Royal claims of India’s fake queen exposed as a web of elaborate lies
A widow claiming to be descended from royalty was believed, and even given a dilapidated palace to live in
For 40 years, stories about India’s most mysterious and reclusive royal family persisted among foreign correspondents in New Delhi. Few were granted an audience with them or were able to report on the tragic downfall of a dynasty said to have ruled a kingdom of five provinces in northern India until 1856.
The widowed Begum Wilayat and her children, Princess Sakina and Prince Ali Raza, also known as Cyrus, claimed to be the heirs of the Nawab of Oudh, descendants of Persian nobility. They reportedly regarded the Mughals, India’s imperial rulers from the 16th to the 19th century, as “common as dirt” and considered “ordinariness not just a crime [but] a sin!”.
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