The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Yet the growing gulf between the people of Delhi and the sepoys, so very clear in the sources, has to date never been properly written up by any historian. For the imperial British, the siege of Delhi was a great moment of British heroism against the mass of ungrateful and undifferentiated natives. For the nationalist historians since Independence, 1857 was a great unified patriotic struggle waged by heroic freedom fighters against the wicked imperialists. The reality, it turns out, was far less clear cut. Ghalib was certainly not alone in viewing the sepoys, with all the hauteur that Delhi aristocrats were capable of, simply as troublesome and ill-mannered ‘blacks’.28

  Nevertheless, for all the ambiguity of the equivocal Delhi responses to 1857, it is clear how very central Delhi was to the Uprising. For despite its diffuse and fractured nature, many of its different elements converged into a single programme: to restore the Mughal Empire.

  For a century, this fact has been partially obscured by nationalist historians for whom the idea of Hindu sepoys flocking to Delhi to revive the Mughal Empire was more or less anathema. Since the time of V. D. Savarkar’s book The Indian War of Independence, 1857, published in 1909, the March outbreak in Barrackpore has been seen as the crucial event of the Mutiny, and Mangal Pandey its central icon. This is a position which was cemented by the recent Bollywood film which, though known as The Rising in its Englishlanguage avatar, was called simply Mangal Pandey in Hindi. Yet in many ways Pandey was almost irrelevant to the outbreak which took place two months later at Meerut in May.29

  Instead the Meerut insurgents headed straight to Delhi, drawn to the court of the Great Mughal, the one clear source of legitimacy recognised across Hindustan.30 Even in Lucknow, which had been in rebellion against Delhi since the late eighteenth century, the sepoys rose in the name of the Emperor, and the Aradhi court, and sent an envoy to Delhi asking for Zafar to confirm the title Wazir for the young heir apparent, Birjis Qadir, who was already minting his coins in the Emperor’s name. The same was true in Kanpur, where the rebels celebrated their victory as due to ‘the enemydestroying fortune of the Emperor’.31

  If Mangal Pandey was the sepoys’ inspiration, they certainly did not articulate it, nor did they rush towards Barrackpore or Calcutta. Instead it was, unequivocally, the capture of Delhi which was the great transforming masterstroke for the Uprising. The fact that Zafar gave the sepoys his tacit support instantly turned an army mutiny – one of a large number of mutinies and acts of armed resistance that had occurred under the Company – into the major political challenge to British dominance of India, and sparked off what would swiftly escalate into the most serious armed challenge to imperialism the world over during the course of the nineteenth century.

  For powerless as he was in so many ways, Zafar was still the Khalifa, God’s Regent on Earth. When Delhi people made an oath, rather than reaching for the scriptures they swore ‘by the throne of the Emperor’.32 When Emily Eden went to Delhi accompanying her brother the Governor General, Lord Auckland, even the Governor General’s own entourage bowed low before the Emperor, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim: ‘All our servants were in a state of profound veneration,’ wrote Emily. ‘The natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful Lord, and so he is, I suppose.’33

  As his coronation portrait described him, he was ‘His Divine Highness, Caliph of the Age, Padshah as Glorious as Jamshed, He who is Surrounded by Hosts of Angels, Shadow of God, Refuge of Islam, Protector of the Mohammedan Religion, Offspring of the House of Timur, Greatest Emperor, Mightiest King of Kings, Emperor son of Emperor, Sultan son of Sultan’. From this point of view, it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for two centuries; after all, the Company had long governed as the Mughal’s tax collector in Bengal, and had until recently acknowledged itself as the vassal of the Mughal even on its own seal and coins.34

  For this reason many ordinary people in northern India responded to Zafar’s appeal, much to the astonishment of the British, who had long ceased to take him seriously, and who, having completely lost touch with Indian opinion, were amazed at how Hindustan* reacted to his call. Seeing only the powerlessness of Zafar, the British had ceased to recognise the charisma that the name of the Mughal still possessed for both Hindus and Muslims in northern India. Mark Thornhill, the British collector in Mathura, recorded his own surprise in his diary immediately after the rebel capture of Delhi:

  Their talk was all about the ceremonial of the palace and how it would be revived. They speculated as to who would be Grand Chamberlain, which of the chiefs of Rajpootana would guard the different gates, and who were the fifty-two Rajahs who would assemble to put the Emperor on the throne … As I listened I realised as I never had done before the deep impression that the splendour of the ancient court had made on the popular imagination, how dear to them were the traditions and how faithfully, all unknown to us, they had preserved them. There was something weird in the Mogul Empire thus starting into a sort of phantom life after the slumber of a hundred years.35

  For many the appeal of the Mughal Emperor was as much religious as political. As far as the Indian participants were concerned, the Uprising was overwhelmingly expressed as a war of religion, and looked upon as a defensive action against the rapid inroads missionaries and Christianity were making in India, as well as a more generalised fight for freedom from foreign domination. The Great Mutiny has usually been presented by the Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s primarily as a rising against British social and economic policies, as both urban revolution and a peasants’ revoltsparked off by loss of land rights and employment opportunities as much as anything else. All this certainly played a part. Yet when the Indian participants of the Uprising articulate the reason for their revolt – as they do with great frequency and at some length in the Mutiny Papers – they invariably state that they were above all resisting a move by the Company to impose Christianity and Christian laws on India – something many Evangelical Englishmen were indeed contemplating.

  As the sepoys told Zafar on 11 May 1857, ‘we have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith’.36 Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Delhi, and asked people: ‘Brothers: are you with those of the faith?’37 British men and women who had converted to Islam – and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi – were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately. As late as 6 September, when calling the people of Delhi to rally against the coming assault by the British, a proclamation issued in the name of Zafar spelled out very plainly ‘that this is a religious war, and is being prosecuted on account of the faith, and it behoves all Hindus and Musalman residents of the imperial city, or of the villages in the country … to continue true to their faith and creeds’.38 Even if one accepts that the word ‘religion’ (for Muslims din) is often being used in the very general and non-sectarian sense of dharma (or duty, righteousness) – so that when the sepoys say they are rising to defend their dharma, they mean as much their way of life as their sectarian religious identity – it is still highly significant that the Urdu sources usually refer to the British not as angrez (the English) or as goras (whites) or even firangis, but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians).

  Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahedin, ghazis and jihadis. Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, unpaid, hungry and dispirited, the proportion of jihadis in Delhi grew to be about a quarter of the total fighting force, and included a regiment of ‘suicide ghazis’ from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs, ‘for those who have come to die have no need for food’.39

  One of the causes of unrest, according to one Delhi source, was that ‘the British had cl
osed the madrasas’.40 These were words that had no resonance to the historians of the 1960s. Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, they are phrases we understand all too well, and words like jihad scream out of the dusty pages of the source manuscripts, demanding attention.

  If all this has strong contemporary echoes, in other ways Delhi today feels as if it is fast moving away from its Mughal past. In modern Delhi an increasingly wealthy Punjabi middle class now lives in an aspirational bubble of shopping malls, espresso bars and multiplexes. Visiting Najafgarh, 20 kilometres beyond Indira Gandhi International Airport, and scene of one of the most important battles in the siege of Delhi, I found that no one in the town had any knowledge or family memories of the battle; but instead recruitment posters for call centres were plastered all over the last surviving Mughal ruin in the town, the Delhi Gate.

  On every side, rings of new suburbs are springing up, full of back-office processing units, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years ago was billowing winter wheat. This fast-emerging middle-class India is a country with its eyes firmly fixed on the future. Everywhere there is a profound hope that the country’s growing international status will somehow compensate for a past often perceived as a long succession of invasions and defeats at the hands of foreign powers. Whatever the reason, the result is a tragic neglect of Delhi’s magnificent past. Sometimes it seems as if no other great city of the world is less loved, or less cared for. Occasionally there is an outcry as the tomb of the poet Zauq is discovered to have disappeared under a municipal urinal or the haveli courtyard house of his rival Ghalib is revealed to have been turned into a coal store; but by and large the losses go unrecorded.

  I find it heartbreaking: often when I revisit one of my favourite monuments it has either been overrun by some slum or container park, unsympathetically restored or reconstructed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) or, more usually, simply demolished. Ninety-nine per cent of the delicate havelis or Mughal courtyard houses of Old Delhi have been destroyed, and like swathes of the city walls have disappeared into memory. According to historian Pavan Varma, the majority of the buildings he recorded in his book Mansions at Dusk only ten years ago no longer exist. Perhaps there is also a cultural factor here in the neglect of the past: as one conservationist told me recently: ‘you must understand’, he said, ‘that we Hindus burn our dead’. Either way, the loss of Delhi’s past is irreplaceable; and future generations will inevitably look back at the conservation failures of the early twenty-first century with a deep sadness.

  Sometimes, on winter afternoon walks, I wander to the lovely and deeply atmospheric ruins of Zafar’s summer palace in Mehrauli, a short distance from my Delhi house, and as I look out from its great gateway, I wonder what Zafar would have made of all this. Looking down over the Sufi shrine that abuts his palace, I suspect he would somehow have managed to make his peace with the fastchanging cyber-India of outsourcing, call centres and software parks that are now rapidly overpowering the last remnants of his world. After all, realism and acceptance were always qualities Zafar excelled in. For all the tragedy of his life, he was able to see that the world continued to turn, and that however much the dogs might bark, the great caravan of life continued to move on. In the words of the poem commonly attributed to Zafar, and said to have been written shortly after his imprisonment:

  When in silks you came and dazzled

  Me with the beauty of your Spring,

  You brought a flower to bloom –

  Love within my being.

  You lived with me, breath of my breath,

  Being in my being, nor left my side;

  But now the wheel of Time has turned

  And you are gone – no joys abide.

  You pressed your lips upon my lips,

  Your heart upon my beating heart,

  And I have no wish to fall in love again,

  For they who sold Love’s remedy

  Have shut shop, and I seek in vain.

  My life now gives no ray of light,

  I bring no solace to heart or eye;

  Out of dust to dust again,

  Of no use to anyone am I.

  Delhi was once a paradise,

  Where Love held sway and reigned;

  But its charm lies ravished now

  And only ruins remain.

  No tears were shed when shroudless they

  Were laid in common graves;

  No prayers were read for the noble dead,

  Unmarked remain their graves.

  The heart distressed, the wounded flesh,

  The mind ablaze, the rising sigh;

  The drop of blood, the broken heart,

  Tears on the lashes of the eye.

  But things cannot remain, O Zafar,

  Thus for who can tell?

  Through God’s great mercy and the Prophet

  All may yet be well.41

  William Dalrymple

  New Delhi, January 2006

  1

  A CHESSBOARD KING

  The marriage procession of Prince Jawan Bakht left the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort at 2 a.m. on the hot summer night of 2 April 1852.

  With a salute from the cannon stationed on the ramparts, and an arc of fireworks and rockets fired aloft from the illuminated turrets of the Fort, the two gates opposite the great thoroughfare of Chandni Chowk swung open.

  The first to emerge were the chobdars or mace-bearers. The people of Delhi have never much liked being restrained by barriers and were in the habit of breaking through the bamboo railings hung with lamps that illuminated the processional route. It was the job of the chobdars to clear a way through the excitable crowd, before the imperial elephants – always a little unpredictable in the presence of fireworks – appeared lumbering through the gates.

  Two ministers of state on horseback began the procession proper. Shell ornaments were plaited into the horses’ manes, and bells strung around their necks and fetlocks, and as they rode out, the ministers were attended by servants with punkahs (fans). Then came a troop of Mughal infantry, with polished black shields and curved swords, long lances and fluttering pennons of green and gold.

  The first six of the imperial elephants followed, caparisoned with gold and saffron headcloths embroidered with the Emperor’s coat of arms. From the howdahs,* officials held aloft the dynastic insignia that had been used by the Mughals since their arrival in India more than three centuries earlier: from one, the face of a rayed sun; from another, two golden fish suspended at each end of a golden bow; from the third, the head of a lion-like beast; from the fourth, a golden Hand of Fatima; from the fifth, a horse’s head; and from the last, a chatri or imperial umbrella. All were made of gold and were raised on gilt staffs from which trailed silken streamers.

  There then emerged in turn a party of red-tunicked Palace servants carrying covered trays of food and gifts for the bride’s family; a squadron of camels, with drums beating and guns firing in the air; a small regiment of British sepoys led by Captain Douglas, Commandant of the Palace Guards, all in tight-fitting busbees and blue-and-saffron uniforms, and escorting two light cannon; a troop of Skinner’s Horse in their yellow tunics and scarlet sashes, topped by armoured breastplates and medieval-looking helmets; a group of bullock-drawn wagons on which sat several bands of Mughal kettle drummers, shanai players, trumpeters and cymbal clashers; and a European brougham carriage, painted kingfisher blue, containing a party of senior princes, their gilt brocade flashing in the light of the exploding fireworks.

  After each group came parties of torchbearers, holding their flames aloft, interspersed with men holding candles in glass bell jars. There were also gangs of water carriers emptying their skins on to the road in an attempt to settle the billowing summer dust kicked up by the procession.

  After the brougham there came a second, smaller group of younger princes, this time riding on horseback; and among them, in the very centre, rode the groom. Mirza Jawan Bakht was only eleven
years old, a young bridegroom even in a society that tended to marry its offspring early in adolesence. Immediately behind the Prince swayed the elephant on which rode the Emperor himself, sitting in his golden howdah and decked out, despite the sweltering night heat, in his state robes and jewels, and attended by his personal bearer holding a peacock fan. The rest of the court followed behind on foot, a great snaking queue stretching back through Chatta Chowk, the Fort bazaar, to the Naqqar Khana Darwaza, or the Gate of the Drum House, in the very centre of the Fort.1

  Not long before this, the Emperor and Jawan Bakht had both sat for the Austrian artist, August Schoefft.2 The portrait of Zafar depicts a dignified, reserved and rather beautiful old man with a fine aquiline nose and a carefully trimmed beard. Despite his height and surprisingly broad and muscular build, there is a profound gentleness and sensitivity in his large brown watery eyes with their unusually long lashes. As a teenage prince, Zafar had always appeared in his portraits as a slightly awkward and uncertain figure, plump, visibly ill at ease and thinly bearded. But as youth gave way to middle age he had grown into his looks, and in old age – unusually – looked finer than ever. Now in his mid-seventies, his cheeks were sallow, his nose more pronounced and his bearing more regal. Yet as the elderly monarch kneels, wearily fingering his beads, there remains in the expression of his dark eyes something unmistakably melancholic; in the set of his full lips there is still that air of sad, patient resignation visible in the earlier pictures. Schoefft shows Zafar a little swamped under the brocade cloth of gold which adorns him, somewhat weighed down by the huge blood-coloured rubies and the strings of vast pearls, each the size of a partridge egg, which seem to hang so heavily around his neck. It is a portrait of a man imprisoned by the trappings of his office.