secondary school in a back alley of congested Jahangirabad? And a teenaged son wanting to make films like Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa? Amusing, perplexing if not altogether shocking. Talk of the perfect square peg in a round hole.
Indeed, âCâest moi,â burbles the amiable, portly, and utterly Indian <b>Balthazar Napoleon Bourbon IV, the 40-year-old scion of Asiaâs only surviving Bourbon clan, one of the six collateral branches of Europeâs most celebrated line of royals who presided over the fortunes of France from 1610 till 1792 before the most illustrious member of the clan, Louis IV, was put to the guillotine by Robespierre and his rogues during the peak of the Terror.</b> The Bourbon sovereignties also extended over Spain, the two Sicilies, and the duchy of Parma.
Though not quite in that enviable league, there was a time when the homegrown Bourbons, says Balthazar, owned virtually âhalf of Bhopalâ. <b>All that remains of the jagir, he bemoans, is 60 acres of farmland, a few shops, and a respectable haveli discreetly tucked behind the school premises.</b> âThe House of Bourbon,â as the entrance announces, was a transit point for members of the clan who came on elephants to attend the neighbouring church, Bhopalâs first. Even the coat of arms (a fleur de lis) adopted by the princely State of Bhopal was a Bourbon hand-down.
<b>Christianity, in fact, sneaked into the royal State of Bhopal wrapped in the coat-tails of the first Bourbon resident, Salvador de Bourbon (Inayat Masih), who settled here around 1783.</b> Both he and his son, Balthazar (great-grandfather of the present descendant) went on to become leading figures in the Bhopal court by virtue of their proximity to Wazir Mohammad Khan (great-grandson of Bhopalâs founder Dost Mohammad Khan), then the virtual ruler. It was Balthazar (Shahzad Masih) whose wife, Isabella, got the first church built in the vicinity.
A swashbuckling soldier and military strategist, the multifaceted talents of the firang were noticed, and he was appointed political counsellor to the formidable regent, Qudsia Begum, whose lover he became for some time after the death of her husband Nazar Mohammad Khan, son of Wazir.<b> It was Balthazar de Bourbon who was singularly responsible for ushering in in 1819 the 107-year-old rule of the four Begums in a conservative Muslim society where a womanâs only place was the harem.</b>
The deep debt of gratitude she owed Balthazar finds mention in the Hayaat-e-Qudsia. <b>Though Balthazar was poisoned by jealous Afghan courtiers in 1829</b>, Qudsia remained regent till 1837, and lived to see the rule of both her daughter Sikandar (1844-68) and grand-daughter Shahjahan (1868-1901) till her death in 1881. Balthazar was the first Bourbon to shake off his European trappings and become a pucca Oriental.
<b>Hence, the smooth morph into Shahzad Masih.</b> So well did life in Bhopal suit him that he even learned Persian and Urdu, penning verse in the latter under the nom de plume Fitrat. Wife Isabella transformed into Sarkar Dulhan, outliving her husband by over four decades. Son Sebastian (Ejaz Masih) briefly served as prime minister to Sikandar Jahan Begum. <b>Louis Rousselet, a French traveller, has an interesting account of a meeting with Isabella in his book Indian And its Native Princes published in 1875.
The presence of the Bourbons in India, however, goes further back. The very first, Jean Philippe, landed in the court of the Emperor Akbar in 1560. A cousin of Henri IV (the first Bourbon to rule France) and son of the constable of Pau in southern France, Jean fled his country after spilling the blood of a Gascon kin in what was a duel of honour. He escaped to Portugal, was captured by Turkish pirates, sold to the Otto-man emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, and set sail for India in the company of Abyssinian Christians.
Here the enterprising Gascon secured an audience with the emperor Akbar who impressed by his adventures appointed him commander of guns and sought his help in reorganising the army. Akbar got him married to a Portuguese beauty, Juliana Mascrenhas, sister of his Christian wife Maria. Akbar granted him a large estate in Shergarh, south of Delhi, where successive generations of Bourbons till Salvador lived in luxury.</b>
The sacking of Delhi by the Persian plunderer Nadir Shah in 1740 forced Salvador to move to Gwalior where he was made quiledar of the impregnable Gwalior Fort. And when the Fort fell to the Mahratta chieftain Mahadji Scindia, packed his bags for safe and serene Bhopal. <b>The Bourbon fortunes plummeted soon after the ascension of Shahjahan Begum in 1868. This was largely due to the influence of her second husband and consort, Syed Saddiq Hassan, a fanatical Wahabi who virtually pauperised the Bourbons by confiscating all their jagirs granted since the days of Shahzad Masih.</b>
This left the clan with no choice than to earn their livelihood by eking out a middle class existence as doctors, priests, nurses, or teachers. The blackballing of the Bourbons continued during the reign of Sultan Jahan Begum despite her secular mindset. Balthazar feels the Bourbons paid a heavy price for their great-grandfatherâs âaffairâ with the venerable Qudsia. Contemporaries thought it a vile conspiracy by a Christian to defile the reputation of a devout and just Muslim ruler. Around 1960, he says, they also lost possession of the Lakherapura palace in a family partition. The palace was later demolished.
Circumstances also compelled his father Salvador to earn his livelihood by taking up the legal profession into whose shoes has stepped the son.To most Bhopalis, the Bourbons remain nothing more than a slightly reclusive family (admission into their precinct wasnât easy) with a surname which closely rhymes with bon-bon. Blame it on their down to earth, unpretentious ways, unlike the des-cendants of the Nawabs.
But history, as the Pakistani diplomat Shaharyar Khan (great-grandson of Sultan Jahan Begum) once half-jokingly remarked, could have been tantalisingly different. Were it not for Balthazarâs backing, Qudsia would never have been Begum, and the East India Company might have ended up appointing Shahzad Masih nawab instead. In which case Bhopal might have been added to the list of Bourbon possessions.
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