“At the funeral of the Queen of Oude, a diadem was placed on her brow,” read a story in the Baltimore Daily Exchange in 1858. The short report, filed under “Foreign Miscellany,” focused on jewels, describing “a necklace of lapiz lazuli round her neck, and circlets of amber round her arms and legs. A number of amulets were also attached to the covering in which her body was enveloped.”
Throughout Europe and the United States, newspapers reported on the Paris funeral, which the Fayetteville Semi-Weekly Observer in North Carolina dubbed “a rare spectacle for the pageant-loving population of that great metropolis.”
“The crowd of curious spectators was so great that it was almost impossible for the procession to move along,” the Observer observed. For years afterward, fashion columns reported that ladies in Paris and London emulated the tasseled silk scarves worn by Malika Kishwar, the last Queen of Oude.
The story of how Kishwar ended up dying in Paris, to be buried in the world-famous Père Lachaise cemetery along with Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison, is a rather sad footnote in the story of British colonialism in India. Obviously, that history is too involved for my little food blog.
Located in the present-day region of Uttar Pradesh, Oude (alternately spelled Oudh, Avadh, or Awadh) was a princely state in India, meaning it wasn’t directly ruled by the British. When enab Aliya Begum aka Malika Kishwar was born in the city of Lucknow, around 1805, the British were in the business of intervening to appoint government officials, and demanding revenue from the kingdom, while also gradually placing regions of the state under more direct rule.
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