Rosie Llewellyn Jones in Calcutta on Tuesday afternoon. Picture by Pabitra Das

Can the life of a fat man make for an interesting story? If Shakespeare had no problem with Falstaff, neither does Rosie Llewellyn Jones, a leading authority on Lucknow and the Awadh royal family, with the corpulent Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, vilified by the British as a debauch with 300 wives, and romanticised by Indians as a poet, musician and man of culture.

Llewellyn Jones is in town now to research her latest project on Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler who was ousted from Lucknow by the British and imprisoned in Fort William and later in the Garden Reach area where he later built a large township in Metiabruz. Its fame spread far and wide and won it the sobriquet of Second Lucknow. After the Nawab’s death, however, the British razed it to the ground, and all that remains of the original township is Sibtainabad Imambara.

Llewellyn Jones, resplendent in a black salwar and kundan jewellery, says her aim is to create a “synthesis” of the “two sharply opposing views” about the king, who played a pivotal role in Satyajit Ray’s classic, Shatranj Ki Khiladi. The historian, who has visited Calcutta six to seven times, and Lucknow countless times, says this mindset is “so deeply entrenched” that neither the Brits nor the Indians are willing to take a holistic view of the king, who is the stuff that myths are made of.

Llewellyn Jones plans to look into the political role that Wajid Ali Shah played. He was “absolutely opposed” to the armed uprising of his queen, Hazrat Mahal, who had to seek refuge in Nepal, where she died and was buried in Kathmandu. The historian stresses that the Nawab had no sympathy for the Great Uprising of 1857 either, and had, in fact, written to the governor general offering his help to put it down.

The nawab, she says, had to deal with the problem of Babri Masjid which was a disputed area even then and was known as the “Temple of Ayodhya.” He had sent his troops to that sensitive area to save the Hindus from Muslim fundamentalists. She has discovered from the National Archives in Delhi that included in his army were African slaves known as Habshi.

They were left behind after the nawab’s ouster from Lucknow, and she has managed to trace their descendants, who have no memory of their forefathers but are aware of their antecedents. During the uprising they had fought against the British, and are known as Shidis, which means a person of African origin. She, however, could not identify which part of Africa they came from.

Llewellyn Jones, born in Gloucestershire, but a London resident for 40 years, studied Urdu and Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where one of her texts was Abdul Halim Sharar’s famous book on Lucknow and its distinctive culture. Visiting India since 1960, her doctoral thesis was published as a book titled A Fatal Friendship, a study of interaction of the British with Nawabi culture.

This was followed by a biography of Claude Martin as a figure of the Enlightenment and several other related titles, including one on the Great Uprising. Llewellyn Jones plans to visit the South Eastern Railway headquarters in Garden Reach, where the nawab was imprisoned, and which formed a nucleus of the township he built.