The Sad End of Fairy Tale of Princess Selma Rauf Sultana: Grand Daughter of Ottoman Sultan Murad V, Married to Syed Sajid Husain , Raja of Kotwara.

The astonishing fate as a Fairy Tale that ended sad of Princess Selma Rauf Hanim Sultana (1916-1942), Grand daughter of Murad V, was told to world by her daughter, Kenizé Mourad, in her famous novel,”De la part de la princesse morte, published in France in 1987.

 

“De la part de la princesse morte”, became a bestseller, translated into English and 33 other languages. The book was the result of many years of painstaking research by Kenizé.

Top Kapi Palace-Istanbul-Turkey

Ottoman Sultan Murad V (1840–1904) was the 33rd Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who reigned from 30 May to 31 August 1876.

Selma was the grand-daughter of the Ottoman emperor, Sultan Mourad V, who as the 33^rd Ottoman emperor. He succeeded to the throne after the deposition of his uncle on 30 May 1876. He reigned for 93 days before being deposed on the grounds that he was mentally ill.

Murad v lived on till 1904, marrying several women and having many children, of whom Selma's mother Princess Hadice Sultana was the only issue of his third wife, Sahcan Kadin Efendi.

 

Hatice Sultan: Mother of Princess Selma Rauf Hanim Sultana

Hatice Sultan was born on 5 April 1870, in her father's villa in Kurbağalıdere. Her father was Sultan Murad V, and her mother was Şayan Kadın, the daughter of Batır Zan.

Sultan Murad v

She was the second child, and eldest daughter of her father and the only child of her mother. She was the granddaughter of Abdulmejid I.

Hetice Sultana  Daughter of Ottoman Sultan Murad v

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, eight-year-old Princess Selma and her mother became another victim of history, fleeing Istanbul, in 1924, for Beirut.

Princess Selma  Rauf Sultana

At the exile of the imperial family in March 1924, Hatice Sultan and her children settled in Beirut, Lebanon, where she died on 12 March 1938, at the age of sixty-seven. She was buried at the Sultan Selim Mosque in Damascus, Syria.

 

it became increasingly difficult for them to make two ends meet, so Selma’s mother thought it best to get her married off, and who was better than a Muslim prince from India?

The entire imperial family, about 150 people, were sent into exile in 1924.

Some of Selma’s relatives went to Paris, others to the French Riviera, and 10-year-old Selma ended up in Beirut (known in those days as the Paris of the East) with her mother, Princess Hatice, and brothers (their parents had divorced in 1918). Despite the family’s limited means, she blossomed into a fashionable young woman.

Princess Selma Rauf Hanim Sultana Married to Syed Sajid Husain Ali, Raja of Kotwara (1910- 1991)

In her distressed circumstances, Princess Hatice was under a lot of pressure to get her daughter married, the sooner the better. But it had become very hard to find suitable marriage partners for impoverished Turkish royalty.

 

In 1932, though, a splendid double match was made for two of Selma’s distant cousins living in France, the princesses Durrushevar (often written Durru Shevar) and Niloufer.

 

The Nizam of Hyderabad, at the time considered the richest man in the world, had won their hand in marriage for his two sons. After a simple wedding in the South of France, the two brides went off to live in faraway India.

 

About five years later, a blue-blooded husband for Selma Rauf Hanim was found in that same country India, most probably with some help from the Hyderabad connection. Selma travelled in 1937, to India to marry Syed Sajid Husain Ali, Raja of Kotwara (1990 1991)

 

Selma’s husband, Sajid Husain, was a dashing prince who had studied in Edinburgh. He had become the ruler of Kotwara, near Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, at a young age.

 

Sad ending of marriage

The marriage was not a happy one. However, after growing up first in the splendor of imperial Istanbul and then in cosmopolitan Beirut, acknowledged those days as the Paris of the East, with its lavish lifestyle and hedonistic nightlife.

 

Selma had great trouble adjusting to her new environment.Despite the ancient bloodline and respectable wealth of her husband’s family, picturesque Kotwara must have seemed like a desolate backwater to her.

 

Princess was pregnant. World War was approaching and Kotwara didn't quite seem the best of places to have a baby, the princess was going off to faraway Paris to have her baby. So, in the summer of 1939, Princess Selma left and that was her last days in Kotwara.

 

She was accompanied only by a faithful retainer of her birth family, a eunuch, who had come to India with her. With the Second World War fast approaching, she would soon run out of money.

 

Her daughter Kenizé was born in November of that year. Selma did not inform her husband, leading her in-laws to believe the child was stillborn.

 

She decided not to come back to India. And that it was over between the princess and the raja. The raja Syed Sajid Husain was devastated.

 

Princess Selma died and buried away from home land: in German-occupied Paris

In 1941, a world war was raging. Cut off from all resources, princess Selma by now lived in dire poverty. That winter, she became very ill and finally succumbed to septicemia.

 

Her distraught eunuch brought the orphaned Kenizé, not quite two years old, to the home of a Swiss diplomat. He and his family would lovingly raise the child until they were posted abroad and, having never formally adopted her, had no option but to place her in an orphanage.

 

Princess Selma’s grave sits in a neglected corner of the Muslim cemetery in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, surrounded by those of twenty other members of the exiled Ottoman imperial family.

Muzaffar Ali with wife Meera Ali

Interesting to know that Muzaffar Ali (1944) filmmaker, fashion designer, poet, artist, cultural revivalist, and social worker is the eldest son of Raja Syed Sajid Husain Ali, the ruling prince of the principality of Kotwara in Awadh, Muzaffar Ali attended La Martini ere, Lucknow, and graduated in science from Aligarh Muslim University.

 

What happened to Selma’s newly born baby Kenizé Mourad?

Meanwhile in Kotwara, Selma’s baby was believed to have died at birth. The Raja Syed Sajid Husain, was said to be devastated by the princess’s decision not to return. Two years after the news of Selma’s death, he remarried.

Kenizé Mourad

 

Then, one day, he was informed that he had a young daughter, Kenizé, living in a French orphanage. His attempts to bring her to India were thwarted by the nuns who ran the orphanage. They had raised her in the Catholic faith and were not about to give her up to a Muslim family.

 

Kenizé stayed in France and became a journalist. Growing ever more curious about her origins, she started to research her mother’s tragic life story, resulting in a first biographical novel, De la part de la princesse morte (1987).

 

The research led her to also explore her Indian roots. With great difficulty, she managed to reconnect with her father, and eventually had her name added to the Kotwara family tree as “Rajkumari Kenize de Kotwara,” Princess Kenize of Kotwara.

Grave of Princess Selma Rauf Sultana in Paris 

 

The End

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