Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [30]
The next to last of these enlightened women rulers, Begum Sultan Jahan, had even created an institution—revolutionary for the time—called the Bhopal Ladies Club. There, women were free to discuss their conditions and their future. The same begum had also given her female subjects the opportunity to go shopping with their faces uncovered by building the Paris Bazaar, a huge shopping center reserved exclusively for women. There they could walk about with their faces uncovered because all the shopkeepers were women. Simply dressed and without bodyguards, the begum herself liked to visit this emporium which was well stocked with items imported from London and Paris.
The British were unsparing in their respect for this remarkable lady. King George V invited her to his coronation and, in 1922, the prince of Wales paid a visit for the inauguration of the Government Council for the Kingdom of Bhopal, a democratic institution quite unique in the princely India of that time. His visit was also intended to thank the begum for having emptied both her private purse and the state coffers to support the British war effort. After all, she had sent her eldest son to represent Bhopal and fight alongside the Allied soldiers in the trenches of the first world war.
Before she passed away, Begum Kudsia, last of the sovereign ladies of Bhopal, nevertheless expressed her regret that her subjects seemed more interested in poetry than industrial projects or affairs of state. Despite the efforts of the economic development agency she had created with the support of the British, in the period between the world wars, very few firms came to Bhopal. Two textile mills, two sugar refineries, a cardboard and a match factory—the sum total was a modest one. Nor did the ascendance of a male sovereign to the throne do anything to rectify matters. The nawab Hamidullah Khan was a charming, cultivated prince but far more interested in decorating his palaces or breeding his horses than in constructing blast furnaces or textile factories. While Mahatma Gandhi was going on a hunger strike to force the British out of the country, he was having a luxury bathroom installed on the roof of one of his hunting station wagons.
On August 15, 1947, the subcontinent’s independence cast the maharajahs and nawabs of the Indian kingdoms into the oubliette of history. The upset was a stroke of good fortune for Bhopal, which found itself promoted to the capital of the vast province of Madhya Pradesh that encompassed all the country’s central territories. Its selection spurred the city into an era of feverish development. It had been chosen for the same three reasons Carbide would select it, twenty years later, as the site of its pesticide plant. Buildings had to be constructed to house the new province’s ministries and administrative bodies, whole neighborhoods had to be built in which to lodge the thousands of officials and their families. A university, several technical colleges, a hospital with two thousand beds, a medical school, shops, clubs, theaters, cinemas, restaurants had to be erected. In the space of five years the population increased from 85,000 to nearly 400,000.
This rise had brought with it an influx of small and large firms from all over India. And now, as the chrome muzzle of a gray Jaguar had just intimated, America was about to step in where only yesterday the last nawab and his