By contrast, the young Jawan Bakht, the Emperor’s favourite son, seems to relish all the pearls and gems, the jewelled daggers and inlaid swords with which he is bedecked with a lavishness almost equal to that of his father. His expression is different too: knowingly handsome, and oddly cocky and confident for a boy of eleven. He is as strikingly sure of himself as his father appears wearily uncertain.3
One person missing from both the portraits and the wedding procession was the woman who had done more than anything else to bring the marriage about. For months, Zafar’s favourite wife, Zinat Mahal, had been preparing for this day. In Mughal tradition, women did not accompany the barat taking the groom to his marriage – not even mothers and queens; but every detail of the procession had been planned by her. For Mirza Jawan Bakht was Zinat Mahal’s only son, and her one ambition, to which she held consistently throughout her life, was to see Jawan Bakht, Zafar’s fifteenth son, placed on the throne at the death of his father.
The exceptionally lavish wedding she had planned was intended by her to raise the profile of the Prince, and also to consolidate her own place in the dynasty: Jawan Bakht’s bride, the Nawab Shah Zamani Begum,* who was probably no more than ten years old at the time of the wedding, was Zinat’s niece, and her father, Walidad Khan of Malagarh, an important ally of the Queen. While so young a couple would not be expected to consummate their marriage for a year or two, or even to live together, political considerations meant that the marriage should go ahead immediately, without having to wait for the couple to reach puberty.
As conceived by Zinat, the wedding of Mirza Jawan Bakht was of a scale unparalleled in Delhi in living memory, eclipsing the weddings of all Jawan Bakht’s elder brothers. Sixty years later, the young courtier Zahir Dehlavi, whose job it was to oversee the care of the Mahi Maraatib or Fish Standard,† still remembered the aroma of the trays of food from the royal kitchens that had been sent out to every Palace official, and the spectacular entertainments that preceded the main celebration: ‘such beauty and magnificence had never been seen before’, he wrote many years later, in exile in Hyderabad. ‘At least not in my lifetime. It was a celebration I shall never forget.’4
The festivities had begun three days before the marriage with a procession from the house of Walidad Khan to the Palace, bearing the principal wedding gifts, followed by fireworks: ‘a brilliant train of elephants, camels, horses and conveyances of every denomination’, according to the Delhi Gazette.5 This led on to the ceremony of the mehndi, when the hands of the couple and their guests, including all the women of the Palace, were decorated with henna; the celebrations would continue for a further seven days beyond the night of the wedding ceremony.
On the evening of the great procession, at the beginning of the night vigil known as the ratjaga, Zafar had bestowed on Jawan Bakht a wedding veil made of strings of pearls known as a sehra, and simultaneous parties of escalating grandeur had been arranged for the different ranks of the Palace, each with their own musicians and troupes of dancing girls. Selected townspeople were in one courtyard, Palace children and students in another, senior officials in a third, and the princes in a fourth.6
Since Zafar’s financial resources rarely matched his spending, let alone that of his wife, much of the initial work for the wedding had involved arranging loans from Delhi moneylenders, who knew from experience what the chances were of seeing their cash again. Since December, the British Resident’s diary of court proceedings had been full of Zinat’s attempts to procure the large amounts needed, something she achieved in the end with the aid of the notoriously ruthless Chief Eunuch of the Palace, Mahbub Ali Khan.7 The Palace was repaired, spring-cleaned and superbly decorated with lamps and chandeliers.8 Getting sufficiently magnificent fireworks was another major concern, with pyrotechnicians from across Hindustan summoned to the Palace throughout January and February to demonstrate their skills.9
The rockets, squibs and Roman candles were still exploding around the great red sandstone curtain walls of the Fort as the wedding procession slowly proceeded westwards down the top of Chandni Chowk, with its trees and central canal glittering in the light of the torches. It snaked onwards, past the gardens of Begum Sumru’s haveli, recently taken over by the new Delhi Bank, and through the Dariba – now in the light of ten thousand candles and lanterns haloed in dust – before veering left and heading under the latticed windows of the courtesans’ kothis (town houses) lining the Kucha Bulaqi Begum.
On the procession passed, turning again under the moonlit white marble domes of the Jama Masjid. It then looped down the Khas Bazaar, before skirting the much smaller but beautifully gilt and illuminated domes of the Suneheri Masjid, and on through the Faiz Bazaar into Daryaganj. Here lay the city’s great aristocratic palaces, such as the famous kothi of the Nawab of Jhajjar, which, according to Bishop Heber, the Anglican Primate of Calcutta, ‘far exceed in grandeur anything seen in Moscow’. Among them lay the procession’s destination, the haveli of Walidad Khan.10
On the way, as the Palace diary puts it, ‘His Majesty’s officers presented their nazrs [ceremonial gifts] as the procession passed their several dwellings, while HM inspected the illuminations on the road.’11 The conspicuously wealthy streets through which the procession passed were still very much a Mughal creation. In 1852, despite 150 years of decline and political reversals, Delhi was once again the largest pre-colonial city in India – a position it had recently regained from Lucknow – and as the Dar ul-Mulk, the seat of the Mughal, was the epitome of an elegant Mughal metropolis: ‘In this beautiful city’, wrote the poet Mir, ‘the streets are not mere streets, they are like the album of a painter.’12 A similar idea was conveyed by another Delhi writer of the period, who compared the waters of the canals of Delhi’s gardens to the burnished border on an illuminated manuscript page: ‘its waters, like mercury, a jadval [margin] of pure silver running over a page of stone’.13
At the same time as the ruling houses of Murshidabad and Lucknow were experimenting with Western fashions and Western classical architecture, Delhi remained firmly, and proudly, a centre of Mughal style. There was no question of Zafar turning up in durbar (court) dressed as a British admiral or even a vicar of the Church of England, as had been heard of in the Nawab’s court in Lucknow. Nor was there much trace of Western architectural influence in the buildings erected by the later Mughal emperors: Zafar’s new gateway at his summer palace, Zafar Mahal, and his delicate floating garden pavilion in Mehtab Bagh, the scented night garden of the Red Fort, were both built in the full Mughal style of Shah Jahan.
What was true of the court was true of the city: with the single exception of the Delhi Bank – formerly the great Palladian Palace of the Begum Sumru – the buildings that the marriage procession passed showed little experimentation with Western classical pediments or square Georgian windows, though such attempts at synthesis had long been common in Lucknow, and in Jaipur. In 1852, British additions within the walls of Delhi were limited to a domed church, a classical Residency building recently converted into the Delhi College, and a strongly fortified magazine, all of which stood to the north of the Fort and out of sight of the path of the procession. Moreover, there were still relatively few Europeans in Delhi – probably well under a hundred within the walls: as the poet and literary critic Azad later put it, ‘those were the days when if a European was seen in Delhi, people considered him an extraordinary sample of God’s handiwork, and pointed him out to each other: “Look, there goes a European!”’14
Others, it was true, took a less charitable view. So prevalent was the belief among Delhiwallahs that Englishmen were the product of an illicit union between apes and the women of Sri Lanka (or alternatively between ‘apes and hogs’) that the city’s leading theologian, Shah Abdul Aziz, had to issue a fatwa expressing his opinion that such a view had no basis in the Koran or the Hadiths, and that however oddly the firangis might behave, they were none the less Christians and thus People of the Book.15 As long as wine and pork were not serv
ed, it was therefore perfectly permissible to mix with them (if one should for any strange reason wish to do so) and even, on occasion, to share their food.*
Partly as a result of this lack of regular contact with Europeans, Delhi remained a profoundly self-confident place, quite at ease with its own brilliance and the superiority of its tahzib, its cultured and polished urbanity. It was a city that had yet to suffer the collapse of self-belief that inevitably comes with the onset of open and unbridled colonialism. Instead, Delhi was still in many ways a bubble of conservative Mughal traditionalism in an already fast-changing India. When someone in Shahjahanabad wished to praise another citizen of the city, he would still reach for the ancient yardsticks of medieval Islamic rhetoric, cloaked in time-worn poetic tropes: the women of Delhi were as tall and slender as cypresses; the Delhi men as generous as Feridun, as learned as Plato, as wise as Solomon; their physicans were as skilled as Galen. One man who was quite clear about the virtues of his home city and its inhabitants was the young Sayyid Ahmad Khan:* ‘The water of Delhi is sweet to the taste, the air is excellent, and there are hardly any diseases,’ he wrote.
By God’s grace the inhabitants are fair and good looking, and in their youth uniquely attractive. Nobody from any other city can measure up to them …In particular the men of the city are interested in learning and in cultivating the arts, spending their days and nights reading and writing. If each of their traits were recounted it would amount to a treatise on good conduct.”16
Rather like modern New Yorkers, Delhiwallahs of the early nineteenth century blithely took as little interest as possible in the world beyond their own familiar and beloved streets, and had to struggle to imagine anyone ever wishing to live anywhere else: as the poet Zauq put it: ‘Kaun jaye Zauq par Dilli ki galian chhor kar’ (How could anyone, O Zauq, forsake Delhi and its lanes?) He was speaking in hyperbole; but behind such writing lay a real and palpable pride in a great and civilised city whose reputation as a centre of learning, culture and spirituality had rarely been higher, even as its political fortunes had waned.
If there was one thing in which the town was most confident, it was in the beauty and elegance of its language. After all, Urdu was born in Delhi:† it was a language the poet and literary historian Azad described as ‘an orphan found wandering in the bazaars of Shahjahanabad’.17 According to Maulvi Abd ul-Haq, ‘Anyone who has not lived in Delhi could never be considered a real connoisseur of Urdu. It is as if the steps of the Jama Masjid are a school of fine language.’ There was no other city like this. In Delhi poetry ‘was discussed in every house’, for ‘the Emperor himself was a poet and a connoisseur of poetry’ and ‘the language of the exalted fort was the essence of refinement’.18
This intoxication with the elegance of Delhi’s language was common to both men and women – there was a special dialect of Delhi Urdu used only in the women’s quarters – and perhaps more surprisingly to all classes. Poetry in particular was an obsession not just of the elite but also, to a remarkable extent, of the ordinary people. The Garden of Poetry, a collection of Urdu verse published two years before Mirza Jawan Bakht’s wedding, contains no fewer than 540 poets from Delhi, who range from the Emperor and fifty members of his family to a poor water seller in Chandni Chowk, a merchant in Punjabi Katra, ‘Farasu’, an elderly German Jewish mercenary – one of a surprising number of Europeans in Delhi who had taken to Mughal culture – a young wrestler, a courtesan and a barber.19 At least fiftythree of these Urdu poets have clearly Hindu names.
So although Walidad Khan had laid on the best dancers in Delhi for the marriage ceremony that night, what was remembered longest and discussed most eagerly was not so much the festivities or the feasting or the fireworks so much as the marriage odes recited by the poet laureate, Zauq, and his rival Mirza Nausha, now more widely known by his pen-name, Ghalib.
To the eye of an outsider such as the newly appointed Commandant of the Palace Guards, Captain Douglas, who accompanied the procession as far as the haveli of Walidad Khan, the wedding seemed both visually stunning and a happy and harmonious occasion. Indeed, according to the account in the Palace diary the only untoward incident in the whole ceremony was on the return journey to the Fort at 10 a.m. the following morning.
Walidad Khan had just presented his guests with the bride’s marriage portion – ‘80 trays of clothing, 2 trays of jewellery, a golden bedstead and canopy, vessels of silver, an elephant and horses with embroidered trappings and two riding camels’ – and Zafar had just set out back to the Palace with the bride and bridegroom, when ‘a baker threw two or three biscuits at the elephant on which Mirza Jawan Bakht was riding’. The elephant shied and the offending baker was taken off to the city jail.20
Nevertheless, the appearance of confidence and harmony was largely deceptive. As in so many family weddings, for all the outward show of prosperity and family unity, severe tensions lurked just beneath the surface. The very emphasis that Zafar and Zinat put on the procession was in itself significant. Certainly, the Mughals had always regarded processions as important public statements of their authority. Two hundred years earlier, the French traveller and writer François Bernier had described the magnificent ostentation of the procession which took Raushanara Begum, the daughter of Shah Jahan, on her summer outing to Kashmir in the late 1640s: ‘You can conceive of nothing more imposing or grand,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘and if I had not regarded this display of magnificence with a sort of philosophical indifference, I should have been apt to be carried away by such flights of imagination as inspire most Indian poets.’21 Since then, however, the Mughals had long since lost control of Kashmir; indeed, it had been well over a century since the Mughals had been able to process anywhere outside the environs of Delhi. As the famous doggerel went,
The Kingdom of Shah Alam,
Runs from Delhi to Palam.*
In the Palace itself, the greatest treasures of the Red Fort had already been removed by the Persian invader Nadir Shah in 1739. Half a century later, in the summer of 1788, when Zafar was a boy of thirteen, the marauder Ghulam Qadir had taken the city, personally blinded Zafar’s grandfather, Shah Alam II, and made Zafar’s father, the future Emperor Akbar Shah II, dance for his pleasure; he then threw vinegar in the wounds by carting off Shah Alam’s fabulous library, most of which he then sold to the Nawab of Avadh, much to the Emperor’s fury.22 A blind emperor was left ruling from a ruined palace: ‘only a chessboard king’, as Azad put it.23
After the death of Shah Alam II, the authority of the Mughals had contracted further, so that Zafar did not control even as far as Palam; instead his real authority existed only within the walls of the Red Fort, as if he were an Indian pope within his own Vatican City. Even there it was in some ways circumscribed. For the British Resident,* Sir Thomas Metcalfe, kept a friendly but none the less firm eye on Zafar’s daily life and frequently forbade him from exercising rights that the Emperor regarded as sacrosanct.
No nobleman from outside Delhi, for example, could enter the Red Fort without Metcalfe’s permission.24 To enforce his right to rent from his own lands, Zafar had to make an application to the British courts.25 He could not present gems from the crown jewels even to his own family members without first informing the Resident, and was occasionally, humiliatingly, made to ask for the return of unauthorised gifts if the agent came to hear about them.26 Zafar could not gift khilats (robes of honour, symbols of overlordship) on noblemen from outside the Delhi territories without Metcalfe’s say-so: when on the day after Jawan Bakht’s wedding Raja Gulab Singh of Kollesur paid a visit to the court, presenting a nazr (or offering of fealty) of ‘a horse and 7 gold mohurs’, in return for which Zafar gave him a khilat, Metcalfe promptly made the Raja return it: in the eyes of the Resident, the Raja was a British subject, and had no business publicly offering his fealty to a foreign ruler.27
How far Zafar felt the humiliation of this is evident in his verse, into which he learned to sublimate his feelings of profound frustration and imprison
ment. His ghazals are full of the imagery of the caged bird, of the bulbul longing for the garden visible through the bars of his prison:
I want to shatter the bars of my cage,
With the flutterings of my wings.
But like a caged bird in a painting,
There is no possibility of being free.
Morning breeze, tell the garden
That Spring and Autumn for me are alike.
How should I know,
When one comes, and the other goes?28
Elsewhere, he expressed the same thought more explicitly:
Whoever enters this gloomy palace,
Remains a prisoner for life in European captivity.29
The degree of loss of control experienced by Zafar was something quite new. When the British first came to Delhi in 1803, defeating the Maratha confederacy, who were then the masters of much of Hindustan, they posed as Shah Alam’s protectors and saviours:* ‘Notwithstanding His Majesty’s total deprivation of real power, dominion, and authority,’ wrote the Governor General, Lord Wellesley, ‘almost every state and every class of people in India continue to acknowledge his nominal sovereignty. The current coin of every established power is struck in the name of Shah Alam …’ 30
He did not add, though it was true, that this included the rupees of the East India Company itself; moreover, the Company’s seal also directly acknowledged its position as the Mughal’s legal vassal, and was inscribed to that end: ‘Fidvi Shah Alam’ (Shah Alam’s devoted dependant). Wellesley wrote that he ‘recoiled from the thought of it being suspected in England’ that he wished to ‘place the East India Company, substantially or vicariously, on the throne of the Moghuls’, and Lord Lake was instructed to offer his ‘loyalty …and every demonstration of reverence, respect and attention’ to the aged monarch. The new Resident also received strict instructions that he too was to use all the forms ‘considered to be due to the Emperors of Hindustan’.31
The Last Mughal Page 6