As Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers the 79th Independence Day address from Delhi's iconic Red Fort, a heavy historical irony looms in silence. Just over a thousand kilometers away, in a crumbling hut in the slums of Howrah, Sultana Begum—the 74-year-old great-granddaughter-in-law of Bahadur Shah Zafar, India's last Mughal emperor—struggles to afford medication and relies on a meagre ₹6,000 monthly pension to survive.
The Red Fort, once the seat of Mughal power, is now a stage for the modern Indian state. Yet the descendants of the very monarch who made his final stand against British rule during the Revolt of 1857 now live a life of obscurity and deprivation. Sultana Begum's life is one of faded grandeur, reduced to poverty, marked by betrayal—both from the state and from those who claim to speak for justice, faith, and heritage.
Sultana's late husband, Mirza Muhammad Bedar Bukht, was the great-grandson of Bahadur Shah Zafar. After the fall of Delhi in 1857 and the subsequent execution of Zafar's sons, the British exiled the emperor to Rangoon, where he died in captivity. Bedar, still a young man in colonial Burma, was smuggled back to India with the assistance of Piare Mian, his maternal grandfather and guardian hailing from Lucknow. It is widely believed that this operation took place under the protective vision of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who saw the surviving bloodline of Zafar not as a relic of monarchy, but as a symbolic embodiment of resistance. Netaji ensured Bedar's safety and shelter during a time when the British sought to erase every trace of the Mughal line.
For decades, the family lived under assumed names, moving between cities and hiding in plain sight. Only after Independence in 1947 did Bedar reveal his true identity, expecting that the new Indian state would honour the memory of his forefather's sacrifice and legacy. That hope, like many others, would eventually erode.
Modest beginnings before a catastrophe strikes
Sultana Begum married Bedar in the early 1960s. While life was modest, it was at least stable during their years together. They received a small pension from the Prime Minister's Office, and the couple managed to make ends meet. However, Bedar's death in 1980 proved catastrophic.
As a widow, Sultana found herself not only alone but increasingly irrelevant in the eyes of the state. Her pension was barely enough to live on. A tea stall she opened was later demolished for road expansion, and her attempts at tailoring could not keep the household afloat. Years of appeals to various ministries, Presidents, and Prime Ministers brought little more than token sympathy. A one-time grant of ₹50,000 was issued in the early 2000s, but it was soon exhausted by medical expenses and debts.
As her health declined and responsibilities grew, Sultana was left to depend on her daughter Madhu Begum and granddaughter Roshan Ara.
Roshan Ara, now employed in Indian Railways in a Group D position, owes her job to a rare act of political empathy—when Mamata Banerjee, then Union Coal Minister, visited the family and helped secure employment for her, once she became the Union Rail Minister. That moment was one of the very few rays of light in an otherwise bleak legacy.
Forsaken by all
Despite being the descendants of India's last emperor, the family has received no consistent support from the wider Muslim community, whose leadership and institutions have often championed the cause of justice and heritage—but curiously not theirs. The Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, a symbolic custodian of Mughal-era faith and architecture, turned deaf ears to their pleas. The Waqf Boards, with their vast landholdings and revenues, have never offered the family a home, nor even basic monthly assistance.
Prominent political leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi, who often invoke the memory of past Muslim rulers in speeches, have ignored the plight of Bahadur Shah Zafar's descendants entirely. Roshan Ara remarks bitterly, "Owaisi does politics in Aurangzeb's name. Zafar's family doesn't interest him."
Equally silent have been the many Islamic charities, NGOs, and zakat fund managers who annually raise crores in the name of uplifting the poor and preserving dignity. If any family should have been symbolically and materially supported as a testament to legacy and resistance, it is this one. Their neglect of Sultana's household raises uncomfortable questions about the real priorities of these institutions—whether their cause is truly rooted in compassion, or shaped by optics and political calculations.
'Is this the price for Zafar's resistance?'
Today, Sultana Begum's deteriorating health is matched only by the fading memory of her family's once-sacred role in India's history. A YouTube channel titled The Last Mughals, launched by Roshan Ara in 2019, initially gained traction and now has 170,000 subscribers. But platform policy changes and monetization rules have made it unreliable, and the ad revenue is not enough to sustain the family.
Meanwhile, year after year, she has written letters to the President, the Prime Minister, and various ministries. Her appeals have largely gone unanswered. In 2006, Sultana even threatened self-immolation out of frustration, but it barely made the headlines. The silence has been consistent, and deafening.
This year, as Prime Minister Modi crowdsourced his Independence Day speech through the MyGov portal, Sultana's voice remains unheard—again. Her question, asked in a 2005 letter, still rings with haunting relevance: "Would we suffer like this if Zafar had surrendered to the British? He resisted. And we still pay."
While the tricolor soars above the Red Fort, its symbolic grandeur seems at odds with the lived reality of those born into its history. Sultana Begum may be eclipsed in public consciousness, but her life makes one bitter truth undeniable: freedom may be universal, but dignity remains unequally distributed.