India, Aug. 15 -- Begam Hazrat Mahal's (1820 - 1879) origins have remained shrouded in ambiguity. The daughter of a slave who was likely of African ancestry, and of a domestic servant, her birth name is unknown. What is known is that she entered Prince Wajid Ali Shah's Pari Khana as a courtesan and was renamed thrice before emerging as Hazrat Mahal, one of his many wives. She gave birth to the prince's son, Birjis Qadr, in 1844 and, after Wajid Ali inherited the throne, briefly enjoyed the position of favourite. By the end of the decade, however, the two were divorced. In 1856, the East India Company annexed Awadh and deposed Wajid Ali Shah. The First War of Independence was brewing. With Wajid Ali exiled and eventually imprisoned in Calcutta, 13-year-old Birjis Qadr became the royal figurehead of Awadh's rebel opposition; and his mother, the begam, its de facto leader. At the centre of her brief rule is one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of British India: the siege of the Lucknow Residency. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones rescues this ruler from obscurity and renders the complexities of 19th-century Awadh through the story of its most unlikely leader....