New Books In Biography

Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued by the image of Indian royals in cramped conditions. Then, her family was granted use of a rundown 14th-century hunting lodge in Delhi; none were seen in public again. Both during Wilayat Mahal’s life, and after her death, journalists have tried to figure out whether her story was true, most famously by a 2019 feature by the New York Times that picked apart the family’s story. Now, in their book The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy (HarperCollins India: 2025), Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar dig into Begum Wilayat Mahal’s past, chasing down leads in India and Pakistan to fully explore this story. Aletta André is a Dutch historian and journalist, who has covered South Asia fo