Regent at Lucknow, 1857
After Wajid Ali Shah's exile to Calcutta in 1856 and the outbreak of the rebellion the next year, the Company's own besieged garrison at Lucknow set down what a spy named Ungud told them of the city outside their walls: 'a boy of eleven or twelve years of age, a member of the Oudh royal family, had been proclaimed king; his mother, the Begum, being regent; while some authority was still exercised by the Molovee, who had accompanied the mutineers from Fyzabad' (Gubbins, p. 230). The boy was her son, Birjis Qadr; the regency is stated here from the losing side, by a witness who never gives her name.
A proclamation issued in her name in the closing weeks of the revolt argued that the promise of religious tolerance under Company rule could not be believed, given daily practice: 'to eat pigs and drink wine, to bite greased cartridges and to mix pig's fat with sweetmeats, to destroy Hindu and Mussalman temples and mosques on the pretense of making roads, to build churches, to send clergymen into the streets to preach the Christian religion, to institute English schools, and pay people a monthly stipend for learning the English sciences, while the places of worship of Hindus and Mussalmans are to this day entirely neglected; with all this, how can people believe that religion will not be interfered with?' (Wikipedia, 'Begum Hazrat Mahal'). The grievance is addressed to a shared injury across both faiths named in the one sentence, not to either community alone.
Her own title, as the record now prints it, is "Regent of Awadh, 1857–1858" (Wikipedia, 'Begum Hazrat Mahal').
Nepal, and a nameless grave
When Lucknow fell she retreated through the border hills into Nepal. The record now most generally in print states that she 'was initially refused asylum by the Rana prime minister Jung Bahadur, but was later allowed to stay' — an account written from the side that had just driven her from her kingdom.
She died at Kathmandu in 1879. The same page records what became of the grave: 'She died there in 1879 and was buried in a nameless grave in the grounds of Kathmandu's Jama Masjid' (Wikipedia, 'Begum Hazrat Mahal'). Eight decades later, in independent India, a park in Lucknow was renamed for her and a marble tablet raised — a correction the grave itself never received.