Sikandar Begum

Sikandar Begum (10 September 1817 – 30 October 1868) was the Begum of Bhopal in central India: regent for her young daughter Shah Jahan Begum from 1844, recognised as nawab in her own right in 1860, and ruler until her death. She held Bhopal on the British side during the rebellion of 1857, performed the Hajj in 1863 and wrote a memoir of it, and reformed the state's finances, administration and courts. ^{1 2}

She was born at Gauhar Mahal in Bhopal, daughter of Nasir Mohammad Khan and Qudsia Begum, herself a former ruler of Bhopal. In 1835 she married Jahangir Mohammad Khan, who became nawab; their only child was Shah Jahan Begum. Widowed in December 1844, she took up the government as regent for her nine-year-old daughter, to whom the throne formally passed. ^{1 3}

During the 1857 rebellion she sided with the British: she banned anti-British pamphlets, strengthened her intelligence service and bought off disaffected soldiers, though her stance angered many in the state and sepoys besieged her palace that December before dispersing on a promise of higher pay. In 1861 she was made a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India, and on 30 September 1860 the British had recognised her as nawab in her own right, with a nineteen-gun salute. She repaid the state's three-million-rupee debt and set up a mint, a secretariat, a customs and postal service, a modern judiciary with a court of appeal, and a Majlis-e-Shoora council (1847); in 1862 she made Urdu the court language in place of Persian, founded the Victoria School for girls, and built the Moti Masjid and the Moti Mahal and Shaukat Mahal palaces. ¹

In 1863 she performed the Hajj with about a thousand companions, mostly women — the English article calls her the first Indian ruler to make the pilgrimage — and wrote a memoir of the journey in Urdu, published in English translation in 1870, in which she was sharply critical of conditions in Mecca and Jeddah. The English article describes her as a devout Muslim who did not observe purdah, hunted tigers, played polo and personally inspected courts, offices, the mint and the treasury. She died of kidney failure at Bhopal on 30 October 1868 and was succeeded by her daughter. ^{1 3}