A journey to Karbala, to repay an old debt

As Iraqi Shias mark their first post-Saddam Hussein commemoration of the death in 680 AD of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, in Ka...

As Iraqi Shias mark their first post-Saddam Hussein commemoration of the death in 680 AD of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, in Karbala over the next couple of days, stories about ancient Indian connections with this holy Iraqi city are emerging.

Like the one on how a third secretary of the Indian embassy in Baghdad would every year make the trip to Karbala and Najaf, looking for the descendants of the Nawab of Avadh to repay an old debt.

A large number of Shia families, especially from Lucknow, began to emigrate to Karbala in the mid-19th century, to live in the shadow of the sacred shrine of Hussein till the end of their days.

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To begin at the beginning, the British East India Company had taken a loan of Rs 1 crore from the Nawab of Avadh before the 1857 war of independence, with the full intention of paying it back.

After the Indian mutiny was lost, the victors decided to change the rules of the game. They would not pay back the capital, since the Company Bahadur had now come under the control of the Crown at home, but would repay the interest to the Nawab’s descendants till the end of time.

It also suited their interest to do so, according to Hamid Ansari, a retired diplomat and Arabist who served in the Indian mission in Baghdad in the early 1960s as a young officer. ‘‘Before the First World war, it gave them the perfect handle to interfere in the Ottoman empire,’’ Ansari said.

But when independence came in 1947, the newly constituted Indian Foreign Office sent a note to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, recommending that the bursaries be stopped on the basis of the legal advice it had received. Nehru had one look at the file and wrote on it, ‘‘Legal yes, moral no. Let the payments continue.’’

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That’s how it fell upon the juniormost officer in the Indian embassy in Baghdad, remembers Ansari, to go off in search of the Nawab descendants in Karbala and Najaf, and hand over their honorarium. In the early ’60s, it amounted to a princely sum of 50 British pounds quarterly.

‘‘We would start our pilgrimage with an 8-fried-egg breakfast, served with naan and ‘kachi paneer’ on the side,’’ laughs Ansari. ‘‘It only got better after that.’’