In the City of Gold and Silver

by Kenize Mourad

  “But our people have sacrificed themselves too, without counting the cost!”

  “The people, yes, perhaps because their lives are so miserable that they consider they have nothing left to lose. But those who own something, the shopkeepers, the small landowners, have they ever been motivated by anything other than profit? As for our elites, apart from a few rare exceptions, have they ever acted in accordance with their great speeches on honour and service?”

  Hazrat Mahal gazes admiringly at her lover, and yet again marvels at the difference between him and other men who, resigned, put up with their fate. Jai Lal never gives up, and this is another reason why she loves him; she loves him for his rebellious streak and his unshakable principles—what others refer to as “his madness”!

  Nestling against his shoulder, she takes his hand and kisses it tenderly.

  There are nearly four thousand men entrenched in Musabagh, but the rajah knows they cannot hold out for long against the superior British forces. Defeat is only a few days away. Their situation is all the more precarious as almost all the taluqdars have deserted the capital, followed by their troops. Maulvi Ahmadullah is the only one left. After resisting, barricaded inside Hazrat Abbas’s sanctuary in the town centre, he has come to Musabagh.

  The first confrontation takes place on March 19th.

  After bombarding the palace relentlessly, General Outram then launches the offensive, killing hundreds of men in the space of a few hours and capturing all the artillery battalions. The Indians, however, refuse to admit defeat and, in mad acts of heroism, they throw themselves before the cannons, armed only with their swords in an attempt to push back the enemy.

  But how can they continue to fight without any artillery? The situation is desperate. Above all, they must save the king and the Queen Mother, and preserve the army for future battles. The rajah will remain behind with about a hundred sepoys to create a diversion, thus allowing more time to cover their escape.

  Hazrat Mahal and Jai Lal are to spend a last night together. As she, distraught, sobs in his arms, he tries to comfort her:

  “Have no fear, my jani, I will come to you. Meanwhile, I trust you. From now on, it is you who will lead the struggle. Do not let yourself be swayed. As the holder of absolute power, and as regent, the generals owe you total obedience. If they raise any objections, place your son at the forefront. They cannot disobey the king. Come now, promise me you will remain strong and will never lose hope.”

  With a weak smile, she gives him her word.

  They must depart before dawn. The rajah makes a short speech before the assembled soldiers, thanking them, and reiterates his confidence and his trust in them. The men are moved, their throats thick with tears: will they ever again see the man who for months has been as much a father to them as a leader?

  Jai Lal then turns to his friend, the Rajah of Mahmudabad, who is to accompany the young king and the Queen Mother.

  “I entrust them to you, Rajah Sahib,” he says in a faltering voice.

  “I answer for them with my life,” the rajah assures him. He is an honourable man and has fully grasped the situation.

  Hazrat Mahal covers her face with her veil to hide her agitation.

  Jai Lal and she stand face to face; they cannot take their eyes off each other.

  “Have faith, my jani,” he murmurs, “I love you more than anything in the world and I will reconquer Lucknow for you.”

  It is time to leave.

  Giving their horses a smart crack of the whip, the small army surges forward at a gallop, raising clouds of dust. Immobile, Jai Lal watches the road until they have completely disappeared from view.

  A hand is laid on his shoulder. It is Brendan Murphy, his Irish companion, who insisted on remaining with him. They smile wordlessly at each other.

  The day ahead of them will be long.

  On March 21st, after a fierce battle, this last bastion of resistance falls. The maulvi flees with his partisans. Campbell’s cavalry gives chase for a few miles. Although a large number of his men are killed, Ahmadullah Shah manages to escape.

  As for Rajah Jai Lal, someone told the begum, they saw him fight like a lion. Since then, no news. Was he killed in battle? Captured? Did he manage to flee?

  * * *

  It was to take two weeks of intense bombing to subdue Lucknow.

  The sepoys fought heroically and defended the entrance to the palace to the last. In the apartments, hundreds of charred bodies give off an unbearable stench, and in the streets, corpses block the conqueror’s progress.

  On the British side, however, no one can understand how the begum and her troops miraculously managed to escape without encountering the slightest resistance!

  The official explanation is that the cavalry regiment assigned to follow them somehow lost its way.

  Indignation is at its peak in the officers’ mess: how could the colonel in charge of operations have made such a stupid mistake?

  “It was no mistake, I can assure you of that. I was there,” intervenes an officer amidst the commotion.

  His words are greeted with a stunned silence and he continues:

  “Refusing to pay any attention to his guide’s information, the colonel ordered his troops to take the opposite direction. Some of us tried to make him listen to reason, but he insisted and we were forced to obey. That is how we galloped away from the route the fugitives had taken!”

  “What a shame! This man should be demoted!”

  The officer shakes his head in disagreement.

  “It would seem that Sir Colin Campbell himself is responsible. He admires the begum greatly and did not want to risk killing or imprisoning her. He has not forgotten that last November, she allowed our besieged compatriots to leave the Residency with the women, children and wounded. With his sense of chivalry, he decided to let her escape in turn. I also suspect that as a Scotsman, with a long history of wars of independence, deep down he respects the men who are fighting to free their country.”

  “He definitely likes them!” confirms another. “I heard him say: ‘Now that we have recaptured Lucknow, why intercept the desperate soldiers who are only trying to escape?’”

  General Campbell, however, has underestimated the begum’s determination to continue the fight, at any cost.

  Unlike the events that occurred after the fall of Delhi, where thousands of civilians had been put to death, Colin Campbell refuses to organise summary executions. However, he is unable to control the rage of the soldiers, who take their revenge on all those who were unable to flee. Hundreds of elderly, sick people, women and children are massacred. Their bodies, along with the thousands of fighters’ corpses, give off a foul odour that permeates the whole town. Witnesses recount how they saw a young boy accompanying a blind old man, begging an officer to protect them from the soldiers’ condemnation:

  “The officer unsheathed his revolver and struck him. While the boy was lying on the ground, he tried twice to shoot at him, but his revolver jammed. It was only on the third attempt that he managed to put a bullet through his head. The adolescent fell at his feet, covered in blood.”*

  The fate of the fifty sepoys who had surrendered after being promised they would not be harmed is also reported: “Having asked them to lay down their weapons, the officer in charge had them lined up against a wall and ordered his Sikh soldiers to finish them off. They disposed of them within minutes, either shooting them or killing them with bayonets.”95

  * * *

  “How do you explain these atrocities?”

  At the end of this month of March 1858, William Russell, the highly respected London Times correspondent, well-known for his reporting during the recent Crimean War, savours his whisky in the company of a few officers with whom he had entered Lucknow two weeks earlier.

  “These acts seem more like displays of condemnation and fear rather than justif
ied punishments,” he insists. “It would appear that in India, the British forget all their basic principles very quickly.”

  “And you, sir, you seem to be forgetting Kanpur!” retorts an officer, trembling with rage. “Barbarianism has never reached such heights—the mutilation and rape of our defenceless women . . . ”

  “Forgive me, but I went to Kanpur and carried out a detailed investigation there. No one ever actually witnessed an English woman being mutilated or raped. These are rumours which, unfortunately, served to justify our men’s worst excesses. They were horrified by these abominable accounts of which I did not discover the slightest proof, stories spread by people in Calcutta who were, in fact, hundreds of miles away when the events took place. I have even been able to establish with certainty that the inscriptions on the walls of the house where the massacre took place were added after Havelock had taken Kanpur, thus proving they were written by British men. These demands to ‘avenge the rapes and mutilations’ drove the soldiers mad and convinced them to massacre all the ‘niggers’ they encountered, even women or children.”

  His comments are received with hostile mutters, but Russell pays them no heed. He knows very well he cannot convince soldiers who are in the throes of military action. His only goal is to inform public opinion in the metropolis by countering the atrocious and slanderous descriptions put forward by the English press in Calcutta, which exhorts the population to demand ever more blood. As the only witness present, he feels obliged to warn the authorities in London to try to limit, if at all possible, the destruction and the carnage.

  For Lucknow, alas, it is too late.

  This town with its half a million inhabitants is now deserted. For weeks, the panic-stricken population will hide in the surrounding forests, preferring to die of hunger rather than risk the fate of the inhabitants of Delhi who, it is said, were tortured before being put to death.

  Although the majority of its population was able to escape the worst, Lucknow, the rebel town, will be destroyed. Its long resistance must be punished; it must serve as an example of the price one pays for opposing British power. “The city of gold and silver,” the most sophisticated symbol of Hindu-Muslim culture, the town of a thousand palaces, gardens, temples and mosques, each one richer and more beautiful than the other, is to be systematically destroyed, after being savagely looted.

  William Russell had arrived a few days before the assault. With great difficulty he had dragged his huge frame all the way up to the terrace of Dilkusha Palace, from where he looked out over the town, amazed:

  “No city in the world, not Rome, nor Athens, nor Constantinople, can be compared to its stunning beauty,” he had written, captivated. “A vision of palaces, minarets, azure and gold domes, cupolas, colonnades, long, beautifully proportioned facades, rooftop terraces—all that emerging out of a calm ocean of greenery that spreads several miles around. Here and there, the towers of this magical city emerge amidst the luminous green. Their golden arrows sparkle in the sunlight, the towers and cupolas shine like stars. Are we really in Awadh? Is this the capital of a semi-barbarian race? Is this the city built by a corrupt, decadent and vile dynasty?”*

  Two weeks later, he notes with horror:

  “Lucknow is henceforth a dead town. All that is left of its magnificent palaces are miserable ruins, their facades and domes pierced by cannonballs. The invaluable art and precious objects that had been accumulated here for centuries are left to be pillaged and destroyed by soldiers greedy for gold and ‘drunk on rapine.’ They break everything that is too fragile or too large to be taken away. The ground is littered with fragments of marvels that the men persist in destroying.”96

  The most terrible scenes of destruction and pillaging took place in the sumptuous Kaisarbagh Palace. The soldiers broke down the doors of precious wood and dragged trunks full of brocades, silk carpets embroidered with pearls, gossamer muslins, out into the courtyards, then ripped them to shreds in a frenzy. As for the cashmere shawls embroidered with gold and silver, they had them burnt to salvage the metal. Enraged, they destroyed exquisite collections of jade, Venetian mirrors, crystal candelabras and threw delicate furniture inlaid with ivory or mother-of-pearl into huge fires, along with musical instruments, tortoiseshell vanity sets and thousands of priceless ancient illuminated manuscripts of which they could not possibly imagine the value. On the other hand, they fought over all that was metal and precious stone, gold and silver tableware, and jewellery abandoned by the terrified women during their flight.

  In order to extract the rubies and emeralds, they took apart exquisitely embossed weapons, shields decorated with inlaid work, ancient swords and daggers, they lacerated the royal horse and elephant saddles in order to extricate the pearls and turquoises, destroying these marvels—evidence of one of the most refined civilisations in the world.

  They even go as far as to tear off the fine gold sheets that cover the Chattar Manzil cupola. They make up a few hundred kilograms of gold that are to find their way to the market in London, where they are sold as trophies and are to reach astronomical prices.

  The mosques and temples are also profaned. Inside the splendid mosque next to the Bara Imambara, drunken British soldiers dance jigs, and the Sikhs light bonfires, savouring their revenge on the execrated Muslims.

  Even the houses of the poor, where there is nothing to steal, are vandalised “to teach them a lesson!” In fact, as the Times correspondent notes perceptively: “The worst thing for these soldiers is that this insurrection was carried out by a subjected race: black men who had dared shed their master’s blood.”97*

  And the Indian people, what do they think of the white man’s behaviour?

  One evening while his servant is laying the table, Russell questions him.

  After assuring himself that his master will not reproach him, the man answers:

  “You see these monkeys, Sahib, they seem to be playing, but the Sahib doesn’t know what the game is or what they are going to do next. Well, the Indian people see the British in just the same way as the British see these monkeys: they know you are strong and ferocious so they dare not laugh. They see you as creatures who have come to hurt them, but they are incapable of understanding either the actions or the motivations behind them.”98*

  * * *

  The pillaging of the capital is to last over a month. When, laden with tons of booty, the army finally leaves, Lucknow is a ghost city where vultures feast on corpses in the vandalised gardens and ruined palaces.

  Little by little, the terrified inhabitants are to return, little by little, the ruins are cleared away and the rebuilding begins.

  However, the splendour of the “city of gold and silver” and, above all, its spirit of refinement and aestheticism, its extravagance, its delicate and subtle attitudes, everything that gave Lucknow the most exquisite quality of life ever known, has disappeared forever.

  32

  Hazrat Mahal fled with four thousand soldiers, forty-five cannons and some of the treasure stashed away from British greed. They rode for two days to escape the enemy army; two days and two nights interrupted by brief halts in villages to water their horses and to have something to eat themselves.

  At the insistence of the Rajah of Mahmudabad, who impresses upon her that the exhausted animals and men cannot continue at this pace, the begum finally accepts the hospitality of this gentleman whom Jai Lal has entrusted her to and who has become her protector. After all, the fiefdom of Mahmudabad is eighty miles to the north of Lucknow, and the scouts sent out on surrounding roads have not glimpsed even the shadow of a British soldier.

  Mahmudabad Palace is an oasis of serenity, rising high above a calm river, set amidst gardens planted with thousands of roses. It is one of the most beautiful ancestral homes in Awadh, with its latticework towers and balconies, fragile columned parapets, long lacework balustrades and ochre walls covered with stucco scallops. A paradise the rajah has prudently h
ad surrounded by strong fortifications.

  His first wife, a pretty woman with a delicate face, warmly welcomes Hazrat Mahal in her private apartments, while the young king is received by the principality’s dignitaries in the men’s section of the palace. His mother will not see him again for the duration of their stay there.

  Indeed, Mahmudabad’s reigning family makes it a point of honour to respect the strictest purdah in the whole of Awadh. Even in times of war or natural disaster, not a single man can boast of ever having set eyes on or having heard the voice of a woman from the palace. The slightest sign of intimacy is considered a violation of modesty. And so Begum Shahar Bano confides to Hazrat Mahal that she never visits her mother-in-law accompanied by her husband, as this would be considered an unfitting demonstration of familiarity, a breach of the etiquette and respect due the dowager, the very powerful Queen Mother.

  Despite these rigid traditions, Hazrat Mahal is given the right to meet with the rajah daily so that strategies for the coming days and weeks can be finalized. The rajah insists that she make Mahmudabad her base: the palace is vast, and she and her retinue may occupy the main wing. As for the army, it will be easy to set up barracks on the adjacent plots of land.

  However, Hazrat Mahal has other plans:

  “I am infinitely grateful to you, Rajah Sahib, but I do not want to invite misfortune upon you, your family and your villages. For a year now, we have seen the British vent their rage on civilians as well as on the fighters. Not only those close to you, but also your peasants, are all at risk of being massacred.”

  “Where do you intend to go then?”

  “Towards the northeast. The Rajah of Gonda is offering me his Bhitauli fortress, between the Ghogra and Chauka rivers. He has warned me comfort there is at best rudimentary, but at the present time, comfort is the least of our concerns. The important thing is the fortress is difficult to access, and there are very few villages around against which the British could exact harsh retribution. If we want the population to remain loyal to us, we must not place them in danger.”