PRINCE ANWAR SHAH

Many years ago, when I was a school kid, I accompanied my father to an unfamiliar area beyond the Dhakuria railway crossing; the over bridge did not exist those days.  He was trying to locate a friend’s house. I noticed that a number of road and street names in the area are prefixed with the word “Prince”. The main thoroughfare that our taxi drove through was Prince Anwar Shah Road. There were several other branches as well with royal titles like Prince Ghulam Muhammad Shah Road, Prince Ghulam Hussain Shah Road, Prince Bakhtiar Shah Road, etc.

Who are all these princes? I wondered aloud.

They are the descendants of Tipu Sultan, said my father.

I did not have a clear idea who this Sultan was but I decided to keep quiet lest it exposed my abhorrence to history lessons.  Much later in life, I learnt a little about the Tiger of Mysore and the tragic end he met with while defending his kingdom, honour and independence. The British had a policy of sending the members of a vanquished royal family to exile beyond the realm of their erstwhile power base.  For some strange reason, Kolkata was the favourite dumping ground for the royals.  The last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah was also humiliated to an exiled life in Kolkata.

Tipu Sultan supposedly had sixteen sons and eight daughters. The fate of the daughters is rather unknown but certain websites on the internet including Wikipedia list the names of all the sixteen sons.  

Hussain Shah, a descendant of Tipu Sultan was recently interviewed by the Deccan Herald (27 July 2010) to reveal some of the mystery associated with the family. According to him, Prince Anwar Shah was a grandson of Tipu Sultan. After the death of the legendary hero, his sons and their families consisting of three hundred members were sent to Kolkata.  They were given official pensions as well as land to settle down. In course of time, the exiled family, still reasonably wealthy, acquired real estates in the prosperous and fast growing city of Kolkata. Hussain Shah leads a comfortable middle class life these days with an established business to run. His two sons are also well settled. However, other members of the family are not that fortunate.   The news report was silent about the princes whose names are linked to other streets and lanes in the neighbourhood.

However, Hussain Shah’s claim is contested by an internet source, which says that the road was named after His Highness Sir Ghulam Mohammad Anwar Shah, the fourteenth son of Tipu Sultan, who was eventually recognized by the British as the official head of the family and successor to his father. He was also knighted two years before he died in 1872. 

The subsequent official successors were as follows: -

1.    Prince Ahmad Halim-us-Zaman, fourth son of Sir Ghulam Muhammad Anwar Shah.

2.    Prince Muhammad Farrukh Shah, fourth son of Prince Ahmad Halim-us-Zaman.

3.    Prince Muhammad Bakhtiar Shah, grandnephew of Sir Ghulam Mohammad Anwar Shah.

4.    Prince Muhammad Ghulam Shah, son of Prince Muhammad Farrukh Shah

5.    Prince Ghulam Hussein Shah, son of Prince Muhammad Ghulam Shah

6.    Prince Hyder Ali, son of Prince Ghulam Hussein Shah.

7.    Prince Asif Ali, son of Prince Hyder Ali.

The last named is the current official head of the family.

Some years ago, Karnataka government wanted to trace out some of the descendants of Tipu Sultan and rehabilitate them in their ancestral land. However, most of the family members declined to leave their current home and hearth in spite of their impoverished life style. For generations, Kolkata has been their home and their ancestral land was completely alien to them.  However, according to media reports, Prince Asif Ali Shah, the official head of the family, agreed to be rehabilitated. Karnataka government provided him with a house, paid for his children’s education and conferred upon him a symbolic status of royalty.

 As mentioned before, the early ancestors of the family had acquired large chunk of real estate at the southern part of the city. It has been on record that the reputed golfing hunts of the city’s rich and elite, the Royal Calcutta Golf Club and Tolly Club are located on the exiled family’s property.  The multi-crore property, incidentally, is run by a trust. According to the trustee, his job was to maintain the mosques named after the Tiger of Mysore and not to dole out charity to the hapless family members. As a result, none of the descendants benefits from the enormous wealth left behind by their noble ancestors.  Today many of the descendants are rickshaw pullers and daily labours in Kolkata, totally ignored by a trust established to provide for their welfare.

Dean Nelson, the South Asian editor of The Telegraph (UK) reported on 31 July 2009 that real estates maintained by the trust are worth “hundreds of millions of pounds”.

Today, Prince Anwar Shah Road is a swanky stretch of thoroughfare proudly proclaiming the presence of the city’s most fashionable shopping mall and residential addresses.  However, the prince’s descendants continue to languish in abject poverty.

Kuwait - 28 October 2010