His eldest son and heir, the bookish Shah Alam (r. 1759–1806), escaped both Ghazi al-Din and Ahmad Abdali by prudently fleeing from Delhi. The Marathas tried and failed to deal with the continuing threat posed by Ahmad Abdali: they suffered a crushing defeat at Panipat in 1761 (on the same field as the Mughals’ original victory in 1526). Ahmad Abdali was forced to return home not by any Indian army but by his own mutinous troops. Meanwhile, Shah Alam was attempting to recover control over Bengal, as a first step in restoring the empire. Here he was halted by a new opponent: the British. In 1765, he signed the Treaty of Allahabad, which put the British in charge of the revenue of eastern India, only nominally under Mughal rule, in return for an annual pension.
Shah Alam continued to live in Allahabad until 1772, though anxious all the while to return to Delhi, not only because it was still seen as the capital but also because while fleeing he had left all his womenfolk behind in the Red Fort. They too were eager to see him return. Shah Alam’s prime protectors, the British, promised and failed to help him on this score, so he turned instead to the Marathas, who were keen to recover some of their former influence.
Once he was back in Delhi, things began to improve for Shah Alam. With the support of one notably loyal noble of Persian descent, Mirza Najaf Khan, he was able to assert his authority over the empire’s former heartland—from Punjab to Agra. But things fell apart after Najaf Khan died and reached a nadir in 1788. In that year, a rather less notably loyal noble of Afghan descent, one Ghulam Qadir, nursing grievances over the past treatment of his family, occupied the Red Fort. He arrested the emperor and sent his soldiers to plunder the royal apartments of the palace. Guards and servants who stood in their way were tortured or killed, and even the royal women were dragged out of the harem and abused. When the emperor complained, Ghulam Qadir blinded him, gouging out his eyes with his own hands. Other members of the imperial family, denied food and water, died of dehydration.
Rash and cruel, Ghulam Qadir was also imprudent. He had neglected to ensure an adequate supply of food even for himself and his men, and after eleven weeks of occupation he was forced to withdraw. At this point the Marathas again intervened, chasing after Ghulam Qadir and his followers. They recovered the stolen loot and returned it all to the emperor along with—an especially touching gift—Ghulam Qadir’s eyeballs.
Blinding was such a common punishment because a blind man was deemed unfit to rule. In this late Mughal era, blinding became almost a routine operation. Jahandar Shah, for example, had several of his relatives blinded when he came to the throne in 1712. No doubt he thought he was being lenient: it was sufficient to blind rather than kill them because a blind man could not sit on the throne and so presented no threat. But matters had sunk so low by 1788 that the blinding of Shah Alam did not put an end to his reign. He continued as nominal emperor under the protection of the Marathas.
This situation only changed after fifteen years as a result of the long-standing rivalry for power in northern India between the Marathas and the British. In 1803, an episode in that rivalry was played out within sight of Delhi, on the east bank of the Yamuna river. An army under the command of Lord Lake forced the Marathas to withdraw from the city, and the British took over the role of protecting the emperor.
Lake found Shah Alam, ‘reduced to poverty, seated under a small tattered canopy’. The emperor signed a treaty with the British that restricted his authority to the area of the Red Fort, in return for a pension. The real administration, even of the city, lay in the hands of the British Resident, appointed as its political representative by the East India Company. Delhiites at the time must have been struck by the irony that the emperor bore the same grandiose title as the last of the Sayyid sultans, whose writ similarly had not extended beyond his own front door. The ditty about the realm of Shah Alam extending only ‘from Delhi to Palam’ is sometimes said to refer to this later ruler.
Shah Alam’s successors, his son Akbar II (r. 1806–37) and grandson Bahadar Shah II (r. 1837–57), were styled by the British ‘King of Delhi’, but even that was an exaggeration. Desperate efforts were made to keep up appearances throughout these last two reigns, with the emperor and his sons parading through the city on elephants on festival days, bearing all the trappings of an imperial procession. But those who looked closely noticed that the trappings were faded and torn. The emperor’s pension was simply insufficient to maintain the many members of his family in customary dignity or even normal cleanliness. Its ever-diminishing value was the subject of frequent humiliating negotiations with the British, who remained resolute in their parsimony. In a fit of frustration, the imperial prince Mirza Jahangir took a potshot at the British Resident. He was banished to Allahabad, where he drank himself to death on cherry brandy.
When Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta, visited the court of Akbar II, he found the great hall of audience being used as a lumber room, stacked high with broken furniture, and the throne canopy smothered in pigeon droppings. The eccentric traveller Fanny Parks was shown around parts of the palace early in the reign of Bahadur Shah and got a similar impression of the pavilion known as the Rang Mahal:
I was taken into a superb hall: formerly fountains had played there; the ceiling was painted and inlaid with gold . . . [But now] over the marble floor, and in the place where fountains once played, was collected a quantity of offensive black water, as if from the drains of the cook rooms. From a veranda, the young prince [her guide] pointed out a bastion in which the king was then asleep.
The older cities, built by the earlier sultans to the south of the Mughal walled city of Shahjahanabad, were equally by now in a state of ruin and decay. An early Assistant Resident, Charles Metcalfe, described the scene:
The ruins of grandeur that extend for miles on every side fill [the mind] with serious reflection. The palaces crumbling into dust, every one of which could tell many tales of royal virtue or tyrannical crime, of desperate ambition or depraved indolence . . . the myriads of vast mausoleums, every one of which was intended to convey to futurity the deathless fame of its cold inhabitant, and all of which are passed by unknown and unnoticed . . . these things cannot be looked at with indifference.
Such a scene was delightful to the moralizing British and to artists of picturesque landscape such as Thomas Daniell. The Daniells—Thomas and his nephew William—visited Delhi in February 1789, the year after the emperor Shah Alam was blinded, and well before the British took control of the city. The subjects that they selected to include in their subsequent series of aquatints, Oriental Scenery (published in 1795–1808), represent an interesting range. They include, unsurprisingly, some fine examples of Mughal architecture, such as the Jami Masjid, shown in all its imperial grandeur, along with lesser monuments such as the Chaunsath Khamba and the tombs that cluster around Humayun’s. They also include more recent buildings such as the Qudsia Bagh, a garden palace to the north of Shahjahanabad built in 1748 for the emperor’s mother, and two views of the Jantar Mantar. Despite their antiquarian interests—they also depicted the Qutb Minar, of course—the Daniells thus engaged with architecture of their own era. The Qudsia Bagh (today decayed almost to extinction) is shown in its pristine state (helpfully to art historians). They may not have been aware of the youth of the Jantar Mantar as they show it in a state of decay that is not credible. Similarly, they have exaggerated the decay of the Purana Qila and Firuz Shah Kotla. It is not that these forts were not in fact ruined, just that they and the surrounding terrain were not as broken as they are shown. The picturesque is an aesthetic that favours rough, irregular forms as pictorial devices, while in mood recalling Gray’s elegiac warning, ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’.
Whether the wide plain of Delhi was or was not crumbling into dust, with the dawn of the new century, the city of Shahjahanabad began to enjoy something of an economic recovery, spurred on by the more settled political conditions and the greater degree of security. The British might have been mean to the emperor, but they were not
(yet) arbitrary or violent towards the citizens. Sensing that the days of sudden invasions were over, the merchants of Delhi found it worthwhile once again to invest in their businesses.
At the same time, there was a remarkable resurgence in the arts. Painters who had previously worked for the court found a new source of patronage in the British and began to produce images of Delhi’s historic buildings. Among prominent exponents in Delhi of this new style, known as Company Painting, were Ghulam Ali Khan (active 1815–50) and Mazhar Ali Khan (likely a relative, active 1840–55), famous for their depictions of the Red Fort and other buildings of Delhi. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah, built a summer palace in Mehrauli (now dilapidated) and added a pavilion to the buildings of the Red Fort: a red sandstone island in the middle of the tank at the heart of the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh, which somewhat breaks the vista across the garden but is a charming reworking on a miniature scale of the idea, common in Rajput architecture, of a water palace or jal mahal as a place of retreat.
Even more than painting and architecture, this era is remembered for its Urdu poetry. Bahadur Shah was himself a poet who wrote under the pen name Zafar. The literary meetings (or mushairas) that he hosted in the palace attracted other luminaries, such as Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq (1788–1855) and Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869). Their poetry is suffused with a sense of loss and longing. At one level it is a collective lament for the diminished status of their world. Sometimes, Zafar addresses his own deplorable condition directly, as in his most often quoted couplet:
I am not the apple of anyone’s eye, nor the joy of any heart,
A handful of useless dust, no purpose I discharge.
Sometimes the focus is on the city itself, and the regret is that nothing of purpose can be achieved in this place which they still cannot bear to leave. As Zauq puts it:
Could talent live at home and thrive,
Why should the Badakhshaan ruby wander world-wide?
Albeit in Deccan, Zauq, the Muse commands respect,
Who would quit the lanes of Delhi and suffer exile?
More often, though, the lament is displaced, being presented as the poet’s sense of his unworthiness as a devotee of God, or his despair arising from unrequited love. In this realm, Ghalib is the master:
A sigh needs a lifetime to make its full impact,
Who lives long enough to conquer your ringlets?
. . . Love demands patience, desire will not wait,
What to do with the heart till it bleeds to death!
The same theme and mood are well captured in Ahmed Ali’s famous novel Twilight in Delhi (1940). Though written a century later, its characters are still lamenting the fall of the Mughal Empire and the decline of the city. Given the city’s latitude, real twilight in Delhi is over in a matter of moments, but Delhi’s metaphorical twilight is a protracted affair. The novel’s protagonist Asghar falls in love with a girl on the basis of a stolen glance, and despite family opposition prevails in his determination to marry her. After his success, Asghar is disappointed to discover that his bride is a demure doe and not the seductress he had imagined from the glance. He neglects her. She falls ill, and he neglects her more. She dies. He later discovers by chance that her naughty little sister is exactly the sex kitten he craves, and that she fancies him. He begs to marry her. But her sensible parents point out that they have already given him one daughter, and he failed to take proper care of her, so he is not getting another. Misery all round!
The mournfulness that had been simmered and savoured by the poets of Bahadur Shah’s court acquired a frightening new cause in 1857, when the city erupted in violence. What British writers used to call the Indian Mutiny—and Indian nationalists pointedly relabelled as the First War of Independence—broke out in the military cantonment at Meerut, to the north of Delhi, on 10 May 1857. The revolt was to spread across large parts of northern India. Its underlying cause was the resentment against the British annexation of Indian states such as Lucknow, and both real and imagined insensitivity towards certain Indian religious and social customs. The infamous matter of the greased cartridges was a case in point. Believing the new cartridges—which had to be bitten open—to be greased with pig and cow fat, which are repugnant on religious grounds, the Indian sepoys refused to use them. In Meerut, British officers met this insubordination head-on by sentencing eighty-five sepoys to jail. To make a more effective example of them, they were humiliated by being fettered in front of their comrades. But the comrades rose in revolt, shooting the officers and releasing the prisoners. They then marched on Delhi.
The relatively small and mostly civilian British community in Delhi was taken by surprise. The rebels were able to enter the city virtually unopposed, where they stirred up a riot that led to a general massacre of Europeans. They forced their way into the Red Fort and beseeched the ageing emperor to be their leader. Bahadur Shah had his own reasons to be disaffected with the British. They had already made it clear that the charade of royalty would end with him: that after his death, his sons would retain the title of prince but none would be recognized as his successor. His domineering wife, Zinat Mahal, in her efforts to advance her own son, intrigued tirelessly against this decision and pestered her husband to reject it. Despite this, Bahadur Shah had some reservations about lending his support to the rabble now clamouring before him. But in the end he had little choice and the revolt, at least in Delhi, was conducted in his name, with the avowed aim of restoring Mughal rule.
Kashmiri Gate; photograph by Bourne & Shepherd, 1860s
The British officer in charge of the arsenal blew it up before the rebels could capture its crucial stock of arms and gunpowder. Messages were despatched to the cantonment at Ambala and to the government in Simla. In reply, an army composed of European regiments, supported by forces from the newly conquered Sikh kingdoms of the Punjab, marched on Delhi and took possession of the ridge of high ground to the north of the walled city. From this position, they orchestrated a siege.
It lasted for three months, through the hottest and then the wettest seasons of the year. Conditions within the city became intolerable. The civilian population was caught between the two sides of the conflict. No doubt many were sympathetic to the political aims of the revolt but their homes and warehouses were ruthlessly plundered by the rebels in search of supplies and cash, and they could not escape because of the siege. Both the British on the ridge and the rebels in the city were able to receive reinforcements as the weeks went by. Casualties were high in the daily skirmishes between them, and disease was ever present because of the difficulty of burying the dead. The final successful British assault on the city’s northern wall began on 14 September under the command of the young Brigadier John Nicholson, who later died of his wounds. A week later the British were again in control of the whole city. Bahadur Shah was brought back under escort from Humayun’s tomb where he had fled. He was later put on trial for his role in the uprising and sentenced to exile in Rangoon, where he died in 1862. Two of his sons suffered more summary justice as the arresting officer, Captain Hodson, fearing a rescue bid, shot them in the street.
Retribution by the British continued long after the recapture of the city, with hunting parties scouring the countryside in search of rebels or their sympathizers, to shoot and hang. Vengeance extended even to some of the city’s buildings. A proposal to raze the Jami Masjid and replace it with a cathedral was mercifully aborted, but much wanton destruction was carried out inside the Red Fort—perceived as the focal point of the uprising—in the name of rendering it unfit for any future military use. Arcades enclosing garden courtyards were destroyed so that they could never again serve as a rebel’s hiding place. Inlaid ornament in the palace pavilions was looted. The architectural historian James Fergusson raised a lonely voice of protest as ‘the whole of the haram courts of the palace were swept off the face of the earth to make way for a hideous British barrack’.
These actions reveal the depth of feeling that the events of 1857 inspired. In the
British public imagination, the ‘Mutiny’ became a tale of Indian barbarism and of British determination and pluck. The leaders that died, like Nicholson, became national heroes. Scenes of important actions, like Kashmiri Gate, where the British re-entry into the city began, were visited in a mood of reverence that is normally reserved for shrines. And this continued for generations. A guidebook by the engineer Gordon Risley Hearn, published fifty years later, describes Delhi as though the main purpose of visiting the city was to tour and reflect on the scenes of the Mutiny. Popular historians even today quote copiously from the many eyewitness records, selecting episodes that highlight individual acts of bravery in the face of Indian brutality.
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