MURSHIDABAD, 20 September 2003 — Syeda Nasim Ara grew up as a princess, enjoying the wealth inherited from her ancestor who two centuries before earned enduring notoriety by betraying his Indian masters to the British.
Now her family is scattered across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and she faces a life of penury, the fate of many royals whose lands once covered about half of the subcontinent. “I had a great life and now it has come to this,” she says, close to tears as she explains how her family has had to rent out one room of the crumbling family home to the local cable television company to make ends meet.
Now 63 years old, she remembers a lifestyle so feudal and so refined that family members were scolded if they forgot to say “good morning” to the servant.
She winces as she walks past two men from the cable company, stripped to the waist and oblivious to her presence. Satellite dishes litter the courtyard where once eight palanquin bearers used to wait on her family.
Syeda Nasim Ara is a direct descendant of Mir Jafar, an Indian nobleman who switched sides at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, handing victory to Britain’s Robert Clive and paving the way for two centuries of British rule.
In the royal capital of Murshidabad, 220 km north of Calcutta, his family built fabulous palaces and monuments, many now crumbling into ruins.
When the British rulers left in 1947, the princely ruler of Murshidabad was given the same choice as others of his kind — join secular but mainly Hindu India or Islamic Pakistan.
With Murshidabad’s large Muslim population, the locals at first assumed the state would go to Pakistan and hoisted the Pakistani flag on Independence Day, only to be told a day later they were actually joining India.
For Nasim’s family, independence marked the beginning of a dispersal across the subcontinent. Three sisters and two brothers went to live in what was then East Pakistan — modern day Bangladesh — which borders the district of Murshidabad.
But all but one brother fled to Karachi in Pakistan after Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971 which brought a backlash against Urdu-speaking Muslims from the Bengali-speaking majority.
The family used to keep in touch, but troubled relations between India and Pakistan, now modern nuclear-armed rivals, made phone calls and letters difficult. The last letter from Karachi came four years ago.
“Partition was like breaking a body into pieces. They have broken our hearts into pieces,” says Nasim.
Worse was to come for the royal families who after independence were given a state pension in return for handing over their lands to India. In 1970, facing a financial crisis, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the abolition of this so-called “privy purse”, forcing many royals into penury.
Mir Jafar, though, is still remembered in India, his exploits a cautionary tale for the future.
At the nearby site of the Battle of Plassey, a fetid, dank field with a small stone monument and huge black bats flying overhead, the locals say India must never forget that the British first came to trade, before taking over the country. “It was the start of the enslavement of India,” says 26-year-old Salahuddin Sheikh, adding that the battlefield monument must be preserved. “It must stay here to remind us of our defeat...”